Paul Kengor

Paul Kengor is author of The Crusader: Ronald Reagan and the Fall of Communism (HarperCollins, 2006), associate professor of Political Science, and executive director of the Center for Vision & Values at Grove City College in Grove City, Pennsylvania. This article is part two in a series of four.

In his pursuit of Cold War victory over Soviet communism, Ronald Reagan enlisted several fascinating covert efforts as part of a bold campaign of economic warfare, an assault so sensitive and so damaging that Reagan advisers denied it publicly, only acknowledging it decades later. "Certainly it was economic warfare," said Reagan defense official Richard Perle, "although we had to deny it at the time." Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger explained that the effort had to be "a silent campaign."

Reagan himself was forced into denials or dodges when asked if he was pursuing an economic war against Moscow. His closest aide, National Security Adviser Bill Clark, later explained Reagan's reluctance to me in a series of interviews: "Look, he didn't want to admit publicly that we were effectively at war [with the Soviets] or that we wanted to defeat them." Clark said that Reagan carefully avoided using words like "economic war."

In one of the most stunning examples from this campaign, there is a potential weapon for the Bush team in its war against terrorism, especially as it relates to the role of Iran vis-a-vis the war in Iraq--one that the Bush team may have already considered.

In 1985-86, the Reagan team enlisted the secret support of King Fahd of Saudi Arabia to help destroy the Soviet economy by drastically reducing Soviet income from oil exports--a commodity that provided the Kremlin with the vast majority of its hard currency revenues. Reagan officials privately worked with the Saudis to manipulate the world's oil market, encouraging them to increase production, thereby lowering the global price of oil. In the six months that followed, the price of oil dropped from $30 a barrel to $10 a barrel, sending catastrophic shock waves through the Soviet economy.

In 1994, details of this effort made their way into Peter Schweizer's groundbreaking work, Victory. I have added new details in my book. What we both found is that former Soviet officials to this day shudder when they speak of the U.S.-Saudi action. Yevgenny Novikov, who served on the senior staff of the Soviet Central Committee, recalls the crippling effect:

The drop in oil prices was devastating, just devastating. It was a catastrophic event. Tens of billions were wiped away.

These revenues--which, in the 1970s, had saved the Soviet economy--were blocked from the Soviet treasury in the mid-1980s, when the Kremlin needed them most.

This tale offers insights for George W. Bush today. President Bush needs the ingenuity to find similar means within the Middle East now--methods that involve nations like Saudi Arabia in a covert campaign to undermine enemies like Iran, which is destabilizing the region and hurting the United States badly in Iraq.

In fact, a similar campaign may be underway, begun by Vice President Cheney in his trip to Saudi Arabia. Cheney was in Saudi Arabia on November 25 to meet with King Abdullah bin Abdul Aziz al-Saud, where, according to a statement from the Office of the Vice President, the two men discussed "issues of mutual interest to developments in the Middle East region." Not long after this meeting, articles appeared concerning possible U.S.-Saudi cooperation on oil prices, and possibly for the clandestine purpose of hurting Iran. A January 22 analysis by Knight Ridder reported:

Some analysts suggest privately that Saudi opposition to OPEC cuts is based more on politics than business. The Saudis, they say, want to starve Iran of needed oil revenues because Saudi rulers are Sunni Muslims and increasingly worried about Iran's backing of fellow Shiite Muslims who rule Iraq.

The Bush administration certainly shares those worries. Though I'm not privy to sources who could confirm this, I strongly suspect that Vice President Cheney likely expressed such concerns in his trip to Saudi Arabia. The two sides may have come to a meeting of minds, as did the Saudi royal family and a previous Republican administration in 1985-86, when Saudi Arabia went against its OPEC brothers and increased rather than decreased oil supplies, dictating a global drop in the price of a barrel of oil.

In the 1985-86 effort, Vice President George H. W. Bush was the liaison between Reagan and the Saudis. Once Vice President Bush became president, Dick Cheney became his secretary of defense, and the two together saved the Saudis in August 1990, when Saddam Hussein began moving troops and tanks to the Saudi border. Today, I would expect Cheney and the younger Bush to cash in on past favors. The Saudis would likely be willing to pitch in, given that they despise the Iranian mullahs.

In 1985-86, the Reagan team cashed in on past favors on behalf of the Saudis, particularly President Reagan's 1981 AWACS sale to Saudi Arabia, which thrilled the Saudis but angered Israel. The U.S.-Saudi oil manipulation of 1985-86 hurt not just the Soviets but the Iranians. The Saudis were happy to hurt the Iranians then. There is no reason why they would be less happy to do so again.

This speculation is hardly unreasonable. In fact, I would be surprised if members of the Bush team did not a least consider this option. It is time to get creative in prosecuting the War on Terror, including calling on old friends. *

"The heart has its reasons which reason knows nothing of." --Blaise Pascal

Joseph S. Fulda

Joseph Fulda is a freelance writer living in New York City. He is the author of Eight Steps Towards Libertarianism.

At first glance, it would appear that governmental initiation of coercion is of a piece with the common criminal's initiation of coercion, where "coercion" is a catch-all term for "force, the threat of force, and various forms of fraud--which rely on deception, rather than the use or threatened use of violence." However, at second glance, there is a different and opposing dynamic also at play, which arises from the normal practices of most overreaching governments to also diligently seek to prevent, deter, and punish those crimes that are properly deemed criminal--the mala in se--namely those acts by private citizens who themselves use force or fraud to bypass the will of an innocent other.

Oftentimes, the business of preventing and deterring the wrongful use of coercion by criminals, however paradoxical it may seem, prevents the government from similar incursions.

The most salient and timely example concerns the privacy of records in databases. But for the curse of identity thieves, the federal government would have, I do not doubt, larger, more accessible, less secure databases linked by the ubiquitous social security number. Long ago, the government reneged on its implicit pledge--and I am old enough to have it printed on my own social security card--that it was "not for identification." Now, with identity theft a serious problem, both the government and ordinary folk have become increasingly reluctant to rely on this or any other one identifier. It is no longer preprinted on tax return labels, no longer used as driver license numbers, and most colleges have abandoned its use as the student and faculty ID numbers.

What therefore appears at first glance to be an unmitigated curse-criminal impersonation to perpetrate fraud--is, on further analysis, a mixed blessing. It is normally true that the best way to fight fire (including the "fire" of violence, force, and fraud) to which George Washington once famously compared government ("a dangerous servant and a fearful master," he said)--is to douse it with water--"water" being argument, persuasion, the political processes of representative government ranging from petitions to election campaigns, and the various, other volitive measures (boycotts, for instance) usually advocated by libertarians. Sometimes, though, fighting fire with fire works when absolutely nothing else does.

Identity thieves appear to have achieved what countless articles and speeches by libertarians, and numerous bills and measures duly put into the hoppers of the House of Representative and the Senate have not achieved. It is curious, but true, that in some cases, criminals may be able to control government's excesses when neither endless free speech nor the political process appears capable of doing what must be done. *

"He that complies against his will, is of his own opinion still." --Samuel Butler

Karl Peterjohn

Peterjohn is the executive director of the Kansas Taxpayers Network and is a former California Department of Finance budget analyst and newspaper reporter.

An old joke goes, "Who do you believe, your lying eyes or me?" At the beginning of April a narrow five-judge majority on the U.S. Supreme Court ratified the Al Gore-inspired argument for global warming. This environmentally green judicial edict was produced just before a massive arctic cold front proceeded to sweep down from Canada and shatter the low temperature records from the Great Plains states to the Atlantic coast in April. While baseball players were pictured frolicking in the Cleveland snow as a whole series of games was snowed out along Lake Erie, the president's western White House home was pictured being pelted with snow. Snow appeared in April in Crawford, Texas! In parts of Kansas this spring snow was not a scattered flurry isolated to the northwest corner of the state but was measured in inches. In some places in central Kansas over six inches fell. Low temperature records were shattered by several degrees as farmers saw an excellent wheat crop placed in jeopardy by temperatures falling into the teens. Even in the People's Republic of Lawrence the low temperature record was stretched down to 20 from 23.

Don't worry, the five judges, or justices as they prefer to be called, or more accurately, five black-robed lawyers assured us that carbon dioxide emissions are pollution and we need to eliminate carbon dioxide pollution to stop man-made global warming. Mother Nature ignored this edict and let it snow on the roof of the U.S. Supreme Court building in Washington. Sadly, these five judges are joining in this pollution every time they exhale. That's true for all of the other mammals and a number of other life forms on this planet. The largest "polluters" creating atmospheric carbon dioxide are volcanoes and oceanic algae. If excessive carbon dioxide was truly a cause, the solution is as simple as planting more trees or bushes that consume CO2. Carbon dioxide is a key chemical needed for photosynthesis that is critical to creating and sustaining life on this planet. Now a flurry of record low temperatures does not guarantee global cooling either. Earth's climate has shown a history of fluctuations with warm periods and ice ages going back far beyond man's relatively recent industrial era. The highly-touted computer climate models still are unable to adequately factor into their temperature equations the impact of the wide variety of clouds perpetually covering large parts of our planet. The United Nations may issue another report that tries to validate the black-robed lawyers' recent carbon dioxide edict. The liberal mainstream news media is already breathlessly reporting this document as "news." The reality is that allegations of a "man-made" global warming will be viewed by 22nd century historians as the pseudo-scientific delusion of our age. Our descendants will laugh at us the way that we today can make fun of our ancestors who criticized Pasteur and his germ theory. *

"We love justice greatly, and just men but little." --Joseph Roux

Dennis T. Avery and S. Fred Singer

Dennis T. Avery is a senior fellow with the Hudson Institute and director of the Hudson Institute's Center for Global Food Issues, and S. Fred Singer is a Professor Emeritus at the University of Virginia and research professor at George Mason University. This article is an edited transcript of a book discussion sponsored by the Hudson Institute in November 2006; this discussion is reprinted with permission from the Hudson Institute. The full text of the discussion can be found at www.hudsoninstitute.org.

The book discussed is Unstoppable Global Warming, Every 1,500 Years, by S. Fred Singer and Dennis T. Avery, published by Rowman & Littlefield Publishers.

This is the question and answer session following the presentation by Dennis Avery and Fred Singer that appeared in the April issue of the St. Croix Review.

MR. WEINSTEIN: Well, thank you two very much for those fascinating presentations. I'd like to open it up for questions from the audience and answers from our authors. Please identify yourself and if you have organizational affiliation as well. Thank you.

Q: Michael Horowitz at the Hudson Institute.

Can't an argument be made that even if these are cyclical climate changes that are inevitable, can't Al Gore shift his argument and say: Are these two guys right? Yes it's coming, but it's going to be worse than it's ever been before because of the levels of carbon dioxide and industrial pollutants and so forth that are out there?

