'1. An exaggerated sense of self-importance (e.g., exaggerates achievements and talents, expects to be recognized as superior without commensurate achievements).'

' 2. Preoccupation with fantasies of unlimited success, power, brilliance, beauty, or ideal love. '

' All men dream: but not equally, Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that it was vanity: but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dream with open eyes, to make it possible. This I did. I meant to make a new nation, to restore a lost influence, to give twenty millions of Semites the foundations on which to build an inspired dream-palace of their national thoughts. So high an aim called out the inherent nobility of their minds, and made them play a generous part in events: but when we won, it was charged against me that the British petrol royalties in Mesopotamia were become dubious, and French Colonial policy ruined in the Levant. '

3. Believes he is"special" and can only be understood by, or should associate with, other special or high-status people (or institutions) 4. Requires excessive admiration 5. Has a sense of entitlement.

' 6. Selfishly takes advantage of others to achieve his own ends. 7. Lacks empathy'

8. Is often envious of others or believes that others are envious of him 9. Shows arrogant, haughty, patronizing, or contemptuous behaviors or attitudes. '

Since the Iraq war began, public discussion has been thick with Vietnam analogies. Revelations of the war's bogus casus belli recalled the Gulf of Tonkin, and the horrors at Abu Ghraib and Haditha and brought to mind the My Lai massacre. Now, with Ned Lamont having upset Sen. Joe Lieberman in Connecticut's Democratic primary, a new parallel is being drawn: between anti-war sentiment then and now. Lamont's win heralds a period like the years 1968 to 1972, when the anti-Vietnam War movement began running candidates for office.

Many liberals today—rightly disturbed by the shrillness of some of Lamont's supporters and the high profile he's given to demagogues like Al Sharpton—fear the Democratic Party could reprise its blunder of 1972. That year it nominated the ultra-dovish South Dakota Sen. George McGovern for president, commencing an era of crippling neo-isolationism and compounding the party's already-debilitating image as indulgent toward extremists on the left.

One failed candidate, however, shouldn't be allowed to stand in for the whole anti-Vietnam War alliance. Even in 1972, McGovern hardly represented the mainstream of anti-war opinion. In fact, when President Nixon crushed him at the polls, a public desire to continue prosecuting the Vietnam War was assuredly not the reason. Most Americans had soured on the war by that point, and Nixon was promising peace as fervently as McGovern. Throughout the fall, polls showed that voters, by a margin of 3-to-2, thought that Nixon, if elected, would end U.S. involvement in Vietnam more rapidly than McGovern.

Voters, in short, didn't reject McGovern for opposing the war. What doomed him was the manner in which he spoke of withdrawal. He wanted to cease all bombing at once and pull troops out within 90 days of taking office. He relentlessly criticized America's (admittedly corrupt) South Vietnam allies. He talked of begging for the release of POWs. His language suggested a retreat from the world stage. "Come Home, America" was his slogan.

But the anti-war spectrum ranged much further than the McGovernite fringe. It contained, of course, its share of radical leftists—"the campus firebrands, the radical clerics, the flowers-in-gun-barrels hippies, the papier-mâché puppeteers" as Hendrik Hertzberg describes them, whose street fights with police, burning of draft cards, and general contempt for social norms drove many Americans into Nixon's arms. Yet it encompassed other groups, too. A large number of conservatives, disillusioned with the lack of progress in the field, wanted to bomb Vietnam back to the Stone Age or get out. Many otherwise-apolitical dissenters simply didn't want to be drafted.

Then there were the liberals. Early on, mainstream anti-communist liberals such as John Kenneth Galbraith, Hans Morgenthau, Walter Lippmann, and Montana Sen. Mike Mansfield counseled against intervention in Vietnam. Plenty of rank-and-file liberal citizens agreed with them. But in the early years, as Charles DeBenedetti wrote in An American Ordeal: The Antiwar Movement of the Vietnam Era, "they were too scattered and undemonstrative to rank as a movement." Loyal to the Democratic Party, moreover, many declined to attack their own leaders publicly or vociferously. Liberals thus generally ceded the anti-war stage—and the cameras—to the flamboyant New Left.

As the war widened and deepened, however, liberals' criticisms grew louder. Many channeled their energies into electoral politics rather than the street theater of the New Left. The most talented liberal leaders harnessed the energies of the young and the angry without succumbing to demagogic gestures or anti-imperialist cant. The classic example of this liberal dissent was Allard Lowenstein, the energetic mastermind of the "Dump Johnson" campaign of 1967 and 1968. Rooted in Cold War liberalism, holding no truck with communism, he was more interested in reaching out to the center than spurning it.

