[Mr. Hanson is a senior fellow of the Hoover Institution, a distinguished fellow of Hillsdale College, and author most recently of "A War Like No Other: How the Athenians and Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian War." This article is adapted form a speech he delivered at the Claremont Institute's annual dinner in honor Sir Winston Churchill. ]

Our current crisis is not yet a catastrophe, but a real loss of confidence of the spirit. The hard-won effort of the Western Enlightenment of some 2,500 years that, along with Judeo-Christian benevolence, is the foundation of our material progress, common decency, and scientific excellence, is at risk in this new millennium.

But our newest foes of Reason are not the enraged Athenian democrats who tried and executed Socrates. And they are not the Christian zealots of the medieval church who persecuted philosophers of heliocentricity. Nor are they Nazis who burned books and turned Western science against its own to murder millions en masse.

No, the culprits are now more often us. In the most affluent, and leisured age in the history of Western civilization--never more powerful in its military reach, never more prosperous in our material bounty--we have become complacent, and then scared of the most recent face of barbarism from the primordial extremists of the Middle East.

What would a beleaguered Socrates, a Galileo, a Descartes, or Locke believe, for example, of the moral paralysis in Europe? Was all their bold and courageous thinking--won at such a great personal cost--to allow their successors a cheap surrender to religious fanaticism and the megaphones of state-sponsored fascism?

Just imagine in our present year, 2006: plan an opera in today's Germany, and then shut it down. Again, this surrender was not done last month by the Nazis, the Communists, or kings, but by the producers themselves in simple fear of Islamic fanatics who objected to purported bad taste. Or write a novel deemed unflattering to the Prophet Mohammed. That is what did Salman Rushdie did, and for his daring, he faced years of solitude, ostracism, and death threats--and in the heart of Europe no less. Or compose a documentary film, as did the often obnoxious Theo Van Gogh, and you may well have your throat cut in "liberal" Holland. Or better yet, sketch a simple cartoon in postmodern Denmark of legendary easy tolerance, and then go into hiding to save yourself from the gruesome fate of a Van Gogh. Or quote an ancient treatise, as did Pope Benedict, and then learn that all of Christendom may come under assault, and even the magnificent stones of the Vatican may offer no refuge--although their costumed Swiss Guard would prove a better bulwark than the European police. Or write a book critical of Islam, and then go into hiding in fear of your life, as did French philosophy teacher Robert Redeker.

And we need not only speak of threats to free speech, but also the tangible rewards from a terrified West to the agents of such repression. Note the recent honorary degree given to former Iranian President, Mohammad Khatami, whose regime has killed and silenced so many, and who himself is under investigation by the Argentine government for his role in sponsoring Hezbollah killers to murder dozens of Jewish innocents in Buenos Aires....

History gives evidence of no civilization that survived long as purely secular and without a god, that put its trust in reason alone, and believed human nature was subject to radical improvement given enough capital and learning invested in the endeavor. The failure of our elites to amplify their traditions they received, and to believe them to be not merely different but far better than the alternatives, is also a symptom of crisis in all societies of the past, whether Demosthenes' Athens, late imperial Rome, 18th-century France, or Western Europe of the 1920s. Nothing is worse that an elite that demands egalitarianism for others but ensures privilege for itself. And rarely, we know, are civilization's suicides a result of the influence of too many of the poor rather than of the wealthy.

But can I end on an optimistic note in tonight's tribute to Winston Churchill, who endured more and was more alone than we of the present age? After the horror of September 11, we in our sleep were also given a jolt of sorts, presented with enemies from the Dark Ages, the Islamic fascists who were our near exact opposites, who hated the Western tradition, and, more importantly, were honest and without apology in conveying that hatred of our liberal tolerance and forbearance. They arose not from anything we did or any Western animosity that might have led to real grievances, but from self-acknowledged weakness, self-induced failure, and, of course, those perennial engines of war, age-old envy and lost honor--always amplified and instructed by dissident Western intellectuals whose unhappiness with their own culture proved a feast for the scavenging Al-Qaedists.
By past definitions of relative power, al-Qaeda and its epigones were weak and could not defeat the West militarily. But their genius was knowing of our own self-loathing, of our inability to determine their evil from our good, of our mistaken belief that Islamists were confused about, rather than intent to destroy, the West, and most of all, of our own terror that we might lose, if even for a brief moment, the enjoyment of our good life to defeat the terrorists. In learning what the Islamists are, many of us, and for the first time, are also learning what we are not. And in fighting these fascists, we are to learn whether our freedom can prove stronger than their suicide belts and improvised explosive devices.

So we have been given a reprieve of sorts with this war, to regroup; and, in our enemies, to see our own past failings and present challenges; and to rediscover our strengths and remember our origins. We can relearn that we are not fighting for George Bush or Wal-Mart alone, but also for the very notion of the Enlightenment--and, yes, in the Christian sense for the good souls of those among us who have forgotten all that as they censor cartoons and compare American soldiers to Nazis.

So let me quote Winston Churchill of old about the gift of our present ordeal:

"These are not dark days: these are great days--the greatest days our country has ever lived."

Never more true than today.

Many months into the debate over finding a new strategy in Iraq, two myths continue to cloud the discussion. The Washington Post recently proclaimed: "The United States and its allies in Iraq would need at least 500,000 and perhaps more than 1 million troops" to bring order to the country. Incoming House majority leader Steny Hoyer declared: "As a practical matter, there are no troops to increase with." Neither of these statements is true. The persistence of these myths forecloses serious consideration of the only option likely to bring peace to Iraq.