MR. AVERY: Well, it's an argument that can be made. The problem is that the price--the premium on the insurance policy--is so high. We're not talking about the Kyoto changes to 2012, the 5 percent cut. We're talking about globally a 60 to 80 percent cut, and for the United States we're talking about something like 100 percent cut in greenhouse gas emissions. That means you're not buying a hybrid car, it means you're buying a skateboard . . . in order to stabilize greenhouse gases at the same time that unregulated economies in China and India are building new coal-fired power plants at the rate of one or two a month. The cost to our economy of virtually eliminating fossil fuels is radical.

MR. SINGER: Two comments here. One, of course, there must be some consequence of the increasing amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. What we show is that it's minor compared to natural changes. That's all you can say.

In other words, we cannot deny the greenhouse effect, that's real, but it's small. It's a lot smaller than calculated from the models. The second point I'd like to make in answering your question is you implicitly assume--and I get it from your question--that warming is bad. I would question that. I would ask: You think a colder climate would be better than the present one? No one would say that. So how can you argue logically that a warmer climate is worse? Or would you say that the present climate just happens to be the optimum climate? That would seem to be very unlikely.

Economists pretty much agree that a warmer climate is actually better overall. Of course, there will be some losers, but there will be more winners. They haven't carried it all the way. It's difficult to do. But the published papers--the published book by this group at Yale University--says that a moderate warming is good for the economy, raises incomes, raises the standard of living, et cetera, et cetera.

Q: To follow up--Klaus Heiss--from the High Frontier and the Space Studies Institute--if you go back to Paleoclimate scales--600 million years--CO2 has sunk consistently and dramatically over these times, and over the last 50 million years as well. Before then, of course, it was very low and we had ice-ball Earth and so on. So basically, returning some of the CO2, which came from the atmosphere to begin with, has only beneficial effects. The burden of proof that it's bad is contrary to 600 million years of life organisms and activity and diversity. You also find extinctions when it's cold and again blooming when it's warm. So why don't we here make a real effort to find out what the costs of the Ice Age are without modeling?

All we have to do is go back 20,000 years and say, Massachusetts, do you want to be covered by one mile of ice--where are the species then? We don't have to simulate. Here are the facts, and what are the economic impacts: Russia disappears, half of Europe disappears 20,000 years ago; as against the ice continues to disappear, with the consequence that we will be able to grow wine again in England.

MR. AVERY: I think we have a nearer model to look at, and that is the history of the medieval warming and the Little Ice Age. I'd recommend to you a book on the Little Ice Age by Brian Fagan, The Little Ice Age: How Climate Made History, 1300-1850. He depicts the famines and the climate instability and the huge storms. And any examination of the medieval warming can start right here at this moment. Any of you who have been to Europe who have seen travel logs of Europe--those famous castles and cathedrals were all built during the global warming during the last overheated planet period. And the people were so grateful that they built the Cathedral of Reims that soars to the sky with flying buttresses: A, lots of food; B, lots of people; C, everybody felt really good.

Q: Is the cause of this 1500-year cycle the angle of the sun?

MR. AVERY: No.

Q: What are you talking about taking place?

MR. AVERY: We're talking about an actual change in the solar irradiance. And now that we're measuring it outside the obscuring atmosphere of the Earth from a satellite, we're finding a tenth of a percentage point change. And the proxy that comes closest is the length of the solar cycles. It's not even the number of sunspots. And if you check a graph of even sunspot numbers, then you find a lagged response in the sea surface temperatures on the Earth. The angle and the distance to the sun are part of other cycles. But the 1500-year cycle is irradiance.

Q: Thank you.

MR. SINGER: The solar sunspots were only discovered relatively recently, a few hundred years ago. What evidence we have shows that during a minimum of the sunspot cycle, the so-called Maunder minimum, coincides with the maximum cold period. That is, with the coldest period of the Little Ice Age.

The other suggestions we have--we have proxies for the sun--some radioactive materials, like Carbon-14, which has been measured in tree rings; Beryllium-10, measured in ice cores. So we can trace back solar activity some hundreds of thousands of years and correlate that with climate. That seems to work.

Then another heroic effort has been done by a Canadian geologist, Jan Veizer, and Nir Shaviv in Jerusalem, who were able to correlate, in this case, cosmic rays with climate change going back as far as 600 million years. That should be enough.

Q: John Weicher, Hudson Institute.

Following up on what Dennis was saying about cathedrals and so forth, if I understood you earlier, the 19th century would have been the trough in terms of climate, you said, going back about 150 years. And that would imply that the fourth century was the previous trough and something like the 11th or 12th century was at the peak. If I have that right, I have a couple questions.

MR. AVERY: Okay. The cycles are not as regular during the warming periods, apparently, as they were during the ice ages. I'm told that during the ice ages, it was 1470 years, plus or minus 10. That's very regular for a natural cycle.

In our warming period, it is varied by several centuries. The Roman warming is usually dated from 200 B.C. . . . Well, now remember, these tend to be front-loaded; the initial changes are fairly abrupt. So it isn't a nice smooth curve, it's a shift and then an erratic climb, and then another shift to the next phase.

It is, I think, very difficult to predict just how long, just how warm, just when.

Q: Well, if the 19th century is the trough, you said going back about 150 years . . .

MR. AVERY: Well, that was the shift point. It was colder in the 1700s than it was at 1850.

Q: Those two centuries are also periods of dramatic economic growth and technological change. And certainly people living in 1900, in general, were a lot better off than they were in 1700, from all the non-statistical evidence we have about standards of living, whereas earlier--talking about the Romans--is certainly a period of collapse. But I'm wondering if you've tried to relate the economic, social, and cultural changes in our societies with those trends or patterns.

MR. AVERY: We've tried, and it's complex. I will say that it looks almost as though the fall of Rome was related to the onset of the Dark Ages. From this distance we can't know.

And as an agriculturalist, I can tell you that some of the changes in European agriculture, which we are benefiting from to this day, were driven by the famines that occurred early in the Little Ice Age. Remember, we had a 50 percent increase in European population during the 11th and 12th centuries, then suddenly we have a cold, unstable climate, and we're back to the previous population the hard way. And that drove the development of the seeder, drove the development of crop rotation with pasturing animals. A lot of the progress made in agriculture was driven by starvation.

Q: Charles Balogh. You mentioned the fact that you'd have to have 100 percent reduction in greenhouse emissions. That tells me absolutely no carbon dioxide, is that correct?

MR. AVERY: What other people have suggested, including the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, is that in order to stabilize the climate, so to speak, we'd need to reduce global emissions of fossil fuels by 60 to 80 percent.

Q: Okay. Well now I'll get to the question. Does that mean we're going to have to go nuclear, which is the only way I can think of producing our power without us having any greenhouse gases.

MR. AVERY: This is up to the voice of the people. And I have said that the Green movement and the UN are boxing us into a nuclear corner. But it's not my decision to make.

Q: You said you watched Al Gore's movie. Could you comment about his claim that the ice cap is decreasing in Arctic?

MR. AVERY: Actually, Fred is better qualified on this than I am.

MR. SINGER: We have data on the Arctic, published data, going back approximately to 1920, I think. The warmest years in the Arctic region were around 1935, then it cooled, and now it's warming again but it hasn't quite reached the 1935 level. If you assume that ice cover and everything else is related to temperature, this would suggest that the ice history of the Arctic has varied in a similar fashion.

MR. AVERY: I would also add that Chinese court records say that in 1421 the Chinese sent a naval expedition to the Arctic Ocean and found no ice. This was right at the end of the medieval warming.

MR. SINGER: Let me mention something else in which there's some uncertainty. There's a letter from the president of the Royal Society in London to the Admiralty in 1817 informing the Admiralty that the ice has receded, and it is now possible to attempt to have a passage from northern Europe to Japan unimpeded by ice. And he wanted to apprise the Admiralty of this. We have that letter.

So it seems to vary on some cyclical basis. I don't know the reason for it. I don't think anybody else does.

Q: Jonathan Rauch, National Journal.

Does the observed pattern of warming in this century fit completely within the confines of what would be predicted by the 1500-year cycle or is there something additional going on? As you will detect, this is another way of asking Mr. Horowitz's question, which you did not in fact directly answer.

For Mr. Singer, what is wrong with the science paper that found that 900 studies included not a single one that took exception of global warming as a fact?

MR. AVERY: We can't know whether all of the warming that we've had since 1850 is due to the cycle and none of it due to the CO2. And as Fred suggests, logic would tell us, and experiments tell us, that more CO2 in the air has some warming affect. What we're suggesting is that both history and the recent pattern of things, particularly the warming before 1940, would indicate that the CO2 impact is a good deal smaller than the climate models which are telling us to be frightened.

MR. SINGER: Well, let me answer the other question. I think experience tells us that scientific consensus is a fallacious concept, number one. In other words, that's not how science advances. It advances because there's not a consensus. Someone thinks differently and puts forward his ideas, whether it's Isaac Newton or someone else, or Einstein. So scientific consensus is not necessarily a good thing.

But now let me talk about the article in Science magazine, which came out, for those who are interested, in December of 2003. It was written by Naomi Oreskes, a professor of science history at the University of California in San Diego, and she claims, and still does, that out of the 932 abstracts which she got from the ISI database on the Internet, not a single one disagreed with the consensus about manmade global warming.

Subsequent to this remarkable article, which many people tried to reply to but none of the replies were published by Science, she found that she had overlooked 11,000 other abstracts, and published a correction, but still maintained her original position. She didn't examine the 11,000. But it's interesting that someone who works in the field would be unaware of the fact that there were 11,000 to 12,000 papers published in the last 10 years and she only ended up with 900.

MR. AVERY: You will find in the footnotes in our book something on the order of 500 authors whose work testifies to the fact of the 1500-year climate cycle.

MR. SINGER: Now, someone took it upon himself, Benny Peiser, professor at the University of Liverpool in England, to look at those 932 abstracts. And he got very different results. He found that more disagreed with the consensus than agreed, but most of them were noncommittal and just didn't comment.

His work is published in another journal because Science accepted his corrections but then decided not to publish it, for reasons that we don't fully understand. So the uncorrected version still stands in the literature unresponded to, at least in Science magazine.

Q: I'm Sam Kazman, Competitive Enterprise Institute.

A year ago, in the wake of Katrina, global warming alarmists were claiming that that was just a foretaste of what was to come. Now, we're very close to the end of the current hurricane season, which, in terms of that prediction, of course, goes the other way, but on the other hand, one calm hurricane season is not really proof of anything.

My question to you is, based on the patterns that you've identified, how soon can we expect to see anything in the way of natural phenomena that offer a much more persuasive refutation of the alarmist claims?

MR. AVERY: I just happen to have here some historic data from the British Navy, which was keeping close track of Caribbean storms in the 17th, 18th, 19th centuries because they had wooden sailing ships based there, and sugar plantations. The British Navy, between 1700 and 1850, recorded one major land-falling Caribbean hurricane every two years. More recently, between 1950 and 1998, we recorded one major land-falling Caribbean hurricane every five years.

