Gnu Whirled Order

CHICAGO -- During the interval between the terrorist
attacks and the United States response, a reporter called
to ask me if the events of Sept. 11 meant the end of
postmodernist relativism. It seemed bizarre that events so
serious would be linked causally with a rarefied form of
academic talk. But in the days that followed, a growing
number of commentators played serious variations on the
same theme: that the ideas foisted upon us by postmodern
intellectuals have weakened the country's resolve. The
problem, according to the critics, is that since
postmodernists deny the possibility of describing matters
of fact objectively, they leave us with no firm basis for
either condemning the terrorist attacks or fighting back.

Not so. Postmodernism maintains only that there can be no
independent standard for determining which of many rival
interpretations of an event is the true one. The only thing
postmodern thought argues against is the hope of justifying
our response to the attacks in universal terms that would
be persuasive to everyone, including our enemies. Invoking
the abstract notions of justice and truth to support our
cause wouldn't be effective anyway because our adversaries
lay claim to the same language. (No one declares himself to
be an apostle of injustice.)

Instead, we can and should invoke the particular lived
values that unite us and inform the institutions we cherish
and wish to defend.

At times like these, the nation rightly falls back on the
record of aspiration and accomplishment that makes up our
collective understanding of what we live for. That
understanding is sufficient, and far from undermining its
sufficiency, postmodern thought tells us that we have
grounds enough for action and justified condemnation in the
democratic ideals we embrace, without grasping for the
empty rhetoric of universal absolutes to which all
subscribe but which all define differently.

But of course it's not really postmodernism that people are
bothered by. It's the idea that our adversaries have
emerged not from some primordial darkness, but from a
history that has equipped them with reasons and motives and
even with a perverted version of some virtues. Bill Maher,
Dinesh D'Souza and Susan Sontag have gotten into trouble by
pointing out that "cowardly" is not the word to describe
men who sacrifice themselves for a cause they believe in.

Ms. Sontag grants them courage, which she is careful to say
is a "morally neutral" term, a quality someone can display
in the performance of a bad act. (Milton's Satan is the
best literary example.) You don't condone that act because
you describe it accurately. In fact, you put yourself in a
better position to respond to it by taking its true
measure. Making the enemy smaller than he is blinds us to
the danger he presents and gives him the advantage that
comes along with having been underestimated.

That is why what Edward Said has called "false universals"
should be rejected: they stand in the way of useful
thinking. How many times have we heard these new mantras:
"We have seen the face of evil"; "these are irrational
madmen"; "we are at war against international terrorism."
Each is at once inaccurate and unhelpful. We have not seen
the face of evil; we have seen the face of an enemy who
comes at us with a full roster of grievances, goals and
strategies. If we reduce that enemy to "evil," we conjure
up a shape- shifting demon, a wild-card moral anarchist
beyond our comprehension and therefore beyond the reach of
any counterstrategies.

The same reduction occurs when we imagine the enemy as
"irrational." Irrational actors are by definition without
rhyme or reason, and there's no point in reasoning about
them on the way to fighting them. The better course is to
think of these men as bearers of a rationality we reject
because its goal is our destruction. If we take the trouble
to understand that rationality, we might have a better
chance of figuring out what its adherents will do next and
preventing it.

And "international terrorism" does not adequately describe
what we are up against. Terrorism is the name of a style of
warfare in service of a cause. It is the cause, and the
passions informing it, that confront us. Focusing on
something called international terrorism - detached from
any specific purposeful agenda - only confuses matters.
This should have been evident when President Vladimir Putin
of Russia insisted that any war against international
terrorism must have as one of its objectives victory
against the rebels in Chechnya.

When Reuters decided to be careful about using the word
"terrorism" because, according to its news director, one
man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter, Martin
Kaplan, associate dean of the Annenberg School for
Communication at the University of Southern California,
castigated what he saw as one more instance of cultural
relativism. But Reuters is simply recognizing how unhelpful
the word is, because it prevents us from making
distinctions that would allow us to get a better picture of
where we are and what we might do. If you think of yourself
as the target of terrorism with a capital T, your opponent
is everywhere and nowhere. But if you think of yourself as
the target of a terrorist who comes from somewhere, even if
he operates internationally, you can at least try to
anticipate his future assaults.

Is this the end of relativism? If by relativism one means a
cast of mind that renders you unable to prefer your own
convictions to those of your adversary, then relativism
could hardly end because it never began. Our convictions
are by definition preferred; that's what makes them our
convictions. Relativizing them is neither an option nor a
danger.

