Beneath the surface...

VDH:

...Lebanon is engaged in a deadly war against Palestinian al Qaeda-affiliates, and has resorted to massive and inherently indiscriminate shelling of Palestinian camp hideouts in Beirut—in a manner far more savage than the CNN-BBC monitored Israeli responses. The old dictum remains: Arabs killing Arabs is apparently a different category of reportage, where rules of Western censure don’t apply...

It's always this way. Google "Black September." Arab countries have wreaked far more devastation and death on the Palestinians than Israel ever has. And this gets no criticism from our Western "liberals" and "pacifists" because they do not and never have cared about the Palestinians. For them the only war is the war for the soul of the West.

And the Jews and the Americans are always the enemy, because, both in symbol and in fact, we personify:

• Religious belief.
• Belief in two nations that are embodied ideas.
• Willingness to fight for those beliefs.
• Capitalism empowering ordinary people.
• Rejection of Old World elites.

In the real war, the war for the soul of the West, the good guys (no pussyfooting here) have a big disadvantage and a big advantage.

Our disadvantage is that we are hardly aware that we are at war. Most of us don't see news stories and immediately recognize them as the back-alley knife attacks they often are. Same with votes of the local school board, or tenure struggles at the State U., or the infiltration of ugly "art" into our churches and public spaces.

Our advantage is that the enemy is nihilism. It has nothing positive to offer. And it has to clothe its nakedness in scraps of belief, beliefs that it doesn't really believe in! So it is tangled in lies and contradictions. Especially, it clothes itself in the rags of Liberalism, and then is vulnerable as it flouts liberal ideals.

Which is why the Leftish crowd hates the Iraq Campaign, and in fact hated it before it even started. I suspect one of the most revealing moments of our time was in early 2002 when reporters were peppering the President with angry probing questions on Iraq, before the Administration had even raised the possibility! They knew! The Left has been calling every conservative a "fascist" for the last 70 or 80 years, and they knew that confronting a real fascist would expose them as frauds. Likewise with other liberal issues like humanitarianism, genocide, torture, oppression of minorities, anti-Semitism, and Human Rights. Saddam's Iraq was the real thing, and any real liberal would have to be in solidarity with George W Bush in fighting the monster. Exactly as much as if we were fighting against Hitler.

Perhaps history will place among the many accomplishments of President Bush a clarification. He has clarified that the great struggle is not between liberals and conservatives, but between nihilists and conservatives.