And Fred tells me this accords neatly with theory, because theory says storm intensity and power is gauged--is produced by the temperature differential between the equator and the poles. During a global warming, the temperature at the equator changes hardly at all. In our proxy studies, the temperature in the Arctic may change four or five degrees Celsius. So the temperatures come closer together; the power available to drive storms is reduced.

MR. SINGER: Yes, that certainly is true for extra-tropical cyclones. But I'll make a general remark about hurricanes. They're very interesting, but they don't tell you anything about the cause of the warming. Even if there were a consequence of increased hurricane frequency or intensity, which there doesn't seem to be, but if there were, it wouldn't tell you what's causing the warming, which I think is the crucial question. This is just another possible consequence.

Q: Alex Avery with the Hudson Institute.

My question is for Fred. I just got an article from a mathematician in London, Dr. Keenan. There was a paper published in Nature in 2004 that purported to estimate summer temperatures based on grape harvest dates. And the paper was published and it said according to their computer model, that calculated summer temperature averages based on grape harvest dates, 2003 was the warmest since 1370. He compared their model predictions with actual recorded temperatures and found that their model had estimated temperatures in 2003 four degrees higher than actual; and previous warm periods in which we had actual measurements from this portion of France were not modeled accurately.

Nature would not publish his criticism of that paper, and he had to get it published in another scientific journal. And I've had the same exact experience at Nature regarding agricultural scientific issues. And I ask you, with both Nature and Science seemingly shutting out legitimate and well-founded criticisms of widely publicized studies, what is going wrong with our scientific institutions, those that we all rely on to be neutral referees in the game?

MR. SINGER: Well, what you say is unfortunately true. The two leading science journals in the world now are Science and Nature, and they both have editors whom I know have a very strong personal view on the issue of global warming. And this colors their whole approach to papers that they receive.

Don't forget, editors are not required to have papers refereed in the first place. Their job is to seek the advice of referees. Well, obviously, if they know what they want to do with a paper, they can always take referees who will give them the convenient advice.

The referee system really doesn't seem to work very well. Take, for example, the Hockey Stick paper that was published in Nature, which was proven to be egregiously wrong; wrong not only in the data, but also the methodology. It took two independent scientists who were not even climate experts--they were statisticians--to find the errors and to publish them eventually against great opposition.

MR. AVERY: It was worse than that, Fred. The key data in the Hockey Stick was derived from a paper written by two guys who were measuring the fertilization effect of more CO2 in the atmosphere, and they specifically said in their paper that there was no local temperature change that would have caused the growth spurt in the Bristlecone pines that produced the hook in the Hockey Stick. It's the closest thing I've ever seen to scientific fraud.

Q: I'm sorry. I would like a follow-up though, Dennis, to the question, because I'm still not clear or satisfied with your responses.

I want to get to the question of--you say the effect of all of the commercial activity and increased CO2 is small relative to the cyclical changes--in what ratio, is the question? And let me ask it in a different way: Can't A1 Gore accept your data and say this time we won't grow grapes on England; half of England will be covered over by the Atlantic Ocean? We hear that there are going to be whole sunken parts of the civilized world. And you haven't, at least for me, refuted the notion that it's our incremental CO2 emissions that are causing it. That's the follow-up question.

And the other one I'd just want to ask is whether the good news of this--or whether you would regard it as good news--that if it generated much greater freedom for nuclear power--forget about windmills and the rest--but would you as scientists regard it as a good coming out of all of this, which you regard as fraud, if it freed us up to go nuclear to a much greater degree?

MR. AVERY: Let me try to answer, and Fred can critique me if he differs. As an economist and a lay historian, it looks to me as though 75 to 80 percent of the warming I see can be credited to the natural cycle. If we're talking about 15 to 20 percent of the warming being associated with man-made CO2, and we understand that each additional increment of CO2 has less forcing power and at some point not too far along, each additional CO2 unit has no forcing power, then there is virtually nothing in the outlook from the standpoint of the 1500-year cycle that would drive frightening temperatures; remembering that a huge number of Americans are at this moment voting for global warming by moving to and living in the sunbelt.

MR. SINGER: Just to expand on this--what Dennis says is quite correct. The effect of CO2--incremental CO2 is what we call logarithmic; that is the effect does not increase lineally with CO2. The reason for this has to do with physics. There's no disagreement on this, by the way. What happens is the absorption bands of CO2 are very strong and they get saturated. Once they're saturated, adding more CO2 doesn't change the situation. They're already saturated. You get a little more absorption at the edges, and this is what gives you the logarithmic effect.

As to how much of the current warming is due to human activities, I wouldn't want to guess. One cannot tell from the data. That's all I can say. We know it must be there. We also know it's small. But exactly how much, I have no idea.

On the nuclear, well, that's something that has to be determined by economics and to some extent by regulation. We seem to be lagging behind in the United States. Many other countries are going ahead full blast with nuclear energy. On the other hand, some countries are going backwards. I'm thinking of Sweden, Austria, and Germany. But many countries like Finland, Japan, France are moving ahead. I'm pro-nuclear.

MR. AVERY: On the other hand, I'm for clean coal. I don't see why we should waste that resource if we have clean-burning technologies that allow us to use it with no pollutant other than--well, I won't classify CO2 as a pollutant. But clean coal does produce CO2. If CO2 is not a problem, then why waste the coal?

MR. SINGER: Let me expand on that. I'm also for burning coal, which is a native resource in the United States. We have huge reserves here. We export coal to the rest of the world. You know, we're the Saudi Arabia of coal, basically.

One correction, not of Dennis, but of the general discourse on this issue. You hear the words bandied about, "clean coal." To me, clean coal means what it really says, it means that the pollutants have been removed. You can do that; you can remove the sulfur, you can remove the mercury, you can remove all the pollutants. To many people, clean coal has become a euphemism for coal burning that doesn't emit carbon dioxide. That's nonsense. Of course you emit carbon dioxide. What they mean by this is that we must get it back again, sequester it and bury it somewhere. That's the worst idea I've ever heard of.

On the other hand, if you want to benefit financially, I would encourage you to invest in coal sequestration. The Department of Energy has just decided to spend $450 million on demonstration projects for coal sequestration--and that's in the Bush administration, so you can imagine what's going to happen if the administration should change.

Q: Well, speaking of changes, I was wondering what you thought was going to be the result of the next Congress and their positions on global warming, what they might do? And I was specifically wondering about the next farm bill, which is apparently going to have a higher mandate for ethanol content of gasoline. And I was wondering if you might be able to say a few words about that?

MR. AVERY: As the author of a new paper published by CEI, "Biofuels, Food, or Wildlife? The Massive Land Costs of U.S. Ethanol."

We currently burn 134 billion gallons of gasoline per year, and corn ethanol will net us 50 gallons worth of gasoline per acre per year. How many million acres of forest are we willing to sacrifice to get small amounts of another low-grade auto fuel, when Canada has more oil than Saudi Arabia in the Athabasca tar sands, that are now being produced by steam injection at less than $20 a barrel?

I consider the ethanol mandate the greatest danger to the environment in the First World.

MR. SINGER: It is also the greatest boondoggle that's been conceived of in recent years.

Now that the election is over, I would hope that the politicians will no longer move in that direction, because, you know, the question of Iowa, of Nebraska, and so on has become somewhat moot, at least until the next election.

Q: But I hear they're considering increasing the mandate, increasing the percent of our gasoline that's used from ethanol.

MR. AVERY: Double digit, yes.

Q: And that lowers our fuel consumption.

MR. SINGER: Yesterday I listened to a debate between David Pimentel from Cornell, who is an ecologist against ethanol debating Bill Holmberg, who's the executive director of the, listen to this, the Renewable Fuels Association of America, or something to that effect. And you could imagine how the debate went.

MR. SINGER: I'd like to just add two remarks here. It's clear to me that they argued about how much energy is required to make ethanol, in relation to the energy we get out of it. In other words, they debated energy ratios. Pimentel argued that it takes more energy--fossil fuel energy--to create ethanol, which then gives you some energy back when you burn it. And Holmberg, of course, argued the other way. They're both probably off.

But let's assume that the amount of fossil fuel energy you put into ethanol equals the amount you get out. It still doesn't make any sense. It causes all sorts of problems, and it is sustained only by subsidies.

MR. AVERY: It is sustained only, Fred, by the Greens having driven us into forgoing all of the other fuels that are kinder to the environment than corn ethanol.

MR. SINGER: It's sustained by greed, not green, but greed, spelled G-R-E-E-D.

MR. SINGER: And the subsidies are considerable. There's the question of whether ethanol will be taxed as gasoline is, as a road user fuel. But there's even one subtle point as to why the automobile companies have become enamored by ethanol, which I learned about yesterday, which is that they think they can gain points on the CAFE standards. They think they can calculate CAFE based on the amount of gasoline they burn per mile, rather than ethanol.

It's a very complicated subject, but it is completely driven by subsidies, in my view.

MR. AVERY: It is weird that corn ethanol is the only energy source that the American public currently will approve using more of.

MR. WEINSTEIN: Hm. Well, on that note of slight disagreement between our two distinguished authors--(laughter)

MR. SINGER: It's unstoppable. (Laughter.)

MR. WEINSTEIN: Exactly. We'd like to thank both of them for this fascinating and provocative discussion, which gives us some of the character of this fascinating, provocative, and well-researched and detailed book that makes this unique argument--which I urge all of you to purchase. *

"A man always has two reasons for doing anything: a good reason and the real reason." --J. P. Morgan

Thomas Martin

Thomas Martin teaches in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Nebraska at Kearney. You may contact Thomas Martin at: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

Visit the campus of almost any university in the land: you will find its classrooms packed with students, its conference rooms buzzing with the activity of faculty and administrative committees, its computer screens overflowing with electronic memoranda detailing new policies and procedures and apprising all and sundry of the latest round of internal assessment and external review of curriculum, of teaching, of research, of diversity--with goals and objectives distinguished and reduced to "bullet" or laid out on an Excel spreadsheet. You will hardly escape without subjection to at least one PowerPoint presentation. If your visit is hasty and unreflective, you may even suffer the delusion that some form of education or scholarship is taking place. . . . The frantic motion to and fro on most campuses, however, holds the same relation to genuine academic activity as the stampede of the Gadarene swine to the discourse of rational men. Like the luckless pigs, the university has been possessed by a legion of unclean spirits: there is feverish movement and a demonic semblance of life, but the soul has departed and all that remains is the cadaver of an educational institution.

These words belong to R. V. Young, a Professor of English at North Carolina State University, and are from the introduction of "The University Possessed," in this spring's issue of The Intercollegiate Review. When I first read Professor Young's autopsy, I wanted to weep. A cadaver? Surely, Professor Young, there is still life in the minds of some professors on university campuses who can quicken a student's soul without the glitz of a PowerPoint presentation.

