Onward, Christian Missionaries

NEW YORK, MAY 27

The program initiated by sundry evangelical Christian ministers to accost Islam by teaching the tenets of the Christian faith to those who seek to bring that faith to Muslims is very good stuff, overdue. There is, of paramount concern to them, the commanding message felt by these Protestant missionaries. One of them put it this way to a reporter from the New York Times: "If I had the answer for cancer, what sort of a human would I be not to share it?"

That is the theological commandment and it is entirely honorable, especially when it tells of men and women willing to spend their lives, and even to risk them, to pass on the word of the Christian faith.

But it is also very important in tactical perspectives.

Some commentators have opined (frequently, in this space) that the war against the extremist Muslims must be fought not only by Marines in Iraq, but also by proselytes. The first approach is and will continue to be the effort to mobilize Koranic teachings that would seem to deplore exercises in the extremism we are now combating.

A special difficulty is that the "moderate" Muslim voice arouses the antagonism of the militant, which antagonism seeks satisfaction, from time to time, in mayhem. The wrath of the militants is feared not only by non-militant exegetes of the Koran; entire governments are intimidated. It is not safely assumed that leaders in Egypt and Syria, let alone Iran, could survive a genuine effort to isolate and discredit those of their own countrymen who are calling for death to infidels and who cheer at any bulletin telling of the success of a suicide bomber.

The Christian evangelical approach meets the problem head-on. One evangelist, from Beirut, advocates assembling passages from the Koran that establish that Islam is "regressive, fraudulent, and violent," to quote the Times report by Laurie Goodstein. "Here in the Koran it says slay them, slay the infidels. In the Bible there are no words from Jesus saying we should kill innocent people." Some evangelical leaders have been direct in branding the Islamic faith as badly disoriented. As ever, Franklin Graham, Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, and Jerry Vines are widely quoted, Mr. Graham having said that Islam is "a very evil and wicked religion." We learn that a dozen books are circulating, written by Christians or disillusioned Muslims who urge confrontational exchanges with Islam.

Wherefore, the Christian face of the ongoing struggle simply has to show itself, and its strengths are great. The doctrine of human love and responsibility for others should not be thought of as intrinsically offensive to a Muslim, and sincerity in preaching the doctrines of Christ has naturally to follow from advocacy of the lessons of the New Testament. Our diplomats and our generals have prescribed roles to play, but ahead of diplomacy and military action are our philosophers, even as the preachments of Locke et al. preceded the thought that galvanized our Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights.

Diplomacy is fine and is necessary but it sometimes demands politically correct professions of equality of faith, at the expense of right reason. Ronald Reagan saw through to this problem when he said that the Soviet Union was an evil empire and that Communism would end up on the ash heap of history. Something like that needs to be said about Muslims, to the extent that they are identifiable as agents of terrorism.

Who Wrote This?

NEW YORK, MAY 30

There is a swirl of controversy having to do with writing, with credit for writing, and with disclosure about who writes what and under what circumstances.

One critic on television deems it outrageous that Hillary Clinton has been paid $8 million to write a book which she did not in fact write. It appears to be everywhere accepted that she didn't, one day, sit down and start reading the 5 million pages of news clips, election returns, campaign speeches, editorials, columns, journals, trip itineraries, and personal letters that somebody or some team has at least had to skim in order to put together the life of Hillary that people hope to read. A defensive book editor who commented on the controversy on the Jim Lehrer program said that in weighing the question of book writing, a lot of people never get around to asking the question: Is everybody capable of writing a book? The answer is clearly no, no more than of removing an appendix. What everybody does believe is that he/she, exceptions, can write a book, an illusion that any editor at a publishing house will attest, groaning after returning the one- millionth unsolicited manuscript.

What the critics are saying, really, is that for $8 million you ought to put in a lot of pain. Well, Hillary has certainly done that. For one thing, she had to read the book. She is a very clear and learned lady and is very discriminating, save possibly when at the wedding altar. She is trained to write legal briefs and by all accounts does them well. And in the manuscript assembled for her, she had to run her eyes over four or five times as much material as has finally been collated to form the book that will appear in the stores. And of course it is entirely conceivable that here and there she wished to add a paragraph or two in her own hand. And absolutely predictable that here and there she applied a blue pencil to scratch out in her own hand a paragraph or two she does not wish to see published.

Pride is not forfeit when public figures get others to do the crafting and the writing of a book. At the journalist level a cognate question arose when the Pulitzer prize-winning reporter Rick Bragg left the New York Times after a flurry having to do with whose names appeared on an article he filed. Bragg takes more or less the position that the freelancer or stringer does not reasonably expect to have his name appear on a story written by a reporter. The case was moderately complicated in this situation because the stringer supplied color which the readers interpreted as having reflected the reaction of the man whose story they were reading. If you write, "On hearing this the witness paled and her eyes looked pleadingly at her attorney," you are going to think that the reporter's own eye transcribed the witness's face.

We haven't seen Mrs. Clinton's book. One way to dilute attention to others in an acknowledgments page is multiplicity. Mention everybody in the world, from the local librarian to the website provider, to the teacher in eighth grade who tuned you in to literature, to -- the person or persons who actually wrote the book. People who are sore at Mrs. Clinton have plenty of things to hold against her, but not who wrote her book. And Rick Bragg can't seriously be judged morally guilty for failure to cite the work, however fine it was, of the 23-year-old researcher who supplied the story's color.

Who Screwed Up?

NEW YORK, JUNE 3

The Bush administration has a grave problem in the matter of the Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD). We are entitled to ask: Where is all that stuff? Manifestly embarrassed by having been unable to answer that question, U.S. officials are saying that it is somewhere. Not yet discovered, except for those two trailers which have no apparent raison d'etre except to make biological and chemical weapons. We have a ritzy Iraq Survey Group set up, a force of 1,200 inspectors and 800 support personnel with a major general of the Defense Intelligence Agency in charge. Its predecessor task force uncovered a cache of vacuums, a buried swimming pool, powder from a high-school student's chemistry experiment, and a number of suspect sites that had been looted, as noted by Time magazine's embedded reporter Jim Lacey in the pages of National Review.

It's reasonable to ask, Why on earth, if indeed he had destroyed the weapons, didn't Saddam Hussein come forward with probative evidence that he had done so? But answering that question is not as difficult as answering the question, Why did Saddam Hussein defy the United States when it was as plain as the posters of his ugly face in every corner of Iraq that his failure to do so would result in the conquest of Iraq and his removal or death?

But even if we acknowledge that as a quandary, we don't satisfy critical concern over what was said by administration spokesmen which induced us to go to war.

How did we detect these weapons? Obviously not by Peeping Tom satellites, because they would have told us exactly where the weapons lay. Two inferences are here made, the first that the suspected weaponry was therefore mobile, and the second, that our knowledge of it came through intelligence sources.

What reason did we have to rely on these sources?

It had to have been compelling.