Relevant historical examples do not support the notion that hundreds of thousands more troops are needed to improve security in Iraq. A study of post-conflict operations in the Balkans, Afghanistan, and elsewhere conducted by Ambassador James Dobbins showed that success in those operations--characterized by severe ethnic and sectarian violence--required force ratios of 1 soldier per 100 inhabitants. Iraq poses challenges that are in some respects more severe, at the moment, but it also offers its own rules-of-thumb. Successful clear-and-hold operations in Tal Afar required a force ratio of around 1 soldier (counting both U.S. and Iraqi troops) for every 40 inhabitants. On the other hand, in 2004 Major General Peter Chiarelli suppressed a widespread uprising in Sadr City (an area inhabited by about 2.5 million Shiites) with fewer than 20,000 U.S. soldiers--a ratio of about 1 to 125.

Then there's the question of the size of the population to be pacified. Most of Iraq is relatively calm. Instances of violence in the Kurdish north and the Shia south are rare. No responsible analyst advocates sending large numbers of troops into either area--they are not needed and would not be welcomed. Disarming the Shia militias is a process that must be undertaken only after the Sunni Arab insurgency is under control, and it cannot be undertaken primarily by American forces directly confronting the Shiite population. Using all of Iraq's 27 million people as a baseline for estimating force ratios is, therefore, an invalid approach.

The U.S. command repeatedly and correctly points out that about 80 percent of the violence in Iraq occurs within a 35-mile radius of Baghdad, among a population of perhaps 10 million. Baghdad itself has roughly 6.5 million inhabitants, including the 2.5 million Shiites in Sadr City. These figures provide the basis for a more realistic estimate of the force levels needed. Applying the high-end ratio used in Tal Afar over the entire metropolitan Baghdad area would generate a requirement of 250,000 troops--both U.S. and Iraqi. There are currently about 100,000 Iraqi army troops that the U.S. command considers trained and ready. There are almost 150,000 American troops in Iraq now, including perhaps 70,000 combat troops. Conducting Tal Afar-type operations across the entire capital region all at once would require concentrating all available forces in the area and a "surge" of about 80,000 U.S. soldiers--a large number, to be sure, but very far from the "hundreds of thousands" or even "millions" generated by the use of specious historical examples.

But the situation is not even this dire. Not all areas of the capital region require such an intensive deployment. Indeed, previous successful operations even in Baghdad did not require such high force ratios. What's more, skillful military planners conduct operations in phases, and that is exactly how this one should be prepared and executed. The recent unsuccessful effort to secure Baghdad, Operation Together Forward II, was broken into a series of phases. U.S. and Iraqi troops working together succeeded in clearing the neighborhoods they entered one after the other. But that is not why the operation failed. The problem, according to much anecdotal evidence and the recent testimony of the director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, General Michael D. Maples, is that the U.S. military command did not leave American forces behind in the areas that had been cleared. That mistake allowed insurgents to reinfiltrate those neighborhoods and begin the cycle of violence again.

There is every reason to believe that a reformulated operation, proceeding in phases to clear Baghdad neighborhood by neighborhood, but with sufficient force levels to leave significant American troops behind in the cleared areas, would be much more successful. It is impossible to estimate precisely how many more U.S. troops would be needed in the capital area, or in Iraq, without proposing a detailed military plan. But since the high end of estimates for doing the whole area at once produced the requirement for a surge of 80,000 or so, it is very likely that a surge of 50,000 American troops would be sufficient to stabilize the capital. Subsequent phases of the operation would then move on to stabilizing al Anbar and other restive areas of the country, although we must keep in mind how much the situation in Iraq would be transformed for the better if violence in the capital were brought under control.

This approach is not just a matter of throwing more troops at the problem. It involves a fundamental change in U.S. military strategy in Iraq. The U.S. military has never set itself the goal of establishing and maintaining security. It has always prioritized training Iraqi forces and allowing them to undertake such operations on their own. This strategy might have had some merit when the principal problem in Iraq was the Sunni Arab insurgency (although it was dubious even then). It has little or no merit today, when sectarian violence is the most important challenge. More resources are needed to support a changed strategy, but changing the strategy is essential.

Establishing security in Iraq should be our primary objective, with training Iraqi forces a close second. The U.S. military, partnered with Iraqi army units capable of assisting, needs to clear and hold troubled neighborhoods in order to bring the sectarian conflict under control. At the same time, the coalition must reinvigorate its efforts to reconstruct cleared areas, bringing jobs, food, and water to the Iraqi people along with safety. Only in this context will it be possible to recruit an effective Iraqi police force or more Iraqi soldiers and to develop effective Iraqi institutions of central, regional, and local government. And only in this context will the Iraqi government be able to disarm militias that now derive their primary justification from the ongoing attacks on their communities.

Many who oppose the idea of sending more troops to Iraq have abandoned the argument that more troops wouldn't help and retreated to what they believe is a more defensible position: that there are simply no more troops available to send. This view, supported to some degree by the testimony of CENTCOM Commander General John Abizaid, is wrong.

To begin with, the Defense Department has just announced plans to deploy over 50,000 troops to Iraq this spring, including more than 20,000 combat troops, as part of a rotational plan to relieve forces currently in the theater. If, instead of bringing those forces home, we extended their tours, we would immediately have generated a surge of 20,000 combat troops.

In truth, we could send more. As of October 1, there were approximately 81,000 active Army soldiers in Iraq, 21,500 active duty Marines, 15,600 Army National Guard, and a little more than 7,000 Army and Marine Reserves--in all about 125,000 troops (13,000 sailors and airmen and a number of other reserves brought the total up to 139,500). Since then, another 8,000-9,000 soldiers and Marines, mostly active duty, have also been committed to the theater. There are another 24,000 members of all services now in Afghanistan as well.

Looking just at basic numbers, it would seem obvious that there are many more troops to send. The active Army numbers about 500,000 soldiers, the Marines 150,000, and the Army National Guard 346,000. That's a pool of almost one million ground forces to draw from. This kind of argument may seem simplistic, but it is supported by no less a personage than the current chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Peter Pace, who declared this spring: "We have just over 200,000 U.S. service members in the [Persian] Gulf region right now. We have 2.4 million U.S. service members available to the country--active, Guard, and reserve. So you've got about 2 million U.S. service members who are not currently involved directly in the Gulf region. . . . We have sufficient personnel, weapons, equipment--you name it--to handle any adversary that might come along." Including, presumably, a surge of 50,000 troops into Iraq.