Then again, if Professor Young were to tour my campus, he would find the same "frantic motion to and fro" with the construction of new "residential" halls, the addition of "smart" classrooms, the computers lining hallways for students to surf the web between classes, the various Starbucks, the General Studies Committee busily at work preparing for the next external review [willfully oblivious that the recommendations from the last two reviews of five and ten years ago have never been addressed], yet another new Strategic Plan, the mega-message sign announcing the employee of the month from custodial services, and the multitude of offices dedicated to assessment, diversity, research, enrollment, retention, women issues, etc.

The modern university is an expensive resort, with wads of money spent on technology, food-courts, resident halls, skyboxes, and administrator's salaries, and very little time spent on teaching students to read beyond the level of an elementary student.

This week two educational studies in national newspapers confirmed Professor Young's postmortem. The first is the finding of a 2005 survey of 14,000 college students by the University of Connecticut that Seniors had flunked the civic literacy exam with an average score of 53.2 percent; more than 53 percent could not identify the century when the first American colony was founded at Jamestown, Virginia; fewer than half, 47.9 percent, could identify the Declaration of Independence as the source for this line: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal." The second confirmation, a report by The National Assessment of Educational Progress, often called the nation's report card, surveyed transcripts of 26,000 high school students, comparing them with an earlier study of student coursework in 1990. The results found that the reading skills of 12th graders tested in 2005 were significantly worse than those of students in 1992. The share of students lacking even basic high school reading skills rose to 27 percent from 20 percent in 1992. The share of those proficient in reading dropped from 40 percent in 1992 to 35 percent. Yet, get ready for this, the high school students in 2005 had averaged 360 more hours of classroom time than students in 1990. Finally, the kicker, the grade point average was a third of letter grade higher than in 1990.

Let's think about this for a minute. One in four high school seniors cannot read and only one in three are proficient in reading. Soon one-half of those high school graduates go to college where under half of the surveyed seniors can identify the Declaration of Independence as the source for the line: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal."

This is ludicrous. It would be like birds sending their chicks to aviaries to teach them the intricacies of high flying or dogs sending their pups to canine academies for agility training and ending up with birds that can only walk and dogs that sleep all day.

How can this be? The answers are simple: very few students have parents who read to them as children, the students are hooked on way too many electronic gizmos, and fewer and fewer teachers read formative character literature in which the student seeks to imitate the virtuous characteristics of the hero in his own life. Ergo, students do not read, like to be electronically stimulated, and do not see the point of stories that have nothing to do with them.

Not long ago I attended a dinner for honor students where a university president told his audience that the goal of modern education is to create lifelong learners, that their generation has more information (thanks to computers!) than previous generations, and that those who can readily adapt to new technologies will continue to be "marketable" in the ever-changing global economy. Swell. Obviously, a university diploma should no longer certify that a student has a mind and is able to read the Declaration of Independence with understanding; in other words, not only where the line "all men are created equal and endowed by their creator with life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" comes from, but what it means, and how it just might apply to the end of his own life when he might hope to face the creator who endowed his rights. With such leadership at the university level, is it any wonder that the world has no other goal than unbridled economic growth so that the feeding frenzy of consumerism can be fueled?

In actuality, modern education is creating students who are life-long forgetters. Most modern teaching, even at the college level, is about isolated facts (information) disconnected from a philosophy of the whole. In the words of Joseph Pearce, he is a "Techno-man, devoid of any metaphysical understanding, [who] knows how to do things without knowing why or whether they should be done." Modern man is being schooled by sociologists who compile what is, without any sense of what has been or ought to be. Our computers have memories, but no remembrances. We have mistaken access to information for wisdom. The modern university is being run by capitalists who view human beings as ciphers to be manipulated in the service of economic efficiency.

Fortunately, a university is more than her buildings, science laboratories, classrooms, and dormitories. The soul of the university is the members of her student body and faculty who are doing research in the eye of the storm's "frantic motion to and fro," which has nothing to do with the quality of rational discourse on a university campus.

Professor Young understands that when a student enters a university he has stepped on a plane with his intellectual ancestors to continue, with the assistance of the faculty, the search for the truth of what it means to be a virtuous human being, a steward of the earth.

For sake of simplification, this search takes on two forms. There is external research, that of looking out upon the world, and the internal research, that of looking within oneself for the fine art of what it means to be a good and happy human being. In the origin of the word research, the prefix "re" means again, and, when placed before "search," it means to look again.

The nature of the subject being studied determines the method of research being conducted. The study of nature, conducted in the natural sciences, differs from study of man in the humanities. Research in the natural sciences is objective; it is about an object that can be grasped by the senses, be it in biology, chemistry, or physics. Research in the natural sciences builds upon its previous discoveries and does not have to rediscover the cell, table of elements, or gravity each semester, though it does require the ability to read about and understand those discoveries.

Science advances by scientists solving problems and moving on to the next set of problems: engines fueled by hydrogen, drought-resistant seed corn, and smoother blends of whiskey. This is all fine and good in that it provides for man's mobility, appetite, and entertainment. Furthermore, one does not have to be a scientist nor understand the scientific method to benefit from the discoveries in genetic research, of drugs that stabilize blood pressure, or in order to fit five trillion songs on an "I-pod."

The humanities does not have the success rate of the natural sciences in manipulating nature because man's nature has not changed in the course of history. Research in the humanities differs from research in the sciences. In philosophy, the problem of what it means to be a human being--to know thyself--begins anew with each student. Self-knowledge is not a scientific investigation but an individual quest where being literate is the necessary proficiency.

The aim of Plato's Republic, for example, is to show that justice and the virtues of wisdom, courage, and moderation are in everyone's best interest and are required for true happiness. This search begins anew with each student who, like all previous students, was born ignorant of the fundamental answers to the questions necessary for a thoughtful existence: Who are we? Why are we? What separates man from the animals? Is man a slave to his desires? What is a soul? What is the function of reason? Do we have a higher nature that can rise above greed and lust? Does might make right? Do we have a higher purpose than self-gratification? Should we ever return a harm with a harm? What is a moral principle? Does moral law precede civil law?

These questions are problems that are not solved; they must be lived with each decision made. So, while there are new and improved aorta valves that can be surgically implanted, there is not a new and improved program which can be downloaded on a student's hard drive that will solve the problems he will face in life. The price for answering the questions from Republic is being able to read because, if you cannot read the questions, you surely cannot seek the answer throughout your life in your quest for your own happiness and that of your children. *

"A Parliament is nothing less than a big meeting of more or less idle people." --Walter Bagehot

William Barr

William A. Barr had a business career in engineering and has published many articles and books.

Much has been attributed to the feats of our twelve million fighting men--and deservedly so--in the Great War we fought and eventually won so decisively in Europe, North Africa, Burma, China, and across the Pacific on land, in the air, and over the seas. Yet little recognition has been given to the planning, production, and distribution of the tools of war wielded by our fighting men. After four years, gradually and eventually, the mighty war machines of both Germany and Japan were overwhelmed by wondrous weapons produced by our free-market, private-capital industries.

On that "day of infamy" when the Japanese made their dastardly attack, we suddenly found ourselves in the thick of a global war. The Japanese and the Germans had the plans, full mobilization, preparation, initiative, momentum, resources, logistics, experience, and the shock of surprise to carry out their treacherous designs. Our leadership was instantly compelled to react while climbing out of the depression of the '30s. When we were in the process of becoming the "arsenal of democracy," America desperately turned to all its resources for an engine of victory.

President Roosevelt and his advisors looked to the creation of the War Production Board to manage war mobilization. With American industry as that engine, the WPB took hold of the throttle and the tiller.

Back when war raged in Europe in 1939, President Roosevelt presented America's industries as the "arsenal of democracy" with William S. Knudsen of General Motors and Sidney Hillman, labor advocate, as co-heads of the Office of Production Management (OPM) which did much in connecting military and naval needs to providers to improve the economy and make progress in munitions production. But in December 1941 with America now at war, the need for managing the entire economy called for a central director, a wartime czar.

America's victory engine--our vast free-enterprise, private-capital, industrial complex--was front and center in Churchill's mind when he predicted:

. . . that the United States is like a gigantic boiler. Once the fire is lighted under it there is no limit to the power it can generate. . . . All the rest is merely the proper application of overwhelming force.

Engine of victory, or "gigantic boiler"--synonyms for America's industrial potential.

How grim were those 1942 news accounts of our army trainees wielding broom sticks for rifles in mock attacks on trucks labeled as "tanks"; of our shattered naval strength smoldering in ruins at Pearl Harbor, of London blitzed and afire; and to learn of the devastation of Allied supply convoys by wolf packs of U-boats. But the flood of bad war news from the Russian front, North Africa, Burma, Singapore, the Dutch East Indies, the Philippines, Guam, Wake Island, and the threat to our life line to Australia/New Zealand was met with our unified resolve while we began to organize our vast resources.

Contrast, if you please, those desperate conditions in early 1942 with our absolute victories in Europe by May 8, 1945 and in the Pacific on September 2. We emerged from World War II as masters of the air, flying unopposed over Germany and Japan. We dominated the seas as our battleship Missouri rode at anchor in Tokyo harbor. We obliterated Hitler's Nazi-Aryan travesty and Tojo's Southeast Asian plunder. We exacted total capitulation of our enemies as they were forced to agree to the occupation and control of their lands by Allied armed forces. Add to that our exclusive atomic power. To what extent did our industrial engine contribute to this overwhelming achievement?

One of the WPB's initial objectives was to measure and qualify America's total economic potential placed against estimated military and civilian needs in an all-out war. By October 1942 America's capacity appeared to be $66 billion or $75 billion adjusted for 1945 dollars. Vital commodities were soon identified--manpower, rubber, aluminum, oil, lumber, steel, farm grains, cotton, wool, leather, coal, transportation, and electric power were given priorities, allocations, capital injections, and incentives all for the total result. And that result was: our national economy grew from $88 billion in 1940 to $ l99 billion in 1944, a 125 percent increase, while an avalanche of war materiel clinched our victory. From July 1940 through July 1945 America produced:

* Ships (naval combat) 1,201; (landing craft) 64,546; (cargo/tanker) 2,686.

* Aircraft (fighters) 98,686; (bombers) 96,675; (transport) 23,661.

* Tanks (T34/76) 40,000, (M4A3) 49,000; Trucks 2,455,964.

* Heavy Field Guns 16,048; Machine Guns 2,681,052; Antiaircraft 724,538.

* Crude oil, refined and delivered for ships, trucks, planes, and tanks to all theaters of war for all Allies.

* Ammunition (torpedoes) 53,261; (helmets) 22,618,000.

In the two years after l942 the rate of U.S.A. munitions output rose from $1 billion per month to $5.2 billion per month and held at that high level until V-Day.

