Have Americans lost the will to win wars? Not just in Iraq, but anywhere? Do we really believe that being nice is more important than victory?

It's hard enough to bear the timidity of our civilian leaders - anxious to start wars but without the guts to finish them - but now our military leaders have fallen prey to political correctness.  Unwilling to accept that war is, by its nature, a savage act and that defeat is immoral, influential officers are arguing for a kinder, gentler approach to our enemies.

They're going to lead us into failure, sacrificing our soldiers and Marines for nothing: Political correctness kills.  It's all in the Army's new counterinsurgency doctrine laid out in Field Manual 3-24.  The doctrine is so dishonest and cowardly that it's message is: Let our troops die, just don't hurt anyone's feelings. 

The BBC reported on October 10 that in the Indian state of Jharkhand, villagers fled their homes to escape a rampaging herd of grief-stricken elephants. "They say the animals are agitated because one of their herd disappeared. Officials say the missing animal became disoriented, and fell into a ditch and drowned over the weekend."

There was no mention in the BBC report whether or not the village jackasses were braying with delight at the sight of the distressed elephants.

Of course the Indian people are always disturbed when their elephants run amuck, because, since time immemorial they have relied on the strong, intelligent and friendly elephants to do their heavy lifting for them. The donkeys simply do not have the mental or physical capacity to substitute for the prized elephants.

Meanwhile in Washington...

The more I travel, study history and read the papers, the more convinced I become of the superiority of rationalism. With that attitude, I should spend all my time traveling to northern Europe and Japan.

However, fate has also seen fit to send me to many places where people think with their viscera and gonads instead of their brains. The more I see it in action, the more convinced I become that societies that place personal "honor" before everything else are truly cursed.

Nothing better illustrates this "honor" mentality better than the fury directed by Islamic militants against Danish and Norwegian cartoons of Mohammed, or most recently the Regensburg speech of Pope Benedict XVI.

Sacrilegious art in other cultures can offend and get people angry but the lunatic response of radical Islamists is in a class by itself. It's the shrieking, out of control petulance of a three-year old throwing a tantrum.

People infected with this attitude will be utterly incapable of recognizing wrongdoing by their own society, utterly incapable of taking criticism or recognizing the need for correction.

This is remarkably close to the image of Hell painted by C. S. Lewis in his books Perelandra and The Screwtape Letters: a paralyzing self-absorption that imprisons the individual in hate and impotent rage while simultaneously blinding him to any possibility of escape.

The recent brouhaha surrounding Pope Benedict XVI comments on Islam delivered in Germany should give Moslems a pause.  What the Pope said allows me, as a Moslem, to ponder self-examination and not rush into a reaction of condemnation.

Islam, throughout its history, delivered its share of great minds to humanity during times of peace and prosperity. Scientists like Mohammad al-Khawarizmi who invented algebra and Avicenna who contributed greatly to medicine lived in an era of "political prestige, financial power, and intellectual pursuit with Baghdad as the epicenter" as Saadia Iqbal described it in a recent National Geographic article.

We Moslems, in another era, built our own great and peaceful civilization that ushered the prosperity wished upon any people of any race in any religion.  But Islam of today differs from the Islam of yesterday. Instead of a thriving era of the Abbasids, we are experiencing a terrorist era of Wahhabism.

The radicalism of Wahhabi Islam demands a concerted effort by moderate Moslems and Moslem nations alike if ever Islam is to survive to usher another era of peace and prosperity.

There is a historically fairly predictable pattern to the unfolding strategies and views of great wars. They often start with a morally ambiguous view of the enemy, a more limited conception of the war's magnitude and a restrained application of violent tactics.

Eventually, moral clarity is obtained, war objectives expand - often to grandiosity, and tactics become ferocious.

Today, the West's struggle to resist radical Islamic aggression (both cultural and terroristic) is still in that early phase of moral confusion and limited tactics.

Thus we continue to debate the ethical merits of minor intrusions into American civil liberties (such as NSA surveillance of some phone calls from foreign suspects), and even men such as Sen. John McCain and Gen. Colin Powell challenge the need to permit psychologically rough - but nonviolent - interrogation of captured terrorists.

But there are some signs that the early stage of moral confusion is beginning to give way to greater clarity.

Syrians Foil US Embassy Bombing blared the BBC headline regarding the terrorist attack on the American Embassy in Damascus, Syria on September 12.  US Lauds Syrian Forces in US Embassy Attack was the CNN headline the next day.  Then came the clincher when the Associated Press ran a story headlined Isolated Syria Hopes Attack on US Embassy Will Warm Relations with US.

Syria playing Uncle Sam for a sucker yet again.  For the "attack," you see, was staged.  It was planned by Assef Shawkat, head of Syrian Military Intelligence, whose agents provocateurs provoked a few hothead fools, provided them with weapons, and organized the attack for them - so Shawkat's "Syrian Forces" could be there as heroes to kill the bad guys and save the American diplomats.

It's an old Damascus game...

At my university I was sitting at one interminably long meeting where sadly much time is wasted and little gets done. But during one of the discussions the person who was the leader made the point that there are faculty members of two different political persuasions, conservative and progressive. He was trying to be simply descriptive.

Ah, yes, "progressive," that into which liberals have been transformed.

Yet the designation fails to fit folks on the Left altogether.  Because instead of moving forward, getting away from past practices, of making progress, those on the Left are actually regressive, even reactionary, in their politics. I give you one major example.