It's important to parse these numbers more closely, since soldiers, sailors, Marines, and airmen are not interchangeable parts. The active Army today has about 350,000 deployable combat troops, including combat and support (logistics) troops. The combat troops are organized into about 43 brigades, numbering around 170,000 soldiers. Marine combat forces usable in Iraq are organized into nine active and three reserve regiments (the Marine equivalent of the Army's brigades) totaling around 36,000 troops. The Army National Guard, currently undergoing a significant reorganization, has a combat force of 60,000-80,000 soldiers. In sum, counting only deployable units, there are at least 64 combat brigades available in the ground forces, of which around 15 are now in Iraq and another 3 in Afghanistan. Adding a further 10 brigades (40,000 combat troops with perhaps another 10,000 logistical troops) is definitely a realistic undertaking.

Sophisticated critics will argue that the devil is in the details. Almost all of the Army units not deployed or deploying to Iraq are rated not-combat ready. They would have to be trained before deploying. Many would have to be sent to Iraq less than a year after leaving the combat zone, violating the Army's current policy of requiring at least a year between deployments. Soldiers now in Iraq would have to stay there--many for considerably more than their expected one-year deployment. And the National Guard would have to be used more heavily than current plans call for. All of these facts would lead, it is asserted, to a significant fall in morale in the ground forces and to recruiting and retention problems. Such a "surge" would break up the planned rotational schedule for these forces, making it impossible to relieve them in a year if the situation still required a large-scale ground forces presence in Iraq. It is, some senior officers say (usually off the record), an unsustainable plan and would impose too much pain on the military....

There are, indeed, certain mysteries about why the military is having such a hard time managing the current deployment anyway. A force of 15 combat brigades requires, in principle, a base of 45 brigades to sustain a one-year-in-three deployment cycle. The Army is now using a one-in-two cycle, which should require only 30 combat brigades. Going up to a 25-brigade deployment should require a base of only 50 or 75 deployable brigades, depending on the frequency of deployment. Even counting the ground forces elements in Afghanistan, the necessary base shouldn't climb higher than 60 or 80 brigades at the most. There are more than 50 brigades in the active Army and Marines right now, not counting the National Guard and Reserves. It would be worth examining what impediments are preventing us from making full use of currently available resources. That might be a worthy first challenge for the new secretary of defense.

This brief examination shows two things. First, that a surge of on the order of 50,000 soldiers into Iraq is highly likely to be meaningful if it supports a changed strategy. Second, that such a surge is doable with the forces currently available. There is risk in any military operation, and it might prove to be the case that securing Baghdad or Iraq is impossible or would require more force than this. It is also true that deploying more forces to Iraq would require accepting greater risk elsewhere. These concerns are worth discussing. Any surge, moreover, should be accompanied with a massive effort at reconstruction, political undertakings, possibly even regional negotiations. Risks and costs of all kinds must be weighed before a decision is made. I have argued elsewhere that the situation in Iraq today both requires and justifies taking such risks and accepting such costs, but that is not the point here. The point is that a surge of forces accompanying a change in strategy is possible and offers the promise of being very helpful. The ultimate decision must be taken on the basis of that reality.

... What is the mission of the US military in Ramadi? I hope my readers will press their representatives in Congress and the executive branch to answer this question. What is the mission? When will it be accomplished?

At what point will the people of Ramadi wake up in the morning and say, 'We've changed our minds. We like the new government dominated by Shiite ayatollahs and Kurdish warlords. We're happy to host Western Occupation troops on our soil. We don't care if those troops are allied with the Israeli military, which is daily bombing our brethren in Gaza and killing them and keeping them down. We're changed persons. We're not going to bother to set any IEDs tonight and we've put away our sniping rifles.' (You could substitute Tikrit, Samarra', Baquba, and other Sunni Arab cities for Ramadi).

It is not going to happen. In fall, 2003, 14 percent of Sunni Arabs thought it was legitimate to attack US personnel in Iraq. Now over 70 percent do. Isn't it going toward 100 percent? How would more or less keeping the people of Ramadi in a cage help things in that regard, especially if they perceive us to be doing it on behalf of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (founded by Ayatollah Khomeini in Iran) and the Kurdish Peshmerga and the Israeli army?

(Despite the denials of Bush administration officials such as Condi Rice, the Arab and Islamic opposition to US presence in Iraq has at least something to do with local perceptions that the US invaded Iraq on behalf of Israel, and Iraqis often refer to US troops as "al-Yahud," "the Jews." This is conspiracy theory thinking and wrong-headed, but it is the reality on the ground. Even the notorious attack on the four mercenaries in Falluja was done in the name of the murdered Palestinian leader Sheikh Yassin. The deeply unpopular US support for Israel's depredations against the Palestinians was one of the things that foredoomed a US military occupation of a major Arab country.)
The idea that al-Anbar tribal forces will pull the US fat from the fire is a non-starter. Some of the tribes are openly agitating on behalf of Saddam Hussein. Any who are fighting the Salafis or Muslim fundamentalists are doing it as a grudge match. Tribes are notoriously factionalized among themselves and seldom unite for very long. The rural tribes just aren't a big center of power in Iraq any more-- it is largely urban and the power centers are urban political parties an d their paramilitaries. Those urban forces have vast hinterlands of practical and monetary support in the region-- Iran for the Shiites, the Oil Gulf and small-town Jordan and Syria for the Sunni Arabs. They are not going to decline in importance.