In the generation between the World Wars the wooden frames and canvas skins of biplanes gave way to aluminum alloy sheets riveted to the metal studs and spars of modern monoplanes. In June 1940 America's aluminum capacity was merely 400 million pounds per year. Aluminum mills had to be built from scratch near electric power and manpower sources. By October 1943 old plus new capacity reached 2,344 million pounds per year, an increase of 586 percent in three years, enough for 125,000 airplanes in 1943. Magnesium, another critical aircraft engine component, was increased 3358 percent in the same period. Steel was also vital for naval and maritime ships and army tanks, trucks, guns, and armor. Iron and steel production grew 185 percent between 1939 and 1944.

Quoting The World Book Encyclopedia on the subject of World War II:

Many historians believe that war production was the real key to Allied victory. The Allies not only mobilized more men and women in their armed forces, but out-produced the Axis in weapons and machinery. The avalanche of war materiel from the home front in the United States alone included 296,429 airplanes, 86,333 tanks, and 11,900 ships.

In spite of this clear statement about "the avalanche of war material" being "the real key to victory," the War Production Board and Chairman Donald Nelson are not mentioned in the 33 pages devoted to World War II nor anywhere else in that encyclopedia.

The same curious omission or lack of recognition of industrial production's contribution is found in Samuel Eliot Morison's history of the US Navy in World War II. In the author's conclusions he points to our being "caught unprepared" at the outset and formidable at the end without recognizing the construction and repair feats that supplied our "massive Third Fleet." Nimitz's account, The Great Sea War is similarly mute. The first Essex-class carrier was commissioned on the 31st of December, 1942, when we were in desperate need. At Japan's surrender there were 20 Essex-class aircraft carriers at sea.

In B. H. Liddell Hart's History of the Second World War the only inference to industrial strength being related to the fall of the Axis is the Allies' "tremendous air superiority" and, "In the Far East, too, the master key of air power made the collapse of Japan certain," again, giving no credit to the producers of that air power.

General Eisenhower's Crusade in Europe reveals his preoccupation with "supply" in terms of efficiently moving supplies from storage to the fighting front. No notion is evident of what it took to produce those vital supplies in spite of so many photographs showing England sinking under the weight of thousands of trucks, tanks, planes, and guns lined up for the Normandy invasion.

Mark M. Boatner's Biographical Dictionary of World War II does include a sketch of Donald Marr Nelson among over a thousand other people, but fails to mention any achievements in production or economic stabilization during the war.

The American Heritage Fifty Year Cumulative Index lists one mention of Donald Nelson among its 330 issues since 1954, a two-page article, The American Superweapon by John Steele Gordon, which features U.S.A.'s "astonishing industrial feat," the production from our privately owned industrial complex. Gordon concludes with this final sentence:

Thanks to Donald Nelson and his legions at WPB who did an immensely complex, largely thankless job, the United States was able to win the Second World War using the same simple strategy Ulysses S. Grant had used eighty years earlier: assemble overwhelming men and materiel, and pound the enemy into the ground with them.

Why have historians typically overlooked the heroic efforts of the producers of our overwhelming tools of war? Perhaps it is easier to recognize heroism in such seamen as those during their convoy runs in the Arctic under the very noses of German subs and planes while delivering vital cargos to Murmansk than to recognize the efforts of steel workers or coal miners hard at work. But American industries had major problems to solve during the war such as manpower when twelve million were away in the service and out of the labor market. Much of the shortage was taken up by Rosie Riveters. Female laborers proved to be much more productive in America's war machine than the sullen, wretched, foreign laborers pressed to toil in the German Ruhr.

In the infancy of aviation and the anguish of the depression years free enterprise generated hungry competitors striving for the scraps of business available from meager naval budgets. Brewster, Loening, Fairchild, and Seversky attended to the various and exacting requirements of the navy for carrier-based fighter planes but Leroy Grumman did it best. Ten years and seven models went into the development of the F4F Wildcat, which by 1941 became the navy's standard carrier fighter. By late 1943 Grumman's F6F Hellcats displaced the Wildcats to earn this awesome record: 5,156 enemy aircraft destroyed which was 75 percent of all U.S. navy aerial victories in WW II! By war's end Leroy Grumman's Long Island factories and licensed cohorts turned out 12,272 Hellcats; 9,812 carrier-based torpedo bombers (TBF Avengers); and 5,500 F4F fighters--more than any other aircraft supplier to the navy, marines, and the Royal navy during the war.

In the matter of World War II aviation the contribution of Grumman mentioned above is but a piece of a vast panorama. Contributions similar to Grumman were made by such aircraft producers as Boeing (B-17, B-29) in Seattle and Renton; Bell (P-39, P-63) in Buffalo and Marietta; Consolidated (PBY, B-24) in San Diego, Willow Run, and Fort Worth; Curtiss-Wright (P-40, C-46, SB2C) in Buffalo, Columbus, St. Louis, and Louisville; Douglas (A-20, A-26, SBD, C-47, C-54) in Santa Monica, Long Beach, Tulsa, El Sagundo, and Chicago; Lockheed (P-38, PV-2) in Burbank; Martin (B-26, PBM) in Middle River, and Omaha; North American (P-51, B-25, AT-6) in Inglewood, Kansas City, and Dallas; Northrup (P-61) in Hawthorne; Republic (P-47) in Farmingdale; and Vought (F4U) in Stratford.

Of equal importance were the engine designers, manufacturers, and licensees for the above aircraft such as Allison in Indianapolis: Rolls-Royce/Packard in Detroit; Curtiss-Wright in Paterson, Cincinnati, and Chicago; and Pratt & Whitney in East Hartford, Kansas City, Chicago, Kenosha, Melrose Park, and Muskegon. To lend some scope to the accomplishments of our collective aviation industry in World War II, Pratt & Whitney alone produced 375,627 radial engines and Curtiss-Wright even more!

Is it possible to find true heroes in this American industrial complex? Emphatically, Yes, Yes, Yes! For every aviation entity listed above there were that many aviation pioneers of the 1920s and 30s who became production giants during the war. Great chronicles could be written (but haven't) about Donald Douglas, Glenn L. Martin, Leroy Grumman, and many other industrialists who met the call for innovation, excellence, and compounded production quantities through those hectic, stressful years.

To identify such a hero let us consider George Jackson Mead. He was the designer of Wright Aeronautical's J-series radial aircraft engines in the 1920s. The J-5 powered Lindbergh's Spirit of St. Louis in his epochal flight in 1927 and helped give birth to America's commercial aviation by powering the legendary DC-3 passenger plane. In 1925, Pratt & Whitney was founded with "Jack" Mead as Vice President of Engineering. Through the 1930s he and Andy Willgoos developed the Wasp and Hornet series radials for most of the military and commercial American planes. Their engines configured seven and nine radial cylinders and eventually 14- and 18- cylinder twin bank engines, the latter being the R-2800 that outperformed all German and Japanese aircraft engines during the war and gave the U.S.A.A.F. and U.S. naval aviation undisputed mastery of the air by 1945.

After the fall of France to Germany's blitzkrieg, President Roosevelt addressed Congress on May 16, 1940, and proposed the unheard-of production of 50,000 American airplanes! Our country was about to become the "arsenal of democracy." The next day F.D.R. appointed Jack Mead to implement and coordinate his 50,000-plane proposal after being recommended by a consensus of aviation's military and industrial leaders. As the aviation member, Jack Mead, took his place in the National Defense Commission under Chairman William S. Knudsen. The eventual American aviation complex outlined above attests to Jack Mead's organizational ability. For his feats he was awarded the Medal of Merit, the highest honor accorded to civilians, by President Truman in April 1946.

Jack Mead not only designed the engines that powered the planes that won the air war over both Germany and Japan but he also organized the aviation industry so effectively that the United States emerged from World War II as the absolute leader in world aviation. His paycheck as Special Advisor to the Office of Production Management on July 2, 1941 was $0.05 (not a typo).

Jack Mead, unheralded by historians, without reservation merits our first Yes.

Such is the substance of our victory and world dominance through air power. Naval supremacy runs parallel to the above aviation analysis and is just as compelling.

One of the most significant developments in the war at sea was the obsolescence of battleships and the rise of naval aviation. Airplanes became the main offensive weapons as the American and Japanese navies fought for control in the Pacific. At the same time carriers were inherently vulnerable to enemy planes. The defense against carriers being easy targets was the fast task force (30+ knots capability) with three or four carriers with their compliments of fighter and bomber planes clustered at the center of concentric rings of cruisers and destroyers bristling with antiaircraft guns and sonar/radar detection gear all for the primary purpose of protecting the carriers from enemy subs, surface ships, and planes. The fast task force concept employed another innovation of the war, a radar-based ability (PPI) to coordinate the positions of the entire task force members, often more than thirty ships, night or day, fog or clear, and avoid collisions or defense gaps. Our task forces moved in unison like schools of fish at all times and under all conditions.

It is interesting that early in the war (1942), before we had enough ships to form task groups, the U.S. navy lost all but one of its front line carriers (the Enterprise), but once enough ships became available to fill out task forces, no Essex-class carriers were ever sunk by the enemy or by typhoons.

In the Atlantic and Mediterranean, our navy finally overcame the tragic losses of cargo ships to German U-boat wolf packs by adding "jeep" aircraft carriers with a compliment of patrol planes to the convoys. Suddenly, the attrition rate of U-boats jumped to 90 percent and our cargo and tanker deliveries became more certain. Henry J. Kaiser not only came up with the idea but also supplied all fifty "baby flattops" to the navy.

Even more constructive to victory were the 1,460 U.S. merchant ships produced by Kaiser shipyards. Although it had taken 150 days for others to build Liberty Ships, Kaiser yards launched them in as few as four days by innovative subassembly methods. Kaiser yards supplied about a third of all U.S. merchant ships launched in 1940-45. Even beyond shipbuilding, Kaiser constructed an entire steel mill in Fontana, California, to supply his West Coast shipyards. He also went into the cement business to supply the Boulder, Grand Coulee, and Bonneville Dam projects in the 1930s. When magnesiurn sources were scarce he built a magnesium plant for the aviation industry.

Henry F. Kaiser, unheralded by historians, fully deserves our second Yes.

With all of the shrimping and fishing boat activity in the Mississippi Delta region, Andrew Higgins' company subsisted before the war. When the navy needed small ships for amphibious assaults for North Africa landings during Operation Torch in late 1942, his shops expanded to factory-size and worked around the clock seven days a week building so many LCPs, LCPLs, LCVPs, and LCMs that all were called "Higgins boats" by the soldiers that rode in them to the beaches in the Mediterranean and the Pacific. High above the production bays in his New Orleans factories were huge signs that read, "THE GUY WHO RELAXES IS HELPING THE AXIS!"

Andy Higgin's companies also made high-speed PT boats for the navy, and glider planes for the army, both of which utilized his special knowledge and use of high strength plywood when steel availability was wanting.

To put Higgins Industries' production into perspective, by September 1943, 12,964 of the navy's 14,072 vessels came from Higgins.