Although he considered the war both an error and a lost cause, Lowenstein disdained an immediate pullout in favor of winding down the conflict through phased withdrawals, talks with the North Vietnamese, and a coalition government for the South. He worked to build an inclusive left—with only violent extremists omitted—that would unite Adlai Stevenson torchbearers with Students for a Democratic Society-types disenchanted with the New Left's zealotry. Lowenstein's liberals, Todd Gitlin has written, "flashed the anti-war V long past the time, in 1968 and 1969, when their New Left counterparts had switched to the clenched fist."

Lowenstein asked New York Sen. Robert Kennedy to challenge President Johnson in the Democratic primaries in 1968. But Kennedy declined, and Lowenstein instead recruited Minnesota Sen. Eugene McCarthy, who at first inspired droves of students and twentysomethings to join his campaign but later turned out to be a petulant, narcissistic, and self-destructive candidate. Yet McCarthy had shown Johnson to be vulnerable, and Kennedy jumped in the race. Though opportunistic, Kennedy's candidacy embodied a more winning anti-war philosophy than McCarthy's. Far from renouncing American influence abroad (as McCarthy was inclined to do), RFK reaffirmed "our right to moral leadership of this planet." His assassination that June dashed hopes for a leader who might have ended the war without jettisoning liberal internationalism tout court.

Yet over the next few years, anti-war sentiment continued to take over the mainstream. Senators and representatives routinely adopted positions once seen as radical. Today, this shift has come to be viewed as a radicalization of the Democratic Party; at the time, it was seen as the normalization of dissent. The three top Democratic candidates running in 1972 denounced the war. Edmund Muskie of Maine pledged "as close to an immediate withdrawal from Vietnam as possible." Hubert Humphrey insisted, "Had I been elected [in 1968], we would now be out of that war." It's not likely that either man, if nominated, would have run a "come home" America campaign like McGovern's. There were many anti-war stances to choose from.

But if Democratic voters erred in selecting McGovern, other doves who entered politics in these years went onto distinguished careers. Lowenstein himself served a term in Congress from 1969 to 1971. The Rev. Robert Drinan of Massachusetts, elected in 1970, and California's Pete Stark and Colorado's Pat Schroeder, elected in 1972, became leading liberal voices. McGovern's campaign manager, Gary Hart, elected to the Senate in 1974, helped fashion the neoliberal vision of a leaner, more efficient government and military that would be an ingredient in liberalism's revival under Bill Clinton.

Philosophically and politically, the Democrats' post-Vietnam retreat from internationalism was a mistake. Sometimes, however, their wariness about adventurism served them well, as when they argued against U.S. military intervention in Central America in the 1980s. More to the point, the baleful effects of their isolationist tendencies should not impugn the soundness of their opposition to the Vietnam War in general—a stand, after all, that was being vindicated across the political spectrum as early as 1972.

Similarly, there exist today many strains of anti-war opinion. Only a minority of critics of the war would endorse then left-wing maximalism now gaining so much attention in the news media. Indeed, a broad consensus now thinks the Iraq war was a mistake—even if no one can agree on what to do about it. The ground has shifted, and the times favor candidates who make a priority of bringing peace. At a similar point in the Vietnam War, no less a politician than Richard Nixon had figured that out.

This piece first ran in Slate and is reprinted with permission of the author. Click here to see a list of his other History Lesson columns in Slate.

As staff at some of the world's most prestigious press organizations effectively take Hezbollah's side in its war with Israel, they inadvertently expose a profound transformation in the logic of warfare.

Some examples of their actions:

• Reuters: Adnan Hajj, a freelance photographer with more than a decade of experience at Reuters, doctored his pictures to make Israeli attacks on Lebanon look more destructive and Lebanese more vulnerable. His embellishments created thicker and darker plumes of smoke from bombing raids and posed the same woman bewailing the loss of her bombed-out residence in three different locations. Reuters fired Mr. Hajj and withdrew 920 of his pictures from its archive. Further research by bloggers uncovered four types of fraudulent pictures by Reuters, all exaggerating Israeli aggressiveness. The bloggers even documented how a Reuters picture was staged.

• The BBC: Editors actively trolled for personal accounts to demonize Israel, posting this request on its news pages:"Do you live in Gaza? Have you been affected by violence in the region? Send us your experiences using the form below. If you are happy to speak to us further please include contact details."

• 	Rosemary Church

  CNN: An anchor on its international program, Rosemary Church, implied that Israeli forces could shoot down Hezbollah's rockets but chose not to do so when she asked an Israeli spokesman,"would Israel not be trying to shoot them out of the sky? They have the capability to do that."