But if by relativism one means the practice of putting
yourself in your adversary's shoes, not in order to wear
them as your own but in order to have some understanding
(far short of approval) of why someone else might want to
wear them, then relativism will not and should not end,
because it is simply another name for serious thought.
Stanley Fish, dean of the college of liberal arts and
sciences at the University of Illinois at Chicago, is the
author, most recently, of "How Milton Works."

http://www.nytimes.com/2001/10/15/opinion/15FISH.html?ex=1004355597&ei=1&en=5dce29df999684c5

And this I stole from HERE

"An example:

Suppose that you want a cup of coffee from the vending machine at work.
First, there is the cup of coffee itself:
that involves the workers on the coffee plantation,
the ones on the sugar plantation and in the refineries,
the ones in the paper mill,
and so on.
Then you have the workers who made the different parts of the vending machine and the ones who assembled it.
Then the ones who extracted the iron ore and bauxite,
smelted the steel,
and work for the electric utility which supplies power to the machine.
Then all the workers who transported the coffee, cups, and machine.
Then the clerks, typists, and communication workers who coordinated the production and transportation.
Finally, you have all the workers who produced all the other things necessary for the other ones to survive.
That gives you a direct material relationship to several million people, in fact, to the immense majority of the world's population.
They produce your life, and you help to produce theirs.
In this light, all artificial group identities and special group interests fade into insignificance.
Imagine the potential enrichment of your life that at present is locked up in the frustrated creativity of these millions of workers,
held back by obsolete and exhausting methods of production,
strangled by lack of control over their own productivity,
warped by the insane rationale of capital-accumulation
which pits one against all and makes life a mad scramble for economic survival.
Here we begin to discover a real social identity
--in people all over the world who are fighting to win control over their own lives we find ourselves."

excerpted from "The Revolutionary Pleasure of Thinking for Yourself."

annon

The bright 10-year-old was the first to arrive for lessons - and she paid with her life.

Little Reham was shot through the head as she tried to take cover in her classroom after a gunman from an Israeli tank opened fire on her school.

At the funeral of Reham yesterday, distraught father Nabil and mother Hadeah were accompanied by hooded gunmen as they buried their daughter.

Surrounded by relatives in the garden of the family home he said: "Reham went to school with all the other girls like any other day. Then
the Israeli tanks came and my sister is dead. Soon there will be an answer for this."

Reham became the first victim as Israel's hardline Prime Minister Ariel Sharon ordered troops to strike back for the assassination of cabinet minister Rehavam Zeevi in Jerusalem.

And three other Palestinians, including a man on Israel's most-wanted list, were killed yesterday in a car explosion near Bethlehem.

Atef Abayat, a member of Palestinian President Yasser Arafat's Fatah faction was wanted by Israel for the shooting of a settler last month.

The Israeli army declined to comment on the blast. The bodies of Abayat, his relative Issa Abayat and Jamal Abdullah were recovered from the car.

Just hours after the carnage Reham's head teacher Wafa Hamdan, 39, was mopping up the blood from the playground.

The school is just 100 yards from a Palestinian army checkpoint. They exchanged fire with Israeli troops after their tanks rolled into Palestinian Authority controlled territory.

"How can this happen? How can they shoot children?" she asked. "Reham was a happy girl. She was the first to arrive in the morning. Reham came to the classroom looking for safety.

"But in the doorway she was hit in the head by a bullet which came through the window. I could see her lying on the floor.

"I could not reach her. Another girl had been hit in the eye and the head with shrapnel.

One of Reham's schoolfriends Samah Jamal Awad, 12, yesterday underwent emergency surgery for shrapnel in her eye.

Yesterday the Israeli military said it was investigating Reham's death and said it entered Jenin because of its "wide infrastructure of terrorists".

But it also demanded that the Palestinian Authority hand over the killers of tourism Minister Rehavam Zeevi, whose killing was claimed by The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.

The Palestinian Authority claims Israelis have assassinated more than 67 Palestinians since last year. Israel says the individuals targeted had planned or carried out attacks against Israelis.

I was in comp sci classes about the time of the first Pentiums. I had a "screamin'" 486-66, but that was back when they only wrote code for stuff people needed to do.

At that time I was looking for the answer to these comparison questions. I was told that the human brain had about 4 times the density of circuitry of a microchip. SO you'd need a Pentium chip four times the size of your brain to have the same amount of circuitry. Trouble is, unless all that density was fairly spread out, it would burn itself up. Keeping chips cool is a big deal, and anything newer than a 486 MUST have a whole separate little fan just to cool the cpu chip.