As an example of how war production brought victory, consider that in 1942, early in the Pacific war, 82 ships were rounded up to conduct the Guadalcanal landing. In the June 1944 invasion of Normandy 987 ships churned the waters and hit the beaches. In March 1945 the Okinawa assault and occupation took 2,261 ships, an armada across the horizon farther than the eye could see!

Andrew Higgins, unheralded by historians, merits a resounding Yes!

Yes, there were true industrial heroes in our engine of victory. What prevents me or other historians from delving further to find and honor three more heroes, or a hundred more, is where to begin and where to stop. Just as there were G. I. Joes in foxholes or storming the beaches, there were hard workers in factories, forests, and mines, night and day, turning out our overwhelming tools of victory. Bless 'em all! *

"All our talents increase in the using, and every faculty, both good and bad, strengthens by exercise." --Anne Bronte

Paul Kengor

Paul Kengor is author of The Crusader: Ronald Reagan and the Fall of Communism (HarperCollins, 2006), associate professor of Political Science, and executive director of the Center for Vision & Values at Grove City College in Grove City, Pennsylvania. This article is part two in a series of four.

In his pursuit of Cold War victory over Soviet communism, Ronald Reagan enlisted several fascinating covert efforts as part of a bold campaign of economic warfare, an assault so sensitive and so damaging that Reagan advisers denied it publicly, only acknowledging it decades later. "Certainly it was economic warfare," said Reagan defense official Richard Perle, "although we had to deny it at the time." Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger explained that the effort had to be "a silent campaign."

Reagan himself was forced into denials or dodges when asked if he was pursuing an economic war against Moscow. His closest aide, National Security Adviser Bill Clark, later explained Reagan's reluctance to me in a series of interviews: "Look, he didn't want to admit publicly that we were effectively at war [with the Soviets] or that we wanted to defeat them." Clark said that Reagan carefully avoided using words like "economic war."

In one of the most stunning examples from this campaign, there is a potential weapon for the Bush team in its war against terrorism, especially as it relates to the role of Iran vis-a-vis the war in Iraq--one that the Bush team may have already considered.

In 1985-86, the Reagan team enlisted the secret support of King Fahd of Saudi Arabia to help destroy the Soviet economy by drastically reducing Soviet income from oil exports--a commodity that provided the Kremlin with the vast majority of its hard currency revenues. Reagan officials privately worked with the Saudis to manipulate the world's oil market, encouraging them to increase production, thereby lowering the global price of oil. In the six months that followed, the price of oil dropped from $30 a barrel to $10 a barrel, sending catastrophic shock waves through the Soviet economy.

In 1994, details of this effort made their way into Peter Schweizer's groundbreaking work, Victory. I have added new details in my book. What we both found is that former Soviet officials to this day shudder when they speak of the U.S,-Saudi action. Yevgenny Novikov, who served on the senior staff of the Soviet Central Committee, recalls the crippling effect:

The drop in oil prices was devastating, just devastating. It was a catastrophic event. Tens of billions were wiped away.

These revenues--which, in the 1970s, had saved the Soviet economy--were blocked from the Soviet treasury in the mid-1980s, when the Kremlin needed them most.

This tale offers insights for George W. Bush today. President Bush needs the ingenuity to find similar means within the Middle East now--methods that involve nations like Saudi Arabia in a covert campaign to undermine enemies like Iran, which is destabilizing the region and hurting the United States badly in Iraq.

In fact, a similar campaign may be underway, begun by Vice President Cheney in his trip to Saudi Arabia. Cheney was in Saudi Arabia on November 25 to meet with King Abdullah bin Abdul Aziz al-Saud, where, according to a statement from the Office of the Vice President, the two men discussed "issues of mutual interest to developments in the Middle East region." Not long after this meeting, articles appeared concerning possible U.S.-Saudi cooperation on oil prices, and possibly for the clandestine purpose of hurting Iran. A January 22 analysis by Knight Ridder reported:

Some analysts suggest privately that Saudi opposition to OPEC cuts is based more on politics than business. The Saudis, they say, want to starve Iran of needed oil revenues because Saudi rulers are Sunni Muslims and increasingly worried about Iran's backing of fellow Shiite Muslims who rule Iraq.

The Bush administration certainly shares those worries. Though I'm not privy to sources who could confirm this, I strongly suspect that Vice President Cheney likely expressed such concerns in his trip to Saudi Arabia. The two sides may have come to a meeting of minds, as did the Saudi royal family and a previous Republican administration in 1985-86, when Saudi Arabia went against its OPEC brothers and increased rather than decreased oil supplies, dictating a global drop in the price of a barrel of oil.

In the 1985-86 effort, Vice President George H. W. Bush was the liaison between Reagan and the Saudis. Once Vice President Bush became president, Dick Cheney became his secretary of defense, and the two together saved the Saudis in August 1990, when Saddam Hussein began moving troops and tanks to the Saudi border. Today, I would expect Cheney and the younger Bush to cash in on past favors. The Saudis would likely be willing to pitch in, given that they despise the Iranian mullahs.

In 1985-86, the Reagan team cashed in on past favors on behalf of the Saudis, particularly President Reagan's 1981 AWACS sale to Saudi Arabia, which thrilled the Saudis but angered Israel. The U.S.-Saudi oil manipulation of 1985-86 hurt not just the Soviets but the Iranians. The Saudis were happy to hurt the Iranians then. There is no reason why they would be less happy to do so again.

This speculation is hardly unreasonable. In fact, I would be surprised if members of the Bush team did not a least consider this option. It is time to get creative in prosecuting the War on Terror, including calling on old friends. *

"The heart has its reasons which reason knows nothing of." --Blaise Pascal

Victor Davis Hanson

Victor Davis Hanson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, a professor emeritus at California State University, Fresno, and a distinguished visiting fellow at Hillsdale College. The following is adapted from a speech delivered at a Hillsdale College National Leadership Seminar on the topic, "National Security: Short- and Long-Term Assessments." Reprinted by permission from Imprimis, the national speech digest of Hillsdale College, www.hillsdale.edu.

The skirmishes in the occupied land are part of a war of destiny. The outcome of hundreds of years of war will be defined in Palestinian land. As the Imam said, Israel must be wiped off the map.

So rants Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. It is understandable why Ahmadinejad might want an arsenal of nuclear missiles. It would allow him to shake down a constant stream of rich European emissaries, pressure the Arab Gulf states to lower oil production, pose as the Persian and Shiite messianic leader of Islamic terrorists, neutralize the influence of the United States in the region--and, of course, destroy Israel. Let no one doubt that a nuclear Iran would end the entire notion of peaceful global adjudication of nuclear proliferation and pose an unending threat to civilization itself.

In all his crazed pronouncements, Ahmadinejad reflects an end-of-days view: History is coming to its grand finale under his aegis. In his mind, he entrances even foreign audiences into stupor with his rhetoric. Of his recent United Nations speech he boasted, "I felt that all of a sudden the atmosphere changed there. And for 27-28 minutes all the leaders did not blink." The name of Ahmadinejad, he supposes, will live for the ages if he takes out the "crusader" interloper in Jerusalem. As the Great Mahdi come back to life, he can do something for the devout not seen since the days of Saladin.

For now, however, Ahmadinejad faces two hurdles: He must get the bomb, and he must create the psychological landscape whereby the world will shrug at Israel's demise.

Oddly, the first obstacle may not be the hardest. An impoverished Pakistan and North Korea pulled it off. China and Russia will likely sell Tehran anything it cannot get from rogue regimes. The European Union is Iran's largest trading partner and ships it everything from sophisticated machine tools to sniper rifles, while impotent European diplomats continue "ruling out force" to stop the Iranian nuclear industry. Meanwhile, Moscow and Beijing, for all their expressed concern, will probably veto any serious punitive action by the United Nations. As for the United States, it has 180,000 troops attempting to establish some sort of democratic stability in Afghanistan and Iraq, not to mention a growing anti-war movement at home. An unpredictable President Bush has less than two years left in the White House, with a majority opposition in Congress that is calling for direct talks with Ahmadinejad and urging congressional restraints on the possible use of force against Iran. It is no surprise that so many in Iran see no barrier to obtaining the bomb. But the second obstacle--preparing the world for the end of the Jewish state--is trickier.

Ahmadinejad and the Holocaust

True, the Middle East's secular gospel is anti-Semitism. State-run media in Syria, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan broadcast endless ugly sermons about Jews as "pigs and apes." Nor do Russia and China much care what happens to Israel, as long as its demise does not affect business. But the West is a different matter. There the history of anti-Semitism looms large, framed by the Holocaust that nearly destroyed European Jewry. Thus the Holocaust is now Ahmadinejad's target just as much as downtown Tel Aviv. Holocaust denial is a tired game, but Ahmadinejad's approach is slightly new and different. He has studied the Western postmodern mind and has devised a strategy based on its unholy trinity of multiculturalism, moral equivalence, and cultural relativism. As a third world populist, he expects that his own fascism will escape proper scrutiny if he can recite often enough the past sins of the West. He also understands the appeal of victimology in the West these days. So he knows that to destroy the Israelis, he, not they, must become the victim, and Westerners the aggressors who forced his hand. "So we ask you" he said recently:

. . . if you indeed committed this great crime? Why should the oppressed people of Palestine be punished for it? If you committed a crime you yourselves should pay for it.

Ahmadinejad also grasps that there are millions of highly educated but cynical Westerners who see nothing exceptional about their own culture. So if democratic America has nuclear weapons he asks, why not theocratic Iran?

Your arsenals are full to the brim, yet when it's the turn of a nation such as mine to develop peaceful nuclear technology, you object and resort to threats.

Moreover, he knows how Western relativism works. Who is to say what are facts or what is true, given the tendency of the powerful to "construct" their own narratives and call the result "history"? So he says that the Holocaust was exaggerated, or perhaps even fabricated, as mere jails became "death camps" through a trick of language in order to persecute the poor Palestinians. We laugh at all this as absurd. We should not.

Money, oil, and threats have gotten the Iranian theocrats to the very threshold of a nuclear arsenal. Their uncanny diagnosis of Western malaise has now convinced them that they can carefully fabricate a Holocaust-free reality in which Muslims are the victims and Jews the aggressors setting the stage for Ahmadinejad's "righteously" aggrieved Iran after "hundreds of years of war," to set things right.

In the midst of all this passive-aggressive noisemaking, the Iranian government pushed insidiously forward with nuclear development, perhaps pausing when it has gone too far, in order to allow some negotiations, but then getting right back at it. Nuclear acquisition for Ahmadinejad is a win/win proposition. If he obtains nuclear weapons and restores lost Persian grandeur, it will remind a restless Iranian populace how the theocrats are nationalists after all, not just pan-Islamic provocateurs. And a nuclear Iran could create all sorts of mini-crises in the region in order to spike oil prices, given world demand for oil.