What are we to think when we see an item like this one, which says that the elected Iraqi PM, Nuri al-Maliki, was pelted by stones by his own constituency in Shiite Sadr City; that 21 villagers were captured by guerrillas in Diyala; or that 25 bodies (7 of them little girls) were found in Baquba, the capital of that province; or that (as al-Zaman reports in Arabic) Sunni Arab guerrillas fought a pitched battle with police in the city of Buhriz near Baquba, defeated them, chased them out of the HQ and set it on fire, and completely took over the city? What about the reports in al-Zaman of car bombings in al-Huswah and in al-Hilla, killin a dozen? When you hear these things, ask yourself 'What is the mission? When and how could it reasonably be expected to be accomplished?'

Syria and Iran are not responsible for the resistance in Ramadi or Baquba and probably can't do anything about it. Therefore negotiating with them is not a silver bullet, though it might be useful in its own right.

What is the military mission? I can't see a practical one. And if there is not a military mission that can reasonably be accomplished in a specified period of time, then keeping US troops in al-Anbar is a sort of murder. Because you know when they go out on patrol, a few of them each week are going to get blown up or shot down. Reliably. Each week. Steadily. It is monstrous to force them to play Russian roulette every day unless there is a clear mission that could thereby be accomplished. There is not. ...

[Historian Mark Naison is Professor of African and African-American Studies and Director of the Urban Studies Program at Fordham University.]

When Amadou Diallo, an unarmed Guinean immigrant, was struck down by 41 bullets in a Bronx vestibule six years ago, I had hoped that outrage that followed would insure that no incident like this would ever happen in New York City again. Though the 4 police officers who killed Diallo were acquitted of any crime, I thought that the NYPD would change its training and deployment procedures enough so that Black citizens of New York could walk the streets without worrying that they would be gunned down in a panic by fearful police officers

Apparently, I was wrong. This weekend, an unarmed Black man, and his two friends, leaving a bachelor party at a Queens strip club the day before he was to be married,
were the targets of a barrage of 50 bullets leveled at them by undercover police officers

Even if the police officers thought they were under attack, there is something terribly wrong with this scenario. There is nothing in any police manual which justifies the discharge of 50 bullets into a moving vehicle when officers are not under fire. This was not only a case of mistaken identity, it was a case of rage and panic overwhelming professionalism, and as a result, a young man is dead on the eve of his wedding and his two friends lie in a Queens Hospital in critical condition.

As I grapple to understand this tragedy, I keep returning to the subject of race. It is no accident that the victim of this explosion of police outrage, like Amadou Diallo, or for that matter Rodney King, was a young black man. In a nation with a troubled racial history, where every popular medium propogates images of black men as dangerous, police patrolling black neighborhoods are carrying the same poisonous brew of racial fantasiess, fears and stereotypes that led Michael Richards to unleash a racial tirade at black hecklers in a comedy club.. Subliminal racial rage is ugly enough when it explodes verbally; but when it leads to the uncontrolled discharge of weapons against unarmed citizens, it is a deadly threat to our social contract.

We may find that these particular police officers may have no past history of racist behavior. Some of them may even be Latino or Black. But that only makes their actions
all the more frightening. If racialized images of Black men as dangerous are so powerful and pervasive that they can trigger uncontrollable explosions or rage -whether verbal or physical- in normally decent people, then we as a society are in deep trouble.

The NYPD needs to discipline the officers involved and put sharp controls on it's elite units, but all of us need to take an honest look at our own feelings about race and our
own complicity in this terrible tragedy.

When it comes to healing the legacy of racism, we still have a lot of work to do. Our laws may be color blind, but our psyches most certainly are not.

[Martin E. Marty's biography, current projects, upcoming events, publications, and contact information can be found at www.illuminos.com ]

"God Gap Narrows as Democrats Take Majority of Catholic Vote" is Joe Feuerherd's headline in the liberal National Catholic Reporter (November 17). "Republican hopes that socially conservative church-going Catholics would help forestall an electoral catastrophe in the 2006 midterm elections were not simply dashed. They were obliterated, a real thumping." The NCR editors had had little to cheer about on the Catholic vote front in recent years. They and we had been told by many pundits that Roman Catholics were securely relocating themselves as blocs or in slots that would help make up a permanent Republican hegemony.

Now, however, "The Public Shakes Things Up." This is the headline for the post-election column by editor Tom Roberts. Blaming or crediting the war in Iraq most of all for the change, he pointed to the victory of progressive Kathleen Sebelius for governor in "redder than red" Kansas, among many other indicators. He reported that Republican strategists had "hoped the so-called God gap" would continue to work in their favor. But in exit polls, for whatever they're worth, 55 percent of Catholics said they voted Democratic. Reliable analyst John Green, who watches these things for the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, observed: "More telling ... is that white Catholics -- considered the most swinging of swing voters -- gave a majority (50 percent) of their vote to Democratic candidates" -- a surprise.

Malfeasance, the Foley-Haggard-Katrina cluster of events, and issues of corruption and competence (more than philosophy and theology) were major determinants. Opposition to abortion and gay marriage always galvanizes many, but this time not enough. Referendums on such issues offered mixed news. Green noted that if those two issues were not still prominent, ever more Catholics and Evangelicals would fold into the Democratic Party. "Catholics care more about right and wrong than right and left," said Alexia Kelly of Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good. Jeff Carr of the evangelical Sojourners group said that the "big losers" were "the secular left and the religious right."

The postscript editorial page in NCR judged the whole election "A Move Away from Extremism." "The unilateral projection of U.S. power abroad and a domestic program that put individualism in hyper mode, and wrapped it all in a religiosity owing to the most extreme and conservative brand of Christianity" did not hold the place it had for several years.

While the returns gave liberal Catholics an occasion to cheer, the public at large may well welcome the shifting attitudes within the Catholic fold. It is possible to make too much of one election as a turning point, but among other things it did lead editorialists to pay attention to more kinds of religious voters than those in the Christian Right, which they had seen as almost all-powerful.

Week after week we keep noting James Madison's observation that the security of rights in a republic depends on the diversity of interests, sects, and the like. We can be sure that those weary of polarization will be working to energize the non-extremists, whose commitments are yet hard to assess.