Incidentally, it used to be fashionable to refer to the brain as a "binary computer" because it had been observed that each neuron either fired or it didn't, and this reminded researchers of the way a computer works. But while a computer has only "on" or "off" as choices for each bit location, a brain neuron either does or does not fire some 18 different chemical transmitters. So there's "off," and about 18 kinds of "on." So the brain has 4 times the density of wiring, raised to the power of 18 in terms of what it can actually do, compared to a Pentium chip, AND it stores all of our memories, in ways researchers are flat not sure of.

----- Original Message -----
From: xxxxxxx
To: [email protected]
Sent: Friday, October 19, 2001 9:34 AM
Subject: Re: [LP] misc...

Fuzzy logic is one way they are trying to get closer to human style reasoning. There are also Neural Networks which I haven't read enough about to know what they are good for other than evidently an ability to "learn" things.

One of the intriguing things about the human brain is how little of it we use. They say the difference between a dunce and a genius is only 1 or 2% points in the total amount of brain they put to use...

..and I'm told that the large brain developed in our ancestors way before the advanced larnyx. So we had the brain for language before we had the equipment to talk with. How? Why? The author of _The Clan of the Cave Bear_ takes the view that some of our big-brained, non-talking ancestors were in some sort of constant psychic communication with one another, and/or had psychic access to ancestral memory. Fun ideas, but hard to sell to scientists. One theory that seemed to carry some weight with my anthro instructor was that hominids were day-time hunters and evolved a brain with great redundancy so they could run all day in the heat chasing dinner, and this also explains the upright posture, for speed and heat-dispersal. (there's that heat dispersal again...) So, in other words, some scientists guess we have all that extra brain so we can afford to burn some of it away pursuing our bliss. Sounds good to me!

Seems to me that a computer is a bad metaphor for a human brain, but maybe the whole internet/whirl-wide communications net _is_ a good metaphor for a brain. Each of our machines is like a single neuron, connected hither and yon in a way that seems neither planned nor random. Each of our machines takes in some info from some sources, and sends out related but different info to a different but non-random group of recipients, like other neurons, who will either "pulse" out info in response, or not. Like the brain, the worldwide communications net has different areas of special function. Military communications, for example, are analogous to reflex reactions, and to fight/flight structures, and to mammalian pack-hierarchy structures. Huge areas of the brain, like the WWW, are given over to low-chakra fantasy. Where the web deals with viruses, bits of info which cripple, in the human world, we have fundamentalist religion: bits of info that if accepted, can shut down all higher brain function and enslave an individual mind to doing nothing other than propagating its virus, in the form of evangelism...

Each of us has a responsibility to maintain our brain as if it were our computer (at least.) The first rule of cybernetics is "garbage in - garbage out." Any time watching television should be considered a time of ingesting garbage: spam, viruses, TSR programs, faulty code, inaccurate information. With some time and effort, though, it's possible to imagine brain-maintenance programs that are analogous to those we have on computers: things like Norton Anti-Virus For Your Head, defragmentation for your memory, a "delete" key for stuff that needs got rid of, whatever. {now, all I need is a spell-check, and an offens-o-meter with an audible, real-time alarm.} Then there is psychic "email," which works better the more you try it. Good inputs into one's cybernetic instrument include real sense observations of the real immediate world right now, other real people you actually know, art, and "programming" for some purpose you, the operator, intend (like magick.) Bad inputs, like television and the rest of the mass-mind-vegetation media that resemble it, tend to use up your RAM and your disk space. Consuming anything else from AOL Time Warner does to your brain what an AOL disk does to your computer... maybe worse.

Both R.A. Wilson and Marshall McLuhan go on at some length about the brain/computer thing, the uses and the limitations of the metaphor. McLuhan predicted in 1964 that computers, television, satellites, and telephones would be wed in a new set of media which would constitute a huge model of the human brain. He also predicted the re-emergence of tribalism, terrorism, the "global village," (his words,) and the collapse of time and space in the new media. The book in which he did all this _Understanding the Media, the Extensions of Man_ 1964 is out of print or was when I went looking for it, 5 or 6 years ago, but it's in some libraries, and I was able to find a used copy, eventually.

Oct 31
http://www.thisislondon.com/dynamic/news/story.html?in_review_id=470295&in_review_text_id=424158
Mistake to declare this a 'war'

Sir Michael Howard, the eminent historian, has delivered a brilliant analysis of the terrorist crisis - and an indictment of its handling - which is likely to prove highly influential in this country and abroad.