The Islamic world and the front line enemies of Israel lost their Middle Eastern nuclear deterrent with the collapse of the Soviet Union; no surprise, then, that we have not seen a multilateral conventional attack on Israel ever since. But with a nuclear Iran, the mullahs can puff themselves up with a guarantee that a new coalition against Israel would not be humiliated or annihilated when it lost--since the Iranians could always, Soviet-like, threaten to go nuclear. And there are always enough crazies in Arab capitals to imagine that at last the combined armies of the Middle East could defeat Israel, with the knowledge that in case of failure, they could recede safely back under an Islamic nuclear umbrella.

Reasons for Action

How many times have we heard the following arguments?

* "Israel has nuclear weapons, so why single out Iran?"

* "Pakistan got nukes and we lived with it."

* "Who is to say the United States or Russia should have the bomb and not other countries?"

* "Iran has promised to use its reactors for peaceful purposes, so why demonize the regime?"

In fact, the United States has at least six reasons for singling out Iran to halt its nuclear development program--and it is past time that we spell them out to the world at large.

First, any country that seeks "peaceful" nuclear power at the same time it is completely self-sufficient in energy production is de facto suspect. Iran has enough natural gas to meet its clean electrical generation needs for two centuries. The only rationale for its multi-billion-dollar program of building nuclear reactors--and for its spending billions more to hide and decentralize them--is to obtain weapons.

Second, we cannot excuse Iran by acknowledging that the Soviet Union, Communist China, North Korea, and Pakistan obtained nuclear weapons. In each of these cases, anti-liberal regimes gained stature and advantage by the ability to destroy Western cities. But past moral failures are not corrected by allowing history to repeat itself.

The logic of this excuse would lead to a nuclearized globe in which wars from Darfur to the Middle East would all assume the potential to go nuclear. In contrast, the fewer the nuclear players, the more likely deterrence can play some role. And if Iran were to go nuclear, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Egypt, and other Arab autocracies would follow suit in order to preserve the prestige and security of largely Arab Sunni nations. That would ensure, again, that almost any Middle East dispute involving Shiite-Sunni tension, from Lebanon to Iraq, might escalate to a nuclear confrontation.

Third, it is simply a fact that full-fledged democracies are less likely to attack one another. Although they are prone to frequent fighting--imperial Athens and republican Venice, for instance, were in some sort of war about three out of every four years during the 5th century B.C. and the 16th century, respectively--consensual governments are not so ready to fight each other. Thus today there is no chance whatsoever that an anti-American France and an increasingly anti-French America would, as nuclear democracies, go to war. Likewise Russia, following the fall of Communism and its partial evolution to an elected government, poses less of a threat to the United States than before.

It would be regrettable should Taiwan, Japan, South Korea, or Germany go nuclear--but not nearly as catastrophic as when Pakistan did so, which is what allows it today to give sanctuary to bin Laden and the planners of 9/11 with impunity. The former governments operate with a free press, open elections and free speech, and thus their warmaking is subject to a series of checks and balances. Pakistan is a strongman's heartbeat away from becoming an Islamic theocracy. And while democratic India is often volatile in relations with its Islamic neighbor, the world is not nearly as worried about its nuclear arsenal as it is about autocratic Pakistan's.

Fourth, there are a number of rogue regimes that belong in a special category: North Korea, Iran, Syria, and Cuba. These are tyrannies whose leaders have sought global attention and stature through sponsoring insurrection and terrorism beyond their borders. If it is frightening that Russia, China, and Pakistan are now nuclear, it is terrifying that Kim Jong II has the bomb, and that Ahmadinejad might soon. Islamic fundamentalism and North Korean Stalinism might be antithetical to scientific advancement, but they are actually conducive to nuclear politics. When such renegade regimes go nuclear, they have an added edge. In nuclear poker, the appearance of derangement is an advantage.

Fifth, Iran presents a uniquely fourfold danger: It has enough cash to buy influence and exemption from sanctions; it possesses oil reserves to blackmail a petroleum-hungry world; it sponsors terrorists who might soon be enabled to find sanctuary under a nuclear umbrella and to be armed with dirty bombs; and it has a leader who talks as if he were willing to take his entire country into paradise--or at least back to the 7th century amid the ashes of the Middle East. Just imagine the recent controversy over Danish cartoons in the context of Ahmadinejad with his finger on a half-dozen nuclear missiles pointed at Copenhagen.

Sixth, the West is right to take on a certain responsibility to discourage nuclear proliferation. The existence of such weapons grew entirely out of Western science and technology. In fact, the story of global nuclear proliferation is exclusively one of espionage, stealthy commerce, or American-and European-trained native engineers using their foreign-acquired expertise. Pakistan, North Korea, or Iran have no ability themselves to create such weapons, any more than Russia, China, or India did. And any country that cannot itself create such weapons is probably less likely to ensure the necessary protocols to guard against their misuse or theft.

What Is to Be Done?

We can argue all we want over the solution. Would it be wrong to use military force? Are air strikes feasible? Will Iranian dissidents rise up, or have most of them already been killed or exiled? Will Russia and China help us, or sit back and enjoy our dilemma? Is Europe our ally in this matter, or is it simply triangulating? Will the UN ever step in, or is it more likely to condemn the United States than Tehran?

Clearly a poker-faced United States seems hesitant to act until moments before the missiles are armed. It is certainly not behaving like the hegemony or imperialist power so caricatured by Michael Moore and his ilk. Until there is firm evidence that Iran has the warheads ready, no administration will wish to relive the nightmare of the past three years, with its endless hysterical accusations of arrogant unilateralism, preemption, inaccurate or falsified intelligence, imperialism, and purported hostility towards Islam.

What, then, should the United States do, other than keep offering meaningless platitudes about "dialogue"? There are actually several measures that, taken together, might work to exploit Iran's weaknesses and maintain a nuclear-free Gulf.

First, keep pushing international accords and doggedly work to ratchet up the watered-down United Nations sanctions. Even if they don't do much to Iran in any significant way, the resolutions seem to enrage Ahmadinejad. And when he rages at the politically correct United Nations, he only loses further support.

Second, keep prodding the European Union, presently Iran's chief trading partner, to apply pressure. The so-called EU3--Britain, France, and Germany--failed completely in this recent attempt to stop Ahmadinejad's nuclear plans. But out of that setback came a growing realization in Europe that a nuclear-tipped missile from theocratic Iran could hit Europe just as easily as Israel. Next, Europeans should adopt a complete trade embargo to prevent all Iranian access to precision machinery and high technology.

Third, keep encouraging Iranian dissidents. We need not ask them to go into the streets where they would be shot. Instead we should offer them media help and access to the West. Also highlight the plight of women, minorities, and liberals in Iran--the groups that traditionally appeal to the Western left.

Fourth, we should announce in advance that we don't want any bases in Iran; don't want its oil; and won't send American infantry there. That would preempt the tired charges of imperialism and colonialism.

Fifth, and crucially, we must complete the stabilization of Iraq and Afghanistan. The last thing Iran wants is a democratic and prosperous Middle East surrounding its borders. The sight of Afghans, Iraqis, Kurds, Lebanese, and Turks voting and speaking freely could form a critical mass of democratic reform to overwhelm the Khomeinists.

Sixth, keep reminding the Gulf monarchies that a nuclear Shiite theocracy is far more dangerous to them than to the United States or Israel--and that America's efforts to contain Iran depend on their own efforts to rein in Wahhabis in Iraq.

Seventh, say nothing much about the presence of two or three carrier groups in the Persian Gulf and Mediterranean. Iran will soon grasp on its own that the build-up of such forces might presage air strikes, at which the United States excels.

Eighth, make it clear that Israel, as a sovereign nation, has a perfect right to protect itself. The United States should keep reminding Iran that 60 years after the real Holocaust, no Israeli Prime Minister will sit by idly while 7th century theocrats grandstand about wiping out the state of Israel and obtain the nuclear means to do it.

Ninth, keep the rhetoric down. Avoid threats to bomb many who could be our friends--while at the same time ignoring therapeutic pleas to talk with those who we know are our enemies.

Finally, Americans must gasify coal, diversify fuels, drill for more petroleum, and invent new energy sources. Only that can collapse the world price of petroleum. At $60 a barrel for oil, Ahmadinejad is a charismatic third world benefactor who throws cash at every thug who wants a roadside bomb or shoulder-fired missile--and has plenty of money to buy Pakistani, North Korean, or Russian nuclear components. But at $30 a barrel, he will be despised by his own people, who will become enraged as state-subsidized food and gas prices skyrocket, and as scarce Iranian petrodollars are wasted on Hezbollah and Hamas.

In conclusion, let me offer a more ominous note of warning. Israel is not free from its own passions, and there will be no second Holocaust. It is past time for Iranian leaders to snap out of their pseudo-trances and recognize that some Western countries are not only far more powerful than Iran, but in certain situations and under particular circumstances can be just as driven by memory, history--and, yes, a certain craziness as well.

The same goes for the United States. The Iranians, like bin Laden, imagine an antithetical caricature--which, like all caricatures, has some truth in it--whereby we materialistic Westerners love life too much to die, while the pious Islamic youths they send to kill us with suicide bombs love death too much to live. But what the Iranian theocrats, like the al-Qaedists, never fully fathom is that if the American people conclude that their freedom and existence are at stake, they are capable of conjuring up things far more frightening than anything in the 7th-century brain of Mr. Ahmadinejad. The barbarity of the nightmares at Antietam, Verdun, Dresden, and Hiroshima prove that well enough. In short, there are consequences to the rhetoric of Armageddon.

So far the Iranian leader has posed as someone 90 percent crazy and 10 percent sane, hoping that in response we would fear his overt madness, grant concessions, and delicately appeal to his small reservoir of reason. But he should understand that if his Western enemies appear 90 percent of the time as children of the Enlightenment, they are still suffused with vestigial traces of the emotional and unpredictable. And military history shows that the irrational 10 percent of the Western mind is a lot scarier in the end than anything Islamic fanaticism has to offer. *

"All people are born alike--except Republicans and Democrats." --Groucho Marx

Ralph Peters

Ralph Peters is a noted columnist and commentator. This interview originates from an e-publication of The Center for Vision & Values at Grove City College. This publication is one part of a series sponsored by The Center for Vision & Values on the topic of "The De-Christianization of Europe: From Nicaea to Nietzsche."

The executive director of the Center for Vision & Values is Dr. Paul Kengor, and he is interviewing Ralph Peters. The conference referred to in the article took place on the campus of Grove City College in April.

V&V: Ralph, in our last Q&A, we talked about the war in Iraq. Now to Europe, the subject of our conference: What is your sense of the status of Christianity there? Do you agree that it is not merely in decline, but, in many ways, under attack? If so, how is it under attack? Who or what is attacking it?

Ralph Peters: To me, the question is whether Christianity in Europe is irrevocably in decline, or merely in abeyance and waiting to return. Religious faith has never been a constant--it's cyclical. The great religious revivals of the 17th century (here, I mean the Puritans, Dissenters, etc.), 18th century (Wesley and his peers), and the 19th century in England were all reactions to a breakdown in personal faith and public morality. We idealize the past, forgetting that humans have always strayed (and often with great enthusiasm).