• The Washington Post: Similarly, a military affairs reporter, Thomas Ricks, announced on national television that unnamed American military analysts believe that the Israeli government"purposely has left pockets of Hezbollah rockets in Lebanon, because as long as they're being rocketed, they can continue to have a sort of moral equivalency in their operations in Lebanon." Having one's own people injured, he explained, offers"the moral high ground."

All these press and broadcast activities stem from a perception that taking casualties and looking victimized helps one's standing in the war. Mr. Hajj's distortions, for example, were calculated to injure Israel's image, thereby manufacturing internal dissent, diminishing the country's international standing, and generating pressure on the government to stop its attacks on Lebanon.

But this phenomenon of each side parading its pain and loss inverts the historic order, whereby each side wants to intimidate the enemy by appearing ferocious, relentless, and victorious. In World War II, for instance, the U.S. Office of War Information prohibited the publication of films or photographs showing dead American soldiers for the first two years of fighting, and then only slightly relented. Meanwhile, its Bureau of Motion Pictures produced movies like"Our Enemy – The Japanese," showing dead bodies of Japanese and scenes of Japanese deprivation.

Proclaiming one's prowess and denigrating the enemy's has been the norm through millennia of Egyptian wall paintings, Greek vases, Arabic poetry, Chinese drawings, English ballads, and Russian theater. Why have combatants (and their allies in the press) now reversed this age-old and universal pattern, downplaying their own prowess and promoting the enemy's?

Because of the unprecedented power enjoyed by America and its allies. As the historian Paul Kennedy explained in 2002,"in military terms there is only one player on the field that counts." Looking back in time, he finds,"Nothing has ever existed like this disparity of power; nothing." And Israel, both as a regional power in its own right and as a close ally of Washington, enjoys a parallel preponderance vis-à-vis Hezbollah.

Such power implies that, when West fights non-West, the outcome on the battlefield is a given. That settled in advance, the fighting is seen more like a police raid than traditional warfare. As in a police raid, modern wars are judged by their legality, the duration of hostilities, the proportionality of force, the severity of casualties, and the extent of economic and environmental damage.

These are all debatable issues, and debated they are, to the point that the Clausewitzian center of gravity has moved from the battlefield to the opeds and talking heads. How war is perceived has as much importance as how it actually is fought.

This new reality implies that Western governments, whether America in Iraq or Israel in Lebanon, needs to see public relations as part of their strategy. Hezbollah has adapted to this new fact of life, but those governments have not.

Aug. 15, 2006 update: In an undated posting, Alex Safian of CAMERA posts this sort-of retraction by Thomas Ricks in a note to the Washington Post ombudsman, referring to his comment quoted above:

Ugh. I wish I hadn’t. I’ll attach a transcript at the end. What I said was accurate: that in an off-the-record conversation with military analysts, a couple had suggested that the Israeli strategy involved leaving Hezbellah 'rocket pockets' in place so as to shape public perceptions and give their forces more freedom of maneuver in Lebanon. Such a strategy might be considered logical and even moral, in that while suffering some short-term casualties, it would provide more protection for more Israelis in the long run.

But I've since heard from some smart, well-informed people that while such a strategy might be logical, that the Israeli public just wouldn't stand for it. And they were pretty dismayed that I has passed on the thought.

My comments were based on a long conversation I had with a senior Israeli official a couple of years ago …

Best
Tom

Safian finds an inconsistency and thus a"serious problem" in this note:

on CNN’s Reliable Sources Mr. Ricks described his source as “some U.S. military analysts,” while in the note he describes his source as “a senior Israeli official.” Which raises the question of whether Mr. Ricks had any source at all – besides himself, that is.

This article is reprinted with permission by Daniel Pipes. This article first appeared in the New York Sun.

Roadside-bomb attacks are typically cited as evidence that the U.S. and its allies are losing the war in Iraq. But a more in-depth look at the numbers suggests that the opposite may be the case.

Since January of 2006, there have been some 11,242 roadside bomb/improvised explosive device (IED) attacks in Iraq, a considerable uptick from the 10,953 for the 12 months of 2005. According to the Brookings Institution, IEDs account for 33 percent of all U.S. deaths. Through June, that means that of the 346 U.S. fatalities, 114 were related to roadside bombs. The Marine Corps reports that accidents after a roadside bomb or IED explodes account for about one-third of all its casualties.

