The question is not whether British imperialism was without blemish. It was not. The question is whether there could have been a less bloody path to modernity. Perhaps in theory there could have been. But in practice?

...the fact remains that no organization in history has done more to promote the free movement of goods, capital and labour than the British Empire in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. And no organization has done more to impose Western norms of law, order and governance around the world.

It's usually my assumption that those in charge of publications such as
yours have a general desire for more subscribers. And so I foolishly took it
for granted that you want people to actually buy your magazine and perhaps
read it as well.

I would never know it by looking at your website. Very thoughtfully, you
provide links allowing current subscribers to obtain online access to your
archives as well as links allowing non-subscribers outside of the U.S. to
obtain access.

I live in the United States. I don't subscribe. I'd like to subscribe, but
there is no way to do this through your website.

Both the "Subscribe" and the "Subscriber Services" links have nothing to
offer anyone except current subscribers and non-U.S. residents.

Perhaps I need to move to Europe before I can read your magazine?

Dear Sir:

We apologize for any difficulties you experienced with the website. We welcome constructive suggestions from subscribers and non-subscribers alike, and we are always interested in improving the quality of the site. You were not foolish to assume that we want people to buy and read the magazine; that is the case.

There is in fact a way to subscribe to the magazine through the website. When the homepage loads, the subscription form appears as a pop-up window. Most likely, you have some form of pop-up blocker on your browser. By turning off the blocker, you will be able, after clicking on the "Subscribe" link, to fill out the form and become a subscriber to TNI. Given the proliferation of pop-up blockers on most browser software, we plan to update the website so that in the future, people will be less likely to encounter difficulties of this sort. As such, I think moving to Europe is an unnecessary step for the time-being.

Yours Sincerely,
Tom Rickers

Managing Editor
The National Interest
1615 L Street NW, Suite 1230
Washington, DC 20036
(202) 467 4884 ext.3
fax: (202) 467-0006

Thanks, Tom.

I'll phone my real estate agent in Stockholm and instruct him to disregard
all of my previous messages.

Sincerely,
[Kreliav]

Mr. Fraley,
You can surely make a case that in the last four games of the ALCS, the ex-Rangers didn't play well. But to assert that winning in the post-season is impossible with ex-Rangers playing prominent roles is perhaps the most ludicrous and thoughtless assertion I've ever read in any op-ed column.

What about Kevin Brown in 1997 with Florida? What about Pudge Rodriguez in Florida last year

Mr. Armstrong,
Thanks for the note.
If you want to be literal, Kevin Brown was 0-2 with an 8.08 ERA for Florida in the 1997 World Series. Ivan Rodriguez played well in the Series for the Marlins last year, but he was singular as in ``ex-Ranger.'' I used the plural construction ``ex-Rangers.''
My intent was not to be taken literally. I was trying to use sarcasm to point out how the Rangers' big-ticket off-season acquisitions _ Alex Rodriguez and Kevin Brown _ failed so badly for the Yankees. Guess I did not pull it off.
Gerry Fraley

"The Daily has refused only one column this semester -- a non-political piece that could not be run because of its offensive nature. All other columns, including political submissions, have been published."

Really?

This is news to me since I have submitted no fewer than three columns and had each one of them refused until just today when you finally ran one of my pieces some two weeks after I had originally submitted it.

I personally handed in one of my pieces to [the editor in chief] in GAB the week before the start of the term. The other was handed in to someone who works the front desk (I don't know her name) in your office in GAB. I asked her to give it to the commentary editor. She said she would give it to [the editor in chief] who would redirect it accordingly. I thanked her and left.

I've read your Views page fairly closely since arriving on campus and I won't disagree with the thesis of your editorial today. I think you've been very fair in the way you publish across the ideological spectrum [this is me attempting to be conciliatory]. I don't know why you refused two of my pieces. I really have no idea. I had started to think you weren't going to publish my pieces no matter how good they were or how many I submitted.

But you did refuse them. And certainly, that is your prerogative, but you may not pretend that I didn't submit them or that you didn't refuse them.

I think you owe it to me and to your readers to issue a correction.

Most sincerely,
[Kreliav]

I'm sorry [Kreliav], but I only recall receiving the one
column from you - that we ran today. If you submitted
others, I didn't receive them or I didn't make a note
of it, which I doubt.

[Commentary Editor]

[Commentary Editor],
You misunderstand me. My intention was not to accuse you personally. I've
never handed anything in to you, yourself (aside from the one I e-mailed to
you which you ran today).

