The American Spectator

The agreement was violated by the son of Arkansas who has lied his way through life thus far and so his failure to stick to agreements should come as no surprise. William Jefferson Clinton sent our finest soldiers to a backwater African nation, drowning in internecine tribal warfare, to slow down the pace of Africans murdering Africans. As this is as much a way of life in Africa as is speaking, we had little hope of accomplishing anything meaningful. In fact Mr. Clinton did accomplish a great deal. He showed the world that dead American soldiers could be dragged naked through the blood soaked streets of a loathsome African city by a murderous people with impunity.

On September 11, a very liberal democrat friend of mine, just momentarily reconnected with reality, and angrily said: “We ought to nuke those stone-age, barbarian Arabs.”

Let us now restate the “agreement” clearly enough that politicians can understand it. “America will not expend the lives of its children unless, in the war to be prosecuted, we are willing, if necessary to win, to use nuclear weapons.” That will provide democrats with every opportunity to surrender our freedoms they require and the Republicans with a useful tool in international relations…

p>Walk softly and carry a big stick, yes? br> — Jay W. Molyneaux br> Wellington, Florida /p>

I am in complete agreement with you on being an endgame conservative. However, I bring up once again your curious insistence on calling radical Islam “an ideology not a religion.” I wrote to you a few months ago about this and perhaps I missed it, but I have not seen a fuller explanation.

Whence cometh this distinction between ideology and religion? Islam is a totalitarian religion. It believes in a supreme being, Allah, and believes that Mohammed is the “seal of the prophets”. It has creed, code, and cult as all religions do. It is in addition a religion that has nothing short of world-wide political hegemony as its primary goal, and this goal has been there since its founding. Is your distinction based on a notion that somehow religion, to be religion, has to have no political ambitions? But it is only Christianity that has ever figured that out and it took us a long time (and still hasn’t completely sunk in, as witness Liberation Theology). Paganism always conflates religion and the state, although not all pagan religions had world-wide designs. Just take Ancient Egypt for example. Islam is a strange thing: a pagan monotheism.

p>So I am still not clear on your distinction. br> — Lucy Tucker /p>

Jed Babbin has my vote for Secretary of State. He understands to the reality of the world we live in. The war against Islamic terrorism must be fought to win, not to gain favor in the fickle and envious international community. .