References:

The National Catholic Reporter can be accessed online at: http://ncronline.org/.

Joe Feuerherd's article can be found at: http://ncronline.org/.

Tom Roberts's article can be found at: http://ncronline.org/NCR_Online/.

The editorial"A Move Away from Extremism" can be found at: http://ncronline.org/.

[Palaima is the Dickson Centennial Professor of Classics at the University of Texas.]

This Thanksgiving, let us be thankful that we live in a democracy. Let us work at reviving and nurturing the principles of free and open exchange of ideas. Let us work at respecting the rights and beliefs of our fellow citizens and immigrants to our country, legal or illegal.

This Thanksgiving, I am thankful for my good friend at the University of Texas at Austin, Paul Woodruff. Paul is a kind of Socrates, a tireless champion of the public examination of ideas. He has written two Socratic books, Reverence and First Democracy. They ask us to think about what democracy is. Democracy is messy, often frustrating, but worth the effort. In fact democracy is the only form of government worth the effort of all citizens, rich and poor, powerful and powerless, educated and uneducated.

We need to remember this constantly and with vigilance. How easily we can lose our way.

Take, for example, the recent selection of a new house majority leader in Congress. Speaker of the House-elect Nancy Pelosi backed John Murtha. She believed his strong views on the Iraqi war needed to be in the forefront of national consideration. There was open debate. As you know, the other candidate, Rep. Steny Hoyer, won the vote 149-86. Analysts said that Pelosi "lost, she lost publicly . . . she lost big." They said her public support for Murtha was "politically stupid."

This mentality is stupid. Solid bloc political decision-making, not standing publicly for what you believe, using a narrow majority as a mandate to push forward an extreme political agenda, all those things are stupid and detrimental to our nation.

Fortunately, we have clear examples of how democracy should work and how big must be our sense of humanity, our sense of humility, our sense of true sympathy for those who are different from us. Two shining examples have been in the public eye recently.

I am thankful this Thanksgiving that Martin Luther King and Robert F. Kennedy cared enough about our country to give their lives for it. Ground was broken recently in Washington, D.C., for a memorial to King. A movie about Kennedy just opened.

Take time this Thanksgiving weekend to gather your families and loved ones. Read or listen together to the speech that King gave on April 3, 1968, the eve of his assassination, and the speech that Kennedy gave the next day, telling the people of Indianapolis that King had been fatally shot.

Kennedy reminded his audience that he felt in his heart what they felt about the murder of King. His own brother had been killed by a white man. He spoke honestly about the anger, the righteous desire for vengeance, the hatred and bitterness black people could feel about King's assassination. He spoke of the polarization that giving way to these justifiable emotions would cause. He then called for blacks and whites to "make an effort, as Martin Luther King did . . . an effort to understand with compassion and love."

King had spoken the night before at a church in Memphis.

His speech is glorious. He begins by talking about what he would do if God Almighty gave him the chance to live at any time in human history. He surveys the great moments of the past, Egypt, the Israelites in the Promised Land, the philosophers and playwrights of ancient Athens, the Roman Empire, the Renaissance, Lincoln signing the Emancipation Proclamation, the American people during the Great Depression believing their president that "we have nothing to fear but fear itself."

King then speaks words that empowered all his listeners. He would, he declares, "turn to the Almighty and say, 'If you allow me to live just a few years in the second half of the twentieth century, I will be happy.'"

He acknowledged, "[T]hat's a strange statement to make because the world is all messed up. The nation is sick, trouble is in the land, confusion all around." But he stressed to his audience that courageous, nonviolent expression of their beliefs about freedom and justice, while not without tremendous human cost, would eventually prevail. Their actions would persuade all Americans to think and feel democratically.

With two such great examples of direct and honest speech about life-and-death issues of human justice readily available to us, we should believe, too, that no problem is insurmountable. As King told the people of Memphis, "Only when it is dark enough can you see stars." We can talk about our problems and settle our differences even by starlight.

[Ledeen is an expert on U.S. foreign policy. His research areas include state sponsors of terrorism, Iran, the Middle East, Europe (Italy), U.S.-China relations, intelligence, and Africa (Mozambique, South Africa, and Zimbabwe). A former consultant to the NSC and to the U.S. State and Defense Departments, he has also written on leadership and the use of power. His latest book is entitled The War against the Terror Masters. He earned a PhD in history from the University of Wisconsin.]

As the Baker/Hamilton club considers our options in the Middle East, its members would do well to study the classic works on counterinsurgency. The first comes from a French lieutenant colonel, David Galula, who was a commander in Algeria in the 1950s. He later studied in America and for a short time consulted to the RAND Corporation. His classic work, "Counterinsurgency Warfare: Theory and Practice," has become required reading for the more thoughtful members of the military community.

Originally published in 1964, it has been reissued this year with a dandy introduction by an American Army lieutenant colonel, John Nagl, who also has written a fine book on the same subject, "Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife: Counterinsurgency Lessons from Malaya and Vietnam." Galula formulated five basic laws for fighting insurgencies:

(1) The population is the basic target, and all other basic principles flow from this one. Whichever side wins over the population will win the war. "Destruction of the rebel forces and occupation of the geographic terrain led us nowhere so long as we did not control and get the support of the population," Galula wrote about the Algerian conflict in a 1963 RAND report, "Pacification in Algeria, 1956-1958," which was reissued this year.

(2) Support from the population can only be obtained through the efforts of the minority among the population that favors the counterinsurgent.

(3) This minority will emerge — and eventually become the majority — only if the counterinsurgent is seen as the ultimate victor. For us to win, the original minority will have to take risks, and it will only do that if we are known, respected, and seen to be winning. Above all, we must be able to protect them.

(4) The superiority of the counterinsurgent will almost never be so overwhelming that he can simply dominate the whole territory. The counterinsurgent has to concentrate his efforts area by area, and demonstrate staying power and resolve.