But I did deliver two columns to the Daily office which never made it to
print. Perhaps there is an organization problem within the office and my
pieces were simply lost. Perhaps you are simply accustomed to receiving
column submissions through e-mail and hard copy submissions, for one reason
or another, never make it as far as your desk. I don't know.

Again, there's nothing wrong with taking columns only through e-mail, but it
would be nice if you would specify as much. As it is, your column submission
instructions clearly give the idea that hand delivered columns are equally
permissible.

Either way, I have no idea what happened to my columns or why you never saw
them. Maybe you should ask [editor in chief] about it.

But I do know that the statement in your editorial this morning to the
effect that you've printed all but one column is simply not true. I think a
correction would be in good order.

[Kreliav]

There were a number of good justifications for war of course, but none of you have it quite right here. Mr. Claybourn and most of the rest of you has seized onto the easy ones -- the ones provided to the public because they could so easily fit into ten second soundbites and would be acceptable to potential allies whom the President was busy courting.

The real justifications don't fit into soundbites. I'll give you an example.

First, let's consider the big lesson of Pearl Harbor for a moment. At Pearl Harbor, an isolationist nation was suddenly attacked and forced to acknowledge the bitter reality that it no longer had the luxury of keeping its head in the sand. It learned that it had to reach out into the world, to jump back into world affairs and to press its ideals and interests, leaving behind its geopolitical reservations.

There's a quote that illustrates this point. Forgive me for having no idea where I got it or who said it.

"If you don't visit a bad neighborhood, it will visit you."

As in Pearl Harbor, the bad neighborhoods came to visit America on September 11. And though America wasn't quite so isolationist on 9/11, it learned that it's Middle East policies needed an overhaul. Tolerating the authoritarian status quo was no longer an option. It needed to press its values.

Both Pearl Harbor and 9-11 gave America this message: that it could no longer afford to live strictly according to its own vital interests. It had to promote its ideals. It's (it was) time to make the world a better place.

Looking exclusively at Iraq is where most of you seem to be going wrong. This was about much more than just Saddam. It was about Syria. It was about Iran; perhaps most of all, it was about Saudi Arabia.But you have to look at the whole region. Everything major foreign policy action undertaken by the U.S. in the post-9/11 world must be looked at in terms of its implications for the Middle East as a whole.

No longer is there a substantial threat to the Saudi monarchy in Iraq. And so very suddenly, the United States now has the leverage to put significant pressure on the Saudis to reform and liberalize.

Saudi Arabia has been a major problem. The majority of the 9/11 hijackers came from Saudi. But now Saudi and various other Arab states are no longer free to tacitly encourage anti-Western extremism as a means of deflecting internal dissatisfaction from their own governments. The Saudis, the Egyptians, the Pakistanis, the Yemenis are all suddenly becoming our allies in this war. Islamic extremism is suddenly their enemy too.

The Iraq invasion has allowed us to mobilize substantially greater diplomatic pressure on Iran and Syria to crack down on terrorist elements within their borders (such governments tend to be a bit more flexible when one of their neighbors is host to 130,000 U.S. troops).

You won't read about any of this in the papers. Unless there's a major photo-op or a visit by a major head of state, the media thinks nothing has happened. The real action is taking place in embassies and through coded diplomatic messages that typically escape the MSM's radar. There's a lot going on, but most of it is going on behind the scenes. We will read about it in history books in 20 years (or in intelligence reports today if we're lucky enough to have access), but for now, we won't know about most of it.

The point I'm trying to get across is this: it's just not as simple as - "did Saddam have WMD? Yes or no?" And those who see it that way are only looking through the blurry, distorted prism provided by the mainstream media.

But it's all so much more complex than what you read in the papers. I just gave you an abbreviated war justification without even mentioning WMD or Al Qaeda.

And this war is NOT simply a war against Al Qaeda (those of you who think it is should vote for Kerry). This is a war of ideas and it's about changing the way Muslims and Arabs view themselves and the world. Our enemies are not just Al Qaeda in the same way that our enemies in the wake of Pearl Harbor were not just Japanese.

Our enemies in WWII were fascists everywhere and today we have to fight radical Islamists everywhere. September 11 was not an isolated incident carried out by a unique group of terrorists. It reflected a broader trend of terrorist attacks against U.S. interests over the previous two decades which we consistently ignored to our detriment. Each time we ignored it, we looked weak. Our enemies became emboldened. And they constantly plotted more and greater attacks.