Having just returned from North Carolina's Camp Lejeune Marine Corps Base and reviewed the training the Marines go through, I can attest that these numbers are being taken very seriously. In response, the Marines have beefed up their driver’s training, building special Iraqi-like courses—lots of sand, with weak shoulders and narrow bridges—in an effort to reduce after-explosion casualties. Among other things, the Marines have slowed down their drivers, noting that at slightly slower speeds one is not substantially more likely to get shot or to detonate a device, but much more likely to keep a damaged vehicle under control.


Looking once more at the numbers, it appears that the adjustments are paying off: 114 deaths from 11,242 roadside bomb attacks means that it takes almost 100 such attacks to kill a single U.S. soldier—a vastly better average for our troops than, say, flying B-17s over Germany in World War II, or flying any aircraft in World War I, where 50 percent of all fliers were killed, half of them in training accidents before they ever fought in combat.

To be sure, IED’s remain our enemy’s most effective mode of attack in Iraq. But this is not so grim as it may sound. Consider the question of how many enemy terrorists are setting off 100 IEDs or, for that matter, merely making them? My guess is that we kill 25 “insurgents” for every 100 attacks, and that at least four or five more incinerate themselves before ever getting the weapon to the roadside. Put another way, it’s costing the enemy 25-30 dead to kill a single American in a roadside attack.

Another measure of how incredibly effective our military is at adapting comes from year-to-year comparisons. From January to June 2005, 409 Americans were killed, while from January to June of 2006 we lost 346. Worth noting is that casualties were reduced despite the fact that the number of attacks in 2006 increased by almost 300. The press harps over such increases, but fails to note it indicates weakness and failure on the part of the enemy. The reason is that it is taking more and more attacks to kill a smaller number of Americans.

There is an even more important lesson to be learned from statistics on IEDs. Enemy training, morale, munitions, and, above all, numbers have been declining. How long does it take to make an IED? Having never made one myself, I’m not sure. But I do know this for certain: It’s taking more and more time with each jihadist we kill or who blows himself up in the learning process. Not only is the numbers game working against the terrorists, but so is time. As more trained terrorists die, the learning curve—a lethal one, in this case—increases further.

In sum, the “insurgency” in Iraq remains a force to be reckoned with. It can shape American public opinion and throw a monkey wrench into Iraqi elections. But it is equally important to bear in mind that it has exacted a spectacularly high cost in jihadist lives and, as their declining ability to produce and deploy IEDs suggests, severely damaged their war strategy. Violence will likely persist in Iraq, but we’ve already absorbed the worst the enemy has to offer.

In his first response to the major terror airline scare in London, President Bush said on Aug. 10 that “The recent arrests that our fellow citizens are now learning about are a stark reminder that this nation is at war with Islamic fascists who will use any means to destroy those of us who love freedom, to hurt our nation.”

His use of the term “Islamic fascists” spurred attention and controversy, especially among Islamists.

At a pro-Hizbullah rally in front of the White House, on Aug. 12, the crowd (in the Washington Post’s description) “grew most agitated when speakers denounced President Bush’s references to Islam.” In particular, the president of the Muslim American Society, Esam Omesh, won a massive roar of approval when he (deliberately?) mischaracterized the president’s statement: “Mr. Bush: Stop calling Islam ‘Islamic fascism.’”

Nihad Awad of the Council on American-Islamic Relations called the term “ill-advised” and “counter-productive,” repeating CAIR’s usual conceit that violence in the name of Islam has, in fact, nothing to do with Islam. Even more preposterously, Awad went on to suggest that we “take advantage of these incidents to make sure that we do not start a religious war against Islam and Muslims.”

CAIR’s board chairman, Parvez Ahmed, sent an open letter to President Bush: “You have on many occasions said Islam is a ‘religion of peace.’ Today you equated the religion of peace with the ugliness of fascism.” Actually, Bush did not do that (he equated just one form of “the religion of peace” with fascism), but Ahmed inadvertently pointed to the evolution in the president’s – and the country’s – thinking away from bromides to real thinking.

Edina Lekovic from the Muslim Public Affairs Council repeated the MPAC argument of the need to cultivate Islamists for counterterrorism: “When the people we need most in the fight against terrorism, American Muslims, feel alienated by the president’s characterization of these supposed terrorists, that does more damage than good.” (Supposed terrorists?) Her case, however, has recently been undercut by the example of Mubin Shaikh and the Toronto 17, in which an Islamist informer has been widely shunned by fellow Muslims. Lekovic did, however, make a valid semantic point: “It would have been far more accurate had he linked the situation to a segment of people rather than an entire faith, along the lines of, say, radical Muslim fascists.”