This is what we nowadays call the "inkblot strategy," or the "clear and hold" strategy. We have done well at "clearing," but all too often we have left the cleared areas, relying on Iraqis to hold them, instead of constantly maintaining small operational groups in and around the cleared areas and initiating combat with terrorists who try to move back in. When we fail to do that, the crucial "minority that favors the counterinsurgent" gets killed.

(5) At a certain point, the war itself becomes the central issue. The population's attitude is dictated not by the intrinsic merits of the contending causes, but by their conviction about winners and losers. Whoever is judged the likely winner will gain popular support, and most likely win the war. Being seen as the eventual winner eventually determines the winner, short of creating a military dictatorship that simply executes anyone on the other side.

It's pure Vince Lombardi: Winning is the only thing. You need popular support, and you'll only get it if two conditions are met: You must have good personal relationships with lots of people, and the people must think you're the winner. If they do, they'll help you win by taking you into their families and tribes, providing you with information, and helping you track down the insurgents. If they don't, they'll either avoid you or support the enemy. Karen Hughes, please take note. You need to convince the peoples of the Middle East that we are winners, not that we are lovable, gentle, and tolerant....

[Roger Morris, who served on the senior staff of the National Security Council under Henry Kissinger and Richard Nixon until resigning over the invasion of Cambodia, is an award-winning author and historian whose new book, Shadows of the Eagle, a history of US covert interventions and foreign policy in the Middle East and South Asia, will be published by Alfred Knopf next year.]

Are we the eagle nation
Or have we but the talons and the maw,
And for the abject likeness of our heart,
Shall some less lordly bird be set apart?
Some gorger in the sun? Some prowler with the bat?

-William Vaughn Moody, An Ode in Time of Hesitation

As Moody posed his birds, America was in the throes of imperial disillusion. President William McKinley having been reliably advised by God and Republican cronies to "take the Philippines" as booty of the 1898 Spanish-American War, the U.S. faced a fiery insurgency in the islands and at home raging debate about the loss of America's anti-colonial innocence. In the end, the Senate annexed by only a single vote, poorly armed Philippine nationalists were put down at brutal cost, and America moved on blithely to world power-albeit with the poet's question increasingly begged.

The issue roils a century later as a public urge to exit disaster in Iraq lifts Democrats in the 2006 elections to slim if ruling Congressional majorities. While U.S. motives and acts abroad may no longer inspire florid poetry, there is no shortage of prose on the debacle that is George W. Bush's less-than-excellent adventure in Mesopotamia. More than a dozen books track the folly in, matched only by the now warned-of folly out. Much as in 1898, America is told it cannot stay in its conquest without chaos, cannot leave without more. It recalls Churchill's richly Tory remark about Lenin with a Stalinist succession: Russia's worst tragedy his birth, next worse his death.

As Moody and McKinley suggest, however, there is rather more to these entrances and exits than people, circumstances, tactics of the moment. Deeper forces are at work in the American plight-and the world's at its mercy-that cannot be resolved by plebiscite. Far beyond Iraq, three timeless books-two classics and a third in the running-capture larger meaning.

True to its title, which more narrowly describes the Pentagon's 2003 dash to Baghdad, Barbara Tuchman's The March of Folly places the calamity in indispensable wider context. Across thirty centuries, from the fall of Troy to the fallacies of Vietnam, from Renaissance Popes provoking the Reformation to the British blindly alienating their American colonies, one of our preeminent historians (certainly its most readable writer in the genre) extracts the Ariadne's thread of preconception, arrogance and deception, including self-deception, that mark governments bent on policies at odds with their own interests-all indulged in what Tuchman calls "wooden-headedness" despite known, available alternatives. Iraq has it all: rulers and ministers obsessed, bureaucrats overbearing and feeble, intelligence confused, confusing and in any case misnamed, generals as blundering as the politicians they later blame, oversight so abdicated by legislature, journalism and the public as to make them all complicit.

Contrary to the prevailing Democratic demonology, itself dangerously self-deceptive, the bleak history reminds us that Mr. Bush & Co. are hardly unique, and that profoundly institutionalized penchants for folly will not somehow magically vanish from Washington with their own departure from power. Not least, Tuchman warns us that exits are seldom what they seem. Lyndon Johnson driven from office in 1968 by antiwar protests, Richard Nixon elected on his "plan" to disengage from Vietnam, it would be four full savage years before America's war actually ended, making that long black wall of the dead in Washington twice as lengthy as it was when an election seemed to put the exit at hand.

Of foreign policy, as the Maréchal de Saxe said of war, the starting point, essence and ending is the human heart, and Edward Said's Orientalism takes us into its darker regions of cant and bigotry. It was a revolutionary book when it appeared in the late 1970s, and like many intellectual revolutions, gave literary form to the politically denied yet obvious. One of the leading literary critics of the twentieth century and a tireless champion of civilized discourse about the Israeli-Palestinian tragedy, Said did nothing less than expose the cultural scandal in Western approaches to the Islamic world: the rotten alliance of enlightenment and colonialism in which academics and novelists, clerks and clerics, soldiers and tourists all confected our own accommodating Muslim Orient, exotic, stagnant, weak yet threatening, prone to despotism yet susceptible to liberation, and above all, relentlessly different, inferior. Deep in the canon of American prejudice, from Woodrow Wilson to Dick Chaney, no bond of ignorance, fear and habit has been more powerful in Washington, save perhaps the intimately related post-Holocaust laissez passer granted Israel, though even that is fading as the Orientalism Express barrels on.

Thus Washington's petty scapegoating of retreat as Mr. Bush's neo-conservative mentors now regret their underestimation of Iraqi "barbarism" and "depravity."...

What is civil war? The question is often raised about the disorders in Iraq. Does the violence between Iraqi religious and political factions amount to civil war, or is it best described another way? The US-led coalition's spokesmen, echoing the views of the White House and Downing Street, refuse to call the disorders civil war. Presumably they believe that to do so would be to admit defeat in their project to set up a stable, legitimate new Iraq.