'War' on Afghanistan: the bombing continues

Here is his speech in full:

"When in the immediate aftermath of the attack on the World Trade Center the American Secretary of State Colin Powell declared that America was 'at war', he made a very natural but a terrible and irrevocable error. Leaders of the Administration have been trying to put it right ever since.

"What Colin Powell said made sense if one uses the term 'war' in the sense of war against crime or against drug-trafficking: that is, the mobilisation of all available resources against a dangerous anti-social activity; one that can never be entirely eliminated but can be reduced to, and kept at, a level that does not threaten social stability.

"The British in their time have fought many such 'wars'; in Palestine, in Ireland, in Cyprus and in Malaya, to mention only a few. But we never called them 'wars': we called them 'emergencies'. This meant that the police and intelligence services were provided with exceptional powers, and were reinforced where necessary by the armed forces, but all continued to operate within a peacetime framework of civil authority. If force had to be used, it was at a minimal level and so far as possible did not interrupt the normal tenor of civil life. The object was to isolate the terrorists from the rest of the community, and to cut them off from external sources of supply. They were not dignified with the status of belligerents: they were criminals, to be regarded as such by the general public and treated as such by the authorities.

"To 'declare war' on terrorists, or even more illiterately, on 'terrorism' is at once to accord them a status and dignity that they seek and which they do not deserve. It confers on them a kind of legitimacy. Do they qualify as 'belligerents' ? If so, should they not receive the protection of the laws of war? This was something that Irish terrorists always demanded, and was quite properly refused. But their demands helped to muddy the waters, and were given wide credence among their supporters in the United States.

"But to use, or rather to misuse the term 'war' is not simply a matter of legality, or pedantic semantics. It has deeper and more dangerous consequences. To declare that one is 'at war' is immediately to create a war psychosis that may be totally counter-productive for the objective that we seek. It will arouse an immediate expectation, and demand, for spectacular military action against some easily identifiable adversary, preferably a hostile state; action leading to decisive results.

"The use of force is no longer seen as a last resort, to be avoided if humanly possible, but as the first, and the sooner it is used the better. The press demands immediate stories of derring-do, filling their pages with pictures of weapons, ingenious graphics, and contributions from service officers long, and probably deservedly, retired. Any suggestion that the best strategy is not to use military force at all, but more subtle if less heroic means of destroying the adversary are dismissed as 'appeasement' by ministers whose knowledge of history is about on a par with their skill at political management.

"Figures on the Right, seeing themselves cheated of what the Germans used to call a frisch, frohliche Krieg, a short, jolly war in Afghanistan, demand one against a more satisfying adversary, Iraq; which is rather like the drunk who lost his watch in a dark alley but looked for it under a lamp post because there was more light there. As for their counterparts on the Left, the very word 'war' brings them out on the streets to protest as a matter of principle. The qualities needed in a serious campaign against terrorists - secrecy, intelligence, political sagacity, quiet ruthlessness, covert actions that remain covert, above all infinite patience - all these are forgotten or overriden in a media-stoked frenzy for immediate results, and nagging complaints if they do not get them.

"Could it have been avoided ? Certainly, rather than what President Bush so unfortunately termed 'a crusade against evil', that is, a military campaign conducted by an alliance dominated by the United States, many people would have preferred a police operation conducted under the auspices of the United Nations on behalf of the international community as a whole, against an criminal conspiracy; whose members should be hunted down and brought before an international court, where they would receive a fair trial and, if found guilty, awarded an appropriate sentence. In an ideal world that is no doubt what would have happened.

"But we do not live in an ideal world. The destruction of the twin towers and the massacre of several thousand innocent New York office-workers was not seen in the United States as a crime against 'the international community' to be appropriately dealt with by the United Nations; a body for which Americans have little respect when they have heard of it at all. For them it was an outrage against the people of America, one far surpassing in infamy even the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Such an insult to their honor was not to be dealt with by a long and meticulous police investigation conducted by international authorities, culminating in an even longer court case in some foreign capital, with sentences that would then no doubt be suspended to allow for further appeals. It cried for immediate and spectacular vengeance to be inflicted by their own armed forces .

"And who can blame them ? In their position we would have felt exactly the same. The courage and wisdom of President Bush in resisting the call for a strategy of vendetta has been admirable, but the pressure is still there, both within and beyond the Administration. It is a demand that can be satisfied only by military action - if possible rapid and decisive military action. There must be catharsis: the blood of five thousand innocent civilians demands it.