The Muslim Association of Britain announced that it “condemns” Bush’s wording and worries that such comments “gives yet another excuse for the targeting of the Muslim minority by extreme right-wing forces in the West.” This fear is disingenuous, given how few anti-Muslim incidents do take place in the West, compared to the number of Muslim attacks on Westerners.

There are also rumblings of a more aggressive Muslim response. “Some hypermarkets in Riyadh,” reports the Arab News, “had already withdrawn American products from their shelves in response to the US’ anti-Islam campaign.” Will this incident lead to a further separation of civilizations?

Comments:

(1) This is hardly the first time Bush has used the term Islamic fascist (or Islamofascist); it has become a part of his routine vocabulary since his path-breaking speech on this subject in October 2005, a speech that, oddly, was dismissed by the mainstream media as a retread, while this glancing reference is treated as major news. (Newsweek calls it a “rhetorical bomb.”) Go figure.

(2) What was new on Aug. 10 was his formulation that the United States is “at war with Islamic fascists.” That was more direct and forceful than anything prior.

(3)Islamic fascist and Islamofascist are more used than ever before, as can be confirmed by a search for those words in my weblog entry, “Calling Islamism the Enemy.” Notably, Senator Rick Santorum gave a powerful speech on July 20 in which he 29 times used the term fascist or fascism with reference to Islam. MSNBC and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution have both suggested that Santorum’s use of this term accounted for its adaptation by the White House.

(4) Protests from Islamists notwithstanding, Bush has indicated that he plans to continue using this term. His spokesman, Tony Snow, explained in an e-mail interview with the Cox newspaper chain that Bush has gradually shifted from the “war on terrorism” to “war with Islamic fascists.” With this new specificity, Snow continues, Bush “tries to identify the ideology that motivates many organized terrorist groups. He also tries to make it clear that the label does not apply to all or most Muslims, but to the tiny factions,” such as Al-Qaeda.

(5) It appears that Islamist protests have been counterproductive, managing the negative double play of bringing more attention to the term and irritating the White House.

(6) I applaud the increasing willingness to focus on some form of Islam as the enemy but find the word fascist misleading in this context. Few historic or philosophic connections exist between fascism and radical Islam. Fascism glorifies the state, emphasizes racial “purity,” promotes social Darwinism, denigrates reason, exalts the will, and rejects organized religion – all outlooks anathema to Islamists.

In contrast, Radical Islam has many more ties, both historic and philosophic, to Marxism-Leninism. While studying for his doctorate in Paris, Ali Shariati, the key intellectual behind the turn to Islam in Iran in the 1970s, translated Franz Fanon, Che Guevara, and Jean-Paul Sartre into Persian. More broadly, quoting the Iranian analyst Azar Nafisi, radical Islam “takes its language, goals, and aspirations as much from the crassest forms of Marxism as it does from religion. Its leaders are as influenced by Lenin, Sartre, Stalin, and Fanon as they are by the Prophet.” During the cold war, Islamists preferred the Soviet Union to the United States; today, they have more and deeper connections to the hard left than to the hard right.

(7) Nonetheless, some voices gamely argue for the accuracy of “Islamic fascists.” After himself using the term on television, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff justified it by noting that bin Laden has

talked about restoring the Caliphate, the empire that existed in the southern Mediterranean centuries ago. That is nothing—it‘s deranged, but essentially it is a vision of a totalitarian empire with him leading under some kind of perverted conception of religion. That comes very close to satisfying my definition of fascism. It might not be classic fascism that you had with Mussolini or Hitler, but it is a totalitarian intolerance—imperialism that has a vision that is totally at odds with Western society and our freedoms and rule of law.

The Washington Times also endorsed the term in an editorial titled “It’s Fascism.”

Fascism is a chauvinistic political philosophy that exalts a group over the individual—usually a race or nation, but in this case the adherents of a religion. Fascism also espouses centralized autocratic rule by that group in suppression of others. It usually advocates severe economic and social regimentation and the total or near-total subordination of the individual to the political leadership. This accurately describes the philosophies of Hitler, Mussolini, the leaders of Imperial Japan and other fascistic regimes through history. It also describes Thursday’s terrorists. It very accurately describes the philosophy of al Qaeda, Hezbollah, Hamas and many other stripes of Islamism around the world.

(8) The use of Islamic fascists should be seen as part of a decades-long search for the right term to name a form of Islam that is recognizably political, extreme, and often violent. I have already confessed in that I am on my fifth term (having previously used neo-orthodox, fundamentalist, and militant, and now using radical and Islamist). While Islamic fascists beats terrorists, let’s hope that a better consensus term soon emerges. My vote is for Islamists.