To assess the situation in Iraq, it is helpful to understand how a civil war differs from an inter-state, cross-border war. There are three principal defining aspects of a civil war, each with numerous subsidiary requirements. The basic formula is simple: the violence must be "civil," it must be "war," and its aim must be either the exercise or the acquisition of national authority.

The "civil" part of the definition means the struggle must be conducted within a national territory, and that it must be carried on largely by the people of that territory, fighting between themselves. It must also involve a significant degree of popular participation.

A civil war also has to be a war—what the dictionary calls a "hostile contention by means of armed forces." Does this definition require formal battles and campaigns? Or does factional or regional struggle suffice? For us the baseline is a minimum degree of organisation, formality and identifiability of the combatants. The battles do not have to be organised, in other words, but the people do. A civil war requires leaders who say what they are fighting for and why, and a public that understands what it is all about—the divisions, the people and the goals.

The third principal condition, authority, is just as important. The point of the violence must be sovereign rule: combatants must be trying either to seize national power or to maintain it. This is the difference between, for example, the Russian civil war and the tribal rebellions now taking place in 14 of India's 28 states, or the late 1990s insurgency of Subcomandante Marcos in Mexico. Revenge, struggles for rights, mass criminality and positioning for economic gain are not sufficient, individually or severally. The opponents must be fighting to rule.

To pass the test of posterity and achieve historical status as a civil war is extremely rare. We can think of only five clear-cut cases: the English (1642-49), the American (1861-65), the Russian (1918-21), the Spanish (1936-39) and the Lebanese (1975-90). There are, of course, thousands of other violent internal struggles in history. But few are remembered as civil wars. Some of those that are so remembered have been misnamed, at least according to our criteria. (The Irish civil war is a borderline case and depends on the extent to which the free-staters are judged to have been running the state.)

When did civil war, as opposed to mere faction fighting between rivals for power, first make an appearance? The English wars of the roses of the 15th century are a possible starting point. These conflicts, however, were largely carried on by landed warriors, allied by family connection to one or other of the principals. The common people did not take part, and indeed were actively deterred from doing so. The wars of the roses thus were not civil wars but violent power struggles. They were brought to an end by the death in battle of the King of England, Richard III, at the hand of his rival, Henry Tudor, who became Henry VII.

But the wars of the roses did have one important ingredient of civil war: the principle of legitimacy. Henry Tudor fought with the determination he did because he believed he had a right in law to the throne of England and because, with reason, he regarded Richard III as a usurper. He nevertheless succeeded by right of conquest alone, and his dynasty kept the throne in subsequent reigns by military force.

The succession passed from the last of the Tudors, the childless Elizabeth, to the Stuarts, whose misrule was challenged on grounds of legitimacy by the parliamentary faction, eventually led by Oliver Cromwell. Cromwell invoked legitimacy to justify his usurpation but it was legitimacy in a new form: ideological rather than hereditary. Cromwell believed that the crown of England could be worn only by a king who was approved by parliament. Charles Stuart's rejection of that view led to the English civil war.

This first civil war reveals all the marks of a classic: claims to legitimacy by both sides, based partly on inheritance and partly on ideology, with the aim of ruling over the whole; the involvement of the common people; the taking of sides by a divided political class; formal military engagements; and the use of violence against the defeated ruler. There was an element of revolution, too, as the victors attempted to institutionalise their victory by bringing about social as well as political changes. The aim was a "new" England, represented by true believers who inherited control of key institutions with the object of changing the country's belief system. Important changes of lasting effect were brought about by the English civil war, though many of these were reversed when divisions within parliament led to the restoration of the Stuarts in 1660.

The war had the effect of inoculating the English against going to war ever again in the name of politics. We might have invented civil war, but we have seen nothing like it since. In that sense, the English civil war was deeply important and highly successful.

Many of those who took part in the American civil war regarded it as being conducted in the spirit of the English civil war (the notion of the "cavalier" was especially alluring to the gentleman soldiers of the confederacy, epitomised by the dashing cavalry chief JEB Stuart). The American conflict, like its predecessor, was fought over an issue of political authority but with an undeclared purpose of social transformation, in this case the abolition of chattel slavery. It was truly a civil war in that common people were hugely involved. In its intensity and totality, it anticipated the big civil wars that were to follow in the 20th century. It was distinguished from them, however, by the spirit of magnanimity that for the most part characterised the conduct of the victors.

By contrast, the Spanish civil war of 1936-39, fought over deep divisions in Spanish society, was characterised by extreme brutality and then savage revenge exacted by the victors. Beginning as a military revolt against the government, in protest at its hostility to certain traditional features of Spanish society, particularly the Catholic church, the conflict was deliberately prolonged by General Franco, the leader of the revolt, so as to inflict as many casualties as possible. Thus it was at terrible cost to Spanish society that the war achieved its objects. It exhibited one feature that was to become common in later civil conflicts: the attraction of foreign fighters sympathetic to the ideas of one side or the other.

The Russian civil war of 1918-21 was an outright ideological struggle, inaugurated by the Bolsheviks to establish communist rule throughout the former czarist empire. It was characterised by brutality on both sides, the intervention of outsiders, and the taking of revenge. Leaders were executed and terror was used against civilians on both sides. It was territorial, it was domestic and it involved large numbers of the common people fighting for both sides. It was ideological and about legitimacy, and led to revolution.

Apart from attacks on the US-led coalition, the current violence in Iraq shows two signs of civil war: it is taking place within the national boundaries of a single country, and it primarily involves local people killing local people. It is civil, in other words. But is it war? And what about the question of authority?