To opt for convenient stability over pressing our values in the Middle East, as some of you seem to desire, is to make the same mistake that led us to September 11 -- to continue ignoring that long series of attacks against the United States that culminated in September 11.

And so this absolutely cannot be made into a law enforcement issue. To argue that this is simply about hunting down Al Qaeda or that we should continue to wait until threats become imminent before acting is to learn NOTHING from 9/11.

And so not only was ordering the invasion of Iraq the correct move in my mind, it was an absolute no-brainer. I have a checklist of reasons, each as long and detailed as the one I just gave, for invading Iraq. None of you people seem to understand them because you're all hung up on asking the same yes/no questions being asked by a stale media that understands none of the complexities of foreign policy.

Certainly though, the administration's conduct of the war after the fall of Baghdad is very much a different matter -- a debate for another thread perhaps.

Posted by: Kreliav on October 8, 2004 03:48 PM

The related military campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq -- the operational definition of the "war on terrorism" -- have had this clarifying effect: Muslim governments that for more than a quarter-century ignored or sought to profit from the spread of intolerance toward non-Muslims can no longer pursue those options with impunity. The intolerance they countenanced or actively encouraged has metastasized into an all-consuming ideology of religious hatred that now threatens them as well.

Egypt and Saudi Arabia can no longer callously export their extremists and the Wahhabist-inspired doctrine that animates them. Sudan and Yemen can no longer safely sell protection and material support to al Qaeda and its ilk. When the USS Cole was bombed in 2000, Yemeni authorities, aided by solicitous U.S. diplomats and policymakers, frustrated the original FBI investigation of the attack.

Now Yemen helps in the hunt for al Qaeda. A Yemeni court imposed death sentences on two of the Cole saboteurs last week. That is one measure of the change wrought in the brutal opening phase of the struggle to contain and eradicate the most virulent strains of intolerance. [...]

When kidnappers demanded as ransom that the French government change a law about religious attire in schools that affected the country's large Muslim minority, the leaders of that community quickly rejected that interference with their rights and duties as French citizens. Last week British Muslims went on television to plead for the life of a British hostage. Muslim clerics in Turkey and Egypt have asked for the release of fellow nationals as an Islamic duty.

As small and halting as they may be, such reactions represent progress over the moral and strategic blindness that prevailed in the region on Sept. 10, 2001.

"I've shown the American people I know how to lead."

"...people know where I stand."

"People out there listening know what I believe."

"The best way to defeat them is to never waver..."

"First of all, what my opponent wants you to forget is that he voted to authorize the use of force and now says it's the wrong war at the wrong time at the wrong place. I don't see how you can lead this country to succeed in Iraq if you say wrong war, wrong time, wrong place. What message does that send our troops? What message does that send to our allies? What message does that send the Iraqis? No, the way to win this is to be steadfast and resolved and to follow through on the plan that I've just outlined."

"My opponent says help is on the way, but what kind of message does it say to our troops in harm's way, 'wrong war, wrong place, wrong time'? Not a message a commander in chief gives, or this is a 'great diversion.'"

"They're not going to follow somebody who says this is the wrong war at the wrong place at the wrong time. They're not going to follow somebody whose core convictions keep changing because of politics in America."

"I think what is misleading is to say you can lead and succeed in Iraq if you keep changing your positions on this war. And he has. As the politics change, his positions change. And that's not how a commander in chief acts."

"The only consistent about my opponent's position is that he's been inconsistent. He changes positions. And you cannot change positions in this war on terror if you expect to win."

"I understand what it means to the commander in chief. And if I were to ever say, 'This is the wrong war at the wrong time at the wrong place,' the troops would wonder, how can I follow this guy? You cannot lead the war on terror if you keep changing positions on the war on terror and say things like, 'Well, this is just a grand diversion.' It's not a grand diversion. This is an essential that we get it right."

"My concerns about the senator is that, in the course of this campaign, I've been listening very carefully to what he says, and he changes positions on the war in Iraq. He changes positions on something as fundamental as what you believe in your core, in your heart of hearts, is right in Iraq. You cannot lead if you send mixed messages. Mixed messages send the wrong signals to our troops. Mixed messages send the wrong signals to our allies. Mixed messages send the wrong signals to the Iraqi citizens."

"...what I won't do is change my core values because of politics or because of pressure."

"If America shows uncertainty or weakness in this decade, the world will drift toward tragedy. That's not going to happen, so long as I'm your president."