"Again, President Bush deserves enormous credit for his attempt to implement the alternative paradigm. He has abjured unilateral action. He has sought, and received, a United Nations mandate. He has built up an amazingly wide-ranging coalition that truly does embody 'the international community' so far as such an entity exists.

"Within a matter of days, almost, the United States has turned its back on the unilateralism and isolationism towards which it seemed to be steering, and resumed its former position as leader of a world community far more extensive than the so-called 'free world' of the old Cold War. Almost equally important, the President and his colleagues have done their best to explain to the American people that this will be a war unlike any other, and they must adjust their expectations accordingly. But it is still a war. The 'w' word has been used, and now cannot be withdrawn; and its use has brought inevitable and irresistible pressure to use military force as soon, and as decisively as possible.

"Now a struggle against terrorism, as we have discovered over the past century and not least in Northern Ireland, is unlike a war against drugs or a war against crime in one vital respect. It is fundamentally a 'battle for hearts and minds'; and it is worth remembering that that phrase was first coined in the context of the most successful campaign of the kind that the British Armed Forces have ever fought - the Malayan Emergency in the 1950s (a campaign incidentally that it took some fifteen years to bring to an end). Without hearts and minds one cannot obtain intelligence, and without intelligence terrorists can never be defeated.

"There is not much of a constituency for criminals or drug-traffickers, and in a campaign against them the government can be reasonably certain that the mass of the public will be on its side. But as we all know, one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter. Terrorists can be successfully destroyed only if public opinion, both at home and abroad, supports the authorities in regarding them as criminals rather than heroes.

"In the intricate game of skill played between terrorists and the authorities, as we discovered in both Palestine and Ireland, the terrorists have already won an important battle if they can provoke the authorities into using overt armed force against them. They will then be in a win-win situation. Either they will escape to fight another day, or they will be defeated and celebrated as martyrs. In the process of fighting them a lot of innocent civilians will certainly be hurt, which will further erode the moral authority of the government.

"Who here will ever forget Black Sunday in Northern Ireland , when a few salvos of small-arms fire by the British Army gave the IRA a propaganda victory from which the British government was never to recover ? And if so much harm can be done by rifle fire, what is one to say about bombing ? I can only suggest that it is like trying to eradicate cancer cells with a blow-torch. Whatever its military justification, the bombing of Afghanistan, with the inevitable 'collateral damage' it causes, will gradually whittle away the immense moral ascendancy that we enjoyed as a result of the bombing of the World Trade Center.

"I hate having to say this, but in six months time for much of the world that atrocity will be, if not forgotten, then remembered only as history; while every fresh picture on television of a hospital hit , or children crippled by land-mines, or refugees driven from their homes by western military action, will strengthen the hatred of our adversaries, recruit the ranks of the terrorists and sow fresh doubts in the minds of our supporters.

"I have little doubt that the campaign in Afghanistan was undertaken only on the best available political and military advice, in full realization of its military difficulties and political dangers, and in the sincere belief that there was no alternative. It was, as the Americans so nicely put it, an AOS situation: 'All Options Stink'. But in compelling us to undertake it at all, the terrorists had taken the first and all-important trick.

"I can also understand the military reasoning that drives the campaign. It is based on the political assumption that the terrorist network must be destroyed as quickly as possible before it can do any more damage. It further assumes that the network is master-minded by a single evil genius, Osmana bin Laden, whose elimination will demoralise if not destroy his organisation. Bin Laden operates out of a country whose rulers refuse to yield him up to the forces of international justice. Those rulers must be compelled to change their minds. The quickest way to break their will is by aerial bombardment, especially since a physical invasion of their territory presents such huge if not insoluble logistical problems. Given these assumptions, what alternative did we have ?

"But the best reasoning, and the most flawless logic, is of little value if it starts from false assumptions. I have no doubt that voices were raised both in Washington and in Whitehall questioning the need and pointing out the dangers of immediate military action; but if they were, they were at once drowned out by the thunderous political imperative: Something Must be Done. The same voices no doubt also questioned the wisdom, if not the accuracy, of identifying bin Laden as the central and indispensable a figure in the terrorist network; demonising him for some people, but for others giving him the heroic status enjoyed by 'freedom-fighters' throughout the ages.

