Author Insight: Os Guinness on Evil (Part 2)

Author and lecturer Os Guinness has written or edited more than 20 books, including The Dust of Death, The Call, and Invitation to the Classics. Earlier this month, HarperSanFrancisco published Guinness’s latest work, Unspeakable: Facing Up to Evil in an Age of Genocide and Terror. Stan Guthrie interviewed Guinness. This is Part 2 of a two-part series. The first part appeared last week.

You framed the book around seven questions. What are they and why did you structure the book this way?
I came to faith in the early Sixties, and since then have had the privilege of talking to thousands of people about the problem of evil, sometimes in large audiences and often in one-to-one conversations. I have found that the best way to set out the issue is to see the seven steps that have to be thought through in the interests of a truly “examined life.” The book is structured around seven questions that highlight the seven steps, which are as follows:

Recognize the sources of evil and suffering;

Listen to the questions;

Acknowledge the modern transformations of evil;

Assess the different interpretations;

Take the appropriate actions;

Say No to false accountings; and

Appreciate the silver lining.

The different religions and nonreligious faiths respond differently to evil. What are the key differences, and how do these differences play out in the lives of individuals and societies?

My position on this is very politically incorrect. Far from there being a common core down below all the different religions, there are huge differences between the faiths. These differences make a huge difference, not only for individuals but for whole societies and civilizations. So I have separate chapters on the three great families of faith—the Eastern, the secularist, and the biblical—and argue strongly for the third only after looking at the other two.

On the one hand, I try to face the most difficult questions evil raises for the Christian faith, in this case seeking to answer the infamous “trilemma”: how can evil be truly evil, and at the same time God be all good and all powerful? On the other hand, I follow the principle that “contrast is the mother of clarity” and therefore invite readers to appreciate the key differences between the faiths, and make up their own minds as to which is true and adequate.

Evil can be overwhelming, both to our faith in God and to our faith in man. How should we respond to evil in terms of our own faith?

It is often said that after Auschwitz there cannot be a God—evil is so overwhelming that it is the “rock of atheism.” But as Viktor Frankl pointed out, those who say that were not in Auschwitz themselves. Far more people deepened or discovered faith in Auschwitz than lost it. He then gave a beautiful picture of faith in the face of evil. A small and inadequate faith, he said, is like a small fire; it can be blown out by a small breeze. True faith, by contrast, is like a strong fire. When it is hit by a strong wind, it is fanned into an inextinguishable blaze.

For example, Fyodor Dostoevsky wrote that he came to faith in Christ through “the hell-fire of doubt.” The turning point for him after all the evils he had experienced was several hours spent looking at a painting of the descent of Jesus from the cross, after which he wrote, “I do not know the answer to evil, but I do know the meaning of love.” The cross—or as I put it, “no other god had wounds”—is only one part of the Christian answer, but we need to have a fully strong and adequate faith.

What would you say to someone who is suffering from evil?

Suffering is uniquely individual, so there are no recipe answers. The first part of reaching out in love is to listen and try to discern where and why the person is hurting, and only then to bring the reassurance that the gospel brings to that particular hurt. We must never forget that listening is love, that comforting someone with an embrace without words is love, and that if we do not know why someone is suffering, to pretend that we do and say what God is doing in his or her life can be insensitive, cruel, and dead wrong—as Job’s comforters were. That said, evil can torture the mind just as it can torture the body, and it is wonderful to be able to bring specific, comforting truths of the gospel to bear on specific points of anguish and see them make a difference. For example, I have seen more people helped by coming to appreciate the outrage of Jesus at the tomb of Lazarus—and its significance for the notion that “the world should have been otherwise”—than by a hundred worthy expositions of the Fall.

How do you maintain your faith as a Christian in the face of pervasive moral horror?

I think you have the question the wrong way around. Where else are we to go? Which other faith comes close to matching the biblical answer for its combination of realism, hope, and courage? Buddhism, for example, has been described as the most radical No to human aspirations ever formulated. And while I personally have sometimes admired the nobility of great atheists I have met such as Bertrand Russell, there is a bleakness to the nobility that is almost unendurable. “Atheism,” in the words of John Paul Sartre, “is a cruel long term business, and I have gone through it to the end.”

In contrast to all such views, the gospel is truly the best news ever—with its prospect of a world in which evil and suffering are gone, justice and peace are restored, and the very last tear is wiped away.

Do you think