That said, a key difference today is that, while states favored religious belief in the past, today governments have fled from any meaningful identification with Christianity (even where "Christian" is part of a political party's name). Enforced secularization at the hand of bureaucrats educated to leftist biases has done much to discredit religion in Europe.

And yet, faith is unkillable. While Europe exudes the bleak odor of atheism today, I don't think it would take all that much to re-excite faith-perhaps greater confrontation with Muslim immigrants, or a pandemic . . . or simply a reaction to the current anomie afflicting individuals and their societies.

I look at the entire globe as I attempt to understand Europe, and what do I see? Evangelical fervor sweeping much of Latin America, a reawakened yearning for spirituality in China (to the great alarm of the bureaucrats in Beijing), the mighty Christianity of sub-Saharan Africa (syncretic, yes, but so is European Christianity), and even the religious fever scorching the Muslim world. . . . All of this suggests that Europe is not eternally immune to faith.

Whether we approach religion as transcendental reality or merely as the most effective survival mechanism ever developed by human collectives (a key point Darwin and Spencer missed), it's clear that it isn't going to go away anytime soon. And centuries of faith cannot be fully erased in a few generations--the problem at present is that, although the Europeans have disavowed God, they've retained the intolerant self-righteousness of the sort of fanatics who give religion a bad name. Today's Europeans are inquisitors without a cause.

V&V: Is a clash of civilizations indeed taking place in Western Europe? Rather than a clash between the forces of Christendom vs. the forces of radical Islam, is the clash instead between Islamists vs. post-Christian European secular elites?

Peters: No European state--not one--has a functional model for integrating immigrants from different cultural and religious backgrounds. This is, indeed, a clash of civilizations. Europe's secular elites are, in fact, the last to get it. The average Frenchman or German or Englishman understands that the situation is dysfunctional, but the governing elites insist on pretending that all will be well-despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. And, of course, there's blame on every side. Immigrants don't want to assimilate, but neither do Europeans really want them to assimilate. The miraculous North American model, in which "America makes Americans," has no counterpart in Europe. And for all their pacifist masquerading, Europeans remain really good haters--you can still smell the smoke of the ovens of Auschwitz.

V&V: You made a very interesting point at our last conference, which you will be discussing at this conference: You said that, given Europe's often brutal track record of dealing with ethnic minorities, we should not be surprised if these "high-minded" Europeans suddenly get real ugly with the Muslims in their midst. Could these people crack down on Muslims? And is that already happening?

Peters: The hatred is already there, just waiting for trigger events--such as a wave of terror attacks--to operationalize it. Native Europeans despise Muslims, while Muslim immigrants despise Europeans and their values (and the Saudis continue to fund the exacerbation of hatred and the deepening of social divisions). As I've said many times, Europe is the continent that perfected genocide and ethnic cleansing--and that has exported more man-wrought death than any other continent. We still identify too readily with Europe because Europeans look like (most of) us. But American civilization and European civilization are profoundly different and ever more divergent. When I look at the situation in France, for example, where both the native-born and the immigrants behave insufferably, my reaction is, "A plague on both their houses."

The Islamists are, in fact, correct that Europe is culturally degenerate. I don't mean this in the moral sense-people are people, with the same urges everywhere, and all puritanical societies are hypocritical societies; rather I find Europe spiritually and ethically degenerate-but that leads us back to the potential for a new "Great Awakening."

V&V: This is, of course, all speculation, but if such a crackdown took place, what might it look like? How violent could it get? Perhaps most interesting, how might America and the rest of the world react? Could we face a stunning situation where one day America feels compelled to come to the rescue of persecuted Muslims in Western Europe?

Peters: I have no difficulty imagining a scenario in which American naval vessels and U.S. Marines are in European ports to evacuate Muslims expelled from their countries of residence. Compounding the tragedy, Muslim countries would attempt to refuse to repatriate them, precipitating a wave of consequent crises. The Muslims of Europe may end as the 21st century's displaced persons, a mass without a home, confined to holding camps, etc. Of course, there are many other less-dramatic potential scenarios. But one does sense that Europe's Muslims are living on borrowed time. Good Lord, consider how thoroughly the Jewish middle classes had integrated into Europe over the centuries--and virtually every European state happily packed them off to Bergen-Belsen.

V&V: You are a military historian, and a talented and insightful one whose predictions are often right on the mark. So, I will ask this bluntly: Could there eventually be a war in Western Europe between native Europeans and Muslim immigrants? What type of war--wars of jihad in certain countries, continental-wide war?

Peters: I'm a student of history, but would not presume to call myself a historian. I'm interested in how history works, not in compiling footnotes.

There may be abortive, if lurid, Muslim uprisings in Europe--it all depends on how a very complex equation plays out--but if there are, they will fail miserably and swiftly. There will be no Eurabia. Jihad in Europe is doomed. There will be no continent-wide war, although each country would be glad for an excuse to participate in continent-wide repression. When their welfare is sufficiently threatened, Europeans will return to form as heartless killers and ethnic cleansers.

Perhaps Europe will muddle through. Historically, muddling through is humankind's usual response. But the portents are not good--and the demagogues on both sides are at work. Overall, I see the behavior of Muslim radicals in Europe as suicidal. But then, we're dealing with a fanatic fringe whose members regard death as a promotion. They'd be perfectly happy to take innocent Muslims--and there are many innocent Muslims--with them.

V&V: Do you feel that the characterization of 21st century Europe as a kind of eventual "Eurabia" is apt? Could parts of Europe one day be governed by Sharia law?

Peters: There is zero chance of Europe becoming Eurabia or of parts of Europe being governed formally by Sharia law. The whole Eurabia/"the-Muslims-are-taking-over" hysteria is nuts. Even if Swedes will no longer fight for Lutheranism, by God, they'll kill without remorse to keep their saunas. *

"The difference between a welfare state and a totalitarian state is a matter of time." --Ayn Rand

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Angus MacDonald

The cost of college is absurd. One year of college can cost more than $30,000. I graduated from Columbia University in New York City, one of the outstanding universities in the world, with a Ph.D. in philosophy, and paid my way as I took courses.

Some years ago I wrote to a college president and asked why tuition was so high. He did not reply. College costs have increased, it is said, because of increased salaries and equipment. That is nonsense. Salaries have probably adjusted for inflation and colleges do not have large expenses for equipment.

My guess is that the increased cost results from the assumption you cannot get a decent job without a college degree, and young people and their parents believe their future depends on a degree, which is correct; but this means colleges must restrict students to the room available. Restriction is achieved by the increase of tuition. Some will get scholarships, but the bulk of students have to choose between no college and poor prospects or enormous debt on graduation

We must define the nature of our colleges. They are trade schools with a pretense of education. That our colleges are odd is shown in their devotion to football. I upset a mother of a young boy recently when I told her I would give her or her son $25 if they could find one university, outside of the United States, that had a football team. Oxford, as I recall, has had a rowing team for decades but that is as far as they go in the perversion of scholarship.

Before the present emphasis on college young people got a job by going to work and increased their income as they increased their value to their employer. As many of you know, I was born in Australia. Young people could quit school and take job at 14. After grade school, one could go to a high school that was academic or go to a technical school. Some of my friends went to technical school and made good livings. I went to the academic high school and graduated at either fifteen or sixteen, I don't remember which, and worked for the Singer company, which sold cars. I did costing of repairs. Mr. Adams was my boss and took me with him when he got a better job. I still did costing. After a year or so, I left for a job at the Commonwealth Aircraft Corporation. Put in the center of a huge factory, I gave requisitions to workers. In an hour or so, a union representative told me to go slow because I made the work look easy. I transferred to the mailroom. Not long after I was transferred to engine factory costing, then aircraft costing. I was in charge of twenty or thirty women. Looking back I have thought that, if I had stayed, I could have made a decent living for the rest of my life. However, I wanted an education and quit.

I did not come to the United States because I could make more money. Money was the last thing in my mind. At around nineteen I knew I was an intellectual misfit and Australia did not offer much opportunity for intellectual misfits. The United States had a large population that gave opportunity to people of all persuasions. Though leaving my home and family was tragic, coming to this wonderful country is the best thing I ever did.

The practical need in America is to reorganize education so that it is affordable and adequate. Colleges are trade schools. Do away with purely academic studies and put young people in a trade by going straight to graduate school. Our graduate schools are the best in the world and we must not lower standards. I would not be surprised if intelligent young people could make the grade. Also, we could create trade schools outside of the present colleges. When I was a teenager, my father thought I should know something about bookkeeping. He sent me to a man who taught this privately and I learned about double-entry bookkeeping. It wasn't much but it showed the basics I used when I began my own business. Private academies, outside of colleges, could be established for every trade needed: accounting, architecture, carpentry, plumbing. We need entrepreneurs who will seize the opportunity. Young people could learn on the job as they used to do, or we could set up little academies that would help employers. The great need is to avoid $30,000 a year of college education.

We could improve all schools if they were tougher. Sentimentalism lowers standards. We want to help minorities and the disadvantaged. Sorry, but minorities would be helped greatly if we demanded more of them. A large percentage of blacks dream only of being athletic stars. They have to pay as much attention to studies as to basketball and football. Some do and are successful. A huge problem for blacks is lost family life. That was not always so, and they have to get back to a better moral basis. What is true of blacks is true of Hispanics or any minority. Racial problems will disappear with application to what is important. Anything less is an insult. Without discipline, minorities will stay disadvantaged, and should.

There are habits that would increase education. One, we should abolish true-false exams, which are easy on the teacher but an educational disgrace. Everything should be written so students learn to think and write. Two, examinations should be monitored. Many of my examinations took several hours and monitors walked between desks so there was no cheating. It was not as onerous as it sounds, however. I was lazy in high school, not studying until two or three weeks before finals, getting up about 2:00 a.m. to learn a year's work. When my mother asked me how I did, my answer was "I beat so-and-so." "Who beat you?" was her reply. In spite of my failings, I learned discipline, which was important and helped when I decided to be serious. Grading was tough and could be anything from zero to a hundred. If person X got 85 and person Y got 90, both were good but Y was better than X. We grade in fractions of a second the time of a hundred yards run. Why can't we be meticulous in education?

Would general intelligence suffer if we dropped academic studies for trade schools? Shakespeare wrote before universal general education. Only a few want learning for its own sake, but there are many who, from personal need, will read history and decent literature. With almost universal education in academics, at a fearsome cost, we do not have a high level of culture. One only has to listen to politicians to know that. We need a return to simplicity, which can accompany learning, and is earned and of great wisdom. *

"I bet after seeing us, George Washington would sue us for calling him 'father.'" --Will Rogers

The quotes following each article have been gathered by The Federalist Patriot at: http://FederalistPatriot.US/services.asp.