There are three major categories of player in Iraq's domestic violence, each of which has important internal divisions. The Sunni insurgency dominated the violence until spring of this year, when its bombing of the mosque at Samarra finally delivered the long-standing goal of goading Shias into large-scale reprisals. The Sunni violence is composed of two principal parts, one motivated by hardcore Wahhabist and Salafist Islam, and the other by the secular outlook of Baathism.

The second main category is the Shia militias. The most dangerous and active of these is the Mahdi army associated with Muqtada al-Sadr, a fractious and nebulous phenomenon that includes many groups whose connection to the movement is nominal. The older and less active—though better organised—Shia militia is the Badr Organisation, formed during the Shia struggle against Saddam, and originally trained and based in Iran. Badr belongs to Sciri, one of Iraq's two main Iranian-backed political parties and is almost always at odds with the al-Sadr movement, which derives its popularity from Iraqi nationalism.

The third major player in the Iraqi civil killing is the tendency that fights on behalf of the Iraqi state against the sectarian agendas of the Sunni insurgency and the Shia militias. The Iraqi police, police commandos and other ministry of interior forces have been heavily infiltrated by the militias, especially the Mahdi army. The Iraqi army is far more independent. With almost 500,000 Iraqis serving with the police or army, it seems safe to say well over 100,000 Iraqis are fighting for the state against the militias and the insurgents. They represent a major armed faction whose agenda is the preservation of a unified, secular and pluralistic state.

The most striking feature of the civil violence in Iraq is that it is for the most part decidedly unmilitary. Despite the names of the two Shia militias, only the third group, the state forces, exhibits the military characteristics of the principal actors in the five conflicts that we recognise as civil wars: uniforms, clear chains of command, acknowledged leadership, and official, public war aims.

There are no, or almost no, battles in Iraq's domestic killing. Civilians are the principal targets. The looser definition of the "war" part of civil war nonetheless acknowledges that if factions or regions are killing enough people for enough time, it can be petty not to recognise the conflict as something very like a war. Iraq meets this standard only partly: the non-state players for the most part lack anything like the public character of players in civil wars to date. In other words, it is not so much that Iraq is a conflict without uniforms and fighting that prevents it from being a civil war, but rather that it is violence in which no player except the state and al Qaeda, which is a minor player, says what it wants, or indeed says that it wants anything other than the continuation of the country's elected government. (One Sunni Islamist group has recently called for a separate Sunni state.)

An important feature of the conflict in Iraq is the lack of public rhetoric against the enemy by popular leaders. All of Iraq's leaders call constantly for unity, tolerance and an end to the violence. This was far from the case with Lenin, Franco, Cromwell or even Lincoln. To the extent that Iraq's violence involves separatist and regional tendencies, the lack of any public aspect to the factional desires extends to an absence of explicit territorial ambitions. (The Kurds do not feature much in Iraq's civil war scenario. They are essentially separate from the Arab Iraqi state, and should they move to formalise this status, no Arab Iraqi player will be strong enough to stop them.)

Could Iraq be the first civil war ever without battles, generals, explicit war aims, the use of partisan public rhetoric by civilian leaders, mass public participation and targets of a predominantly military nature? Even if Iraq today possessed these characteristics, it would still lack something even more important: the struggle for authority. In Iraq, the state actors are fighting for authority. But the others are not, which is probably why we do not hear from them. The Shia militias are the armed wings of the two biggest parties in parliament, and their people own the top ministries. Neither Badr nor the al-Sadr movement is big enough or strong enough to own the state itself. They balance each other while the Sunnis, whose violent actors are far smaller, provide the final guarantee against a full grab for power by either. It is no coincidence that the only player, apart from the state, that acknowledges war aims is the only player whose war aims constitute the traditional aspiration of exclusive control: the religious element of the Sunni insurgency. The aspiration to a new Baghdad caliphate frees the Wahhabis and Salafists from the pragmatic calculations of al-Sadr or the Baathists, and lets them dream of control, and talk about it on their websites.

Objectively, it must be concluded that the disorders in Iraq do not constitute a civil war but are nearer to a politico-military struggle for power. Such struggles in Muslim countries defy resolution because Islam is irreconcilably divided over the issue of the succession to Muhammad. It might be said that Islam is in a permanent state of civil war (at least where there is a significant minority of the opposing sect) and that authority in Muslim lands can be sustained only by repression if the state takes on a religious cast, since neither Shia nor Sunni communities can concede legitimacy to their opponents.

The Lebanese civil war of 1975-90 offers perhaps the closest example of the sort of outcome towards which Iraq might be heading. An Iraqi civil war, with seven main factions (pro-Iranian Shias, nationalist Shias, Islamist Sunnis, Baathist Sunnis, pro-state secularist forces, and two major Kurdish mini-governments), would very likely offer the confused and confusing array of shifting allegiances and foggy front lines that characterised much of the Lebanese conflict. Without the clarity of blue versus grey, red versus white, or roundheads versus cavaliers, and no one faction capable of winning, the Lebanese civil war went on for 15 years and ended with a broad negotiated settlement. The factions were fighting for authority, for the most part, especially the Christian Phalange, and the others for smaller nationalist projects. Ultimately the country settled into the uneasy equilibrium touched by an endless succession of flare-ups that we know today.

Full democracies are the states least prone to violent civil disorder; autocracies are the second most orderly. It is intermediate democracies and transitional states that are the least orderly. Iraq, of course, is both a transitional and an intermediate democracy. Even without the peculiarly violent character that has been endemic to Mesopotamia since history began there 6,000 years ago, Iraq would still be in the sweet spot for chaos. Yet apart from the Salafists, the state forces are the only player in the current phase of Iraq's domestic violence that aspires to replace the current constitutional arrangement with its own sole rule. These forces, of course, are the only ones that can have that aspiration, for they are the only players who combine the various sectarian identities, and thus the only ones who possess a theory of rule that might work. The individual sectarian tendencies are too weak to replace the current constitutional order in any foreseeable scenario. So what are they fighting for? Revenge, criminality, ideology and political advantage, but not sole authority over the state.