"We are now in a horrible dilemma. If we 'bring him to justice' and put him on trial we will provide him with a platform for global propaganda. If we assassinate him - perhaps 'shot while trying to escape' - he will be a martyr. If he escapes he will be a Robin Hood. He can't lose. And even if he is eliminated, it is hard to believe that a global network that apparently consisting of people as intelligent and well-educated as they are dedicated and ruthless will not continue to function effectively until they are traced and dug out by patient and long-term operations of police and intelligence forces, whose activities will not, and certainly should not, hit the headlines. Such a process that , as the Chief of the Defence Staff rightly pointed out, may well take decades.

"Now that the operation has begun it must be pressed to a successful conclusion; successful enough for us to be able to disengage with a reasonable amount of honour and for the benefit of the tabloid headlines to claim 'victory' (though the very demand for 'victory' and the sub-Churchillian rhetoric that accompanies it shows how profoundly press and politicians still misunderstand the nature of the problem that confronts us.) Only after we have done that will it be possible to continue with the real struggle that I have described above; one in which there will be no spectacular battles, and no clear victory.

"Sir Michael Boyce's analogy with the Cold War is valuable in another respect. Not only did it go on for a very long time: it had to be kept cold. There was a constant danger that it would be inadvertently toppled into a hot nuclear war, which everyone would catastrophically lose. The danger of nuclear war, at least on a global scale, has now thank God ebbed, if only for the moment, but it has been replaced by another, and one no less alarming; the likelihood of an on-going and continuous confrontation of cultures, that will not only divide the world but shatter the internal cohesion of our increasingly multi-cultural societies. And the longer the overt war continues against 'terrorism', in Afghanistan or anywhere else, the greater is the danger of that happening.

"There is no reason to suppose that Osmana bin Laden enjoys any more sympathy in the Islamic world than , say, Ian Paisley does in that of Christendom. He is a phenomenon which has cropped up several times in our history - a charismatic religious leader fanatically hostile to the West leading a cult that has sometimes gripped an entire nation. There was the Mahdi in the Sudan in the late nineteenth century, and the so-called 'Mad Mullah' in Somaliland in the early twentieth. Admittedly they presented purely local problems, although a substantial proportion of the British Army had to be mobilised to deal with the Mahdi and his followers.

"The difference today is that such leaders can recruit followers from all over the world, and can strike back anywhere in the world They are neither representative of Islam nor approved by Islam, but the roots of their appeal lies in a peculiarly Islamic predicament that has only intensified over the last half of the twentieth century : the challenge to Islamic culture and values posed by the secular and materialistic culture of the West, and their inability to come to terms with it.

"This is a vast subject on which I have few qualifications to speak, but which we must understand if we are to have any hope, not so much of 'winning' the new 'Cold War', but of preventing it from becoming hot.

"In retrospect, it is quite astonishing how little we have understood, or empathised with, the huge crisis that has faced that vast and populous section of the world stretching from the Mahgreb through the Middle East and central Asia into South and South-East Asia and beyond to the Philippines: overpopulated, underdeveloped, being dragged headlong by the West into the post-modern age before they have come to terms with modernity. This is not a problem of poverty as against wealth, and I am afraid that it is symptomatic of our western materialism to suppose that it is. It is the far more profound and intractable confrontation between a theistic, land-based and traditional culture, in places little different from the Europe of the Middle Ages, and the secular material values of the Enlightenment .

"I would like to think that , thanks to our imperial experience, the British understand these problems - or we certainly ought to - better than many others. So, perhaps even more so, do our neighbours the French. But for most Americans it must be said that Islam remains one vast terra incognita - and one, like all such blank areas on medieval maps, inhabited very largely by dragons.

"This is the region where we have to wage the struggle for hearts and minds and win it if the struggle against terrorism is to succeed. The front line in the struggle is not Afghanistan. It is in the Islamic states where modernising governments are threatened by a traditionalist backlash: Turkey, Egypt, Pakistan, to name only the most obvious. And as we know very well, the front line also runs through our own streets. For these people the events of September 11th were terrible, but they happened a long way away and in another world. Those whose sufferings as a result of western air raids or of Israeli incursions are nightly depicted on television are people, however geographically distant, with whom they can easily identify.

"That is why prolongation of the war is likely to be so disastrous. Even more disastrous would be its extension, as American opinion seems increasingly to demand, in a 'Long March' through other 'rogue states' beginning with Iraq, in order to eradicate terrorism for good and all so that the world can live at peace. I can think of no policy more likely, not only to indefinitely prolong the war, but to ensure that we can never win it.

"I understand that this afternoon, perhaps at this very moment, the Prime Minister is making a speech exhorting the British People to keep their nerve. It is no less important that we should keep our heads.