Is It Civil War Yet - Road to the Middle Class

HERE AT Road to the Middle Class we have said: Of course there is civil war in Iraq. There are parties contending for power, parties that mobilized for war after the collapse of the Saddam regime. What else are you going to call it?

But Ralph Peters in The New York Post says no. You want civil war, he writes, try this definition:

I'd define it as a broad internal conflict between at least two contending governments, each of which has the overt support of a substantial portion of the population and each of which fields organized (if not always professional) military forces.

Indeed, the strategy of the terrorists in Iraq is to provoke a general civil war in which the Iraqis are mobilized into general conflict their entho-religious parties: Shia, Sunni, and Kurd.

Clearly, general civil war hasn�t happened, not yet. But it might, and the parties have been building militias just in case.

Meanwhile there is a great civil conflict in Iraq, and our western media isn�t doing anything to help, as White House reporter Helen Thomas this week seemed determined to prove.

The MSM and the Democrats need to be careful here. The president says, as he did in response to Helen Thomas�s question on Monday asking him why he went to war in Iraq when �Every reason given, publicly at least, has turned out not to be true.�

I'm never going to forget the vow I made to the American people that we will do everything in our power to protect our people.

You can tell that he invited Helen Thomas to make her question so that he could wrap himself in the flag as the protector of the American people.

Liberals like to sneer about the president wrapping himself in the flag. They are wrong. The president�s job is first and foremost to protect the American people from enemies foreign and domestic. All the other stuff, the pensions, the rights, the programs, the promises, all that is mere bagatelle.

So when the president says that his entire effort is to protect the American people, you�d better be sure of your facts before you call him a liar. That is why Bush carefully, and politely makes sure to call Helen Thomas on her accusation.

I think your premise -- in all due respect to your question and to you as a lifelong journalist -- is that, you know, I didn�t want war. To assume I wanted war is just -- is just flat wrong, Helen, in all due respect --

All that stuff about �due respect� and �lifelong journalist� is gentlemenly politeness, packaging around the basic message: You are flat wrong.

The problem is that our news media and our educated elite just don�t get it. Not on the war, not on the economy, not on the social issues, not on the war on terror, and certainly not on civil war in Iraq.

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Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.

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Civil Society

“Civil Society”—a complex welter of intermediate institutions, including businesses, voluntary associations, educational institutions, clubs, unions, media, charities, and churches—builds, in turn, on the family, the primary instrument by which people are socialized into their culture and given the skills that allow them to live in broader society and through which the values and knowledge of that society are transmitted across the generations.
Francis Fukuyama, Trust

What Liberals Think About Conservatives

[W]hen I asked a liberal longtime editor I know with a mainstream [publishing] house for a candid, shorthand version of the assumptions she and her colleagues make about conservatives, she didn't hesitate. “Racist, sexist, homophobic, anti-choice fascists,” she offered, smiling but meaning it.
Harry Stein, I Can't Believe I'm Sitting Next to a Republican

Liberal Coercion

[T]he Liberal, and still more the subspecies Radical... more than any other in these latter days seems under the impression that so long as he has a good end in view he is warranted in exercising over men all the coercion he is able[.]
Herbert Spencer, The Man Versus the State

Moral Imperatives of Modern Culture

These emerge out of long-standing moral notions of freedom, benevolence, and the affirmation of ordinary life... I have been sketching a schematic map... [of] the moral sources [of these notions]... the original theistic grounding for these standards... a naturalism of disengaged reason, which in our day takes scientistic forms, and a third family of views which finds its sources in Romantic expressivism, or in one of the modernist successor visions.
Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self

US Life in 1842

Families helped each other putting up homes and barns. Together, they built churches, schools, and common civic buildings. They collaborated to build roads and bridges. They took pride in being free persons, independent, and self-reliant; but the texture of their lives was cooperative and fraternal.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism

Society and State

For [the left] there is only the state and the individual, nothing in between. No family to rely on, no friend to depend on, no community to call on. No neighbourhood to grow in, no faith to share in, no charities to work in. No-one but the Minister, nowhere but Whitehall, no such thing as society - just them, and their laws, and their rules, and their arrogance.
David Cameron, Conference Speech 2008

Faith and Politics

As far as the Catholic Church is concerned, the principal focus of her interventions in the public arena is the protection and promotion of the dignity of the person, and she is thereby consciously drawing particular attention to principles which are not negotiable... [1.] protection of life in all its stages, from the first moment of conception until natural death; [2.] recognition and promotion of the natural structure of the family... [3.] the protection of the right of parents to educate their children.
Pope Benedict XVI, Speech to European Peoples Party, 2006

Never Trust Experts

No lesson seems to be so deeply inculcated by the experience of life as that you should never trust experts. If you believe doctors, nothing is wholesome: if you believe the theologians, nothing is innocent: if you believe the soldiers, nothing is safe. They all require their strong wine diluted by a very large admixture of insipid common sense.
Lord Salisbury, “Letter to Lord Lytton”

Conservatism's Holy Grail

What distinguishes true Conservatism from the rest, and from the Blair project, is the belief in more personal freedom and more market freedom, along with less state intervention... The true Third Way is the Holy Grail of Tory politics today - compassion and community without compulsion.
Minette Marrin, The Daily Telegraph

Class War

In England there were always two sharply opposed middle classes, the academic middle class and the commercial middle class. In the nineteenth century, the academic middle class won the battle for power and status... Then came the triumph of Margaret Thatcher... The academics lost their power and prestige and... have been gloomy ever since.
Freeman Dyson, “The Scientist as Rebel”

Government Expenditure

The Union publishes an exact return of the amount of its taxes; I can get copies of the budgets of the four and twenty component states; but who can tell me what the citizens spend in the administration of county and township?
Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America

Conservatism

Conservatism is the philosophy of society. Its ethic is fraternity and its characteristic is authority — the non-coercive social persuasion which operates in a family or a community. It says ‘we should...’.
Danny Kruger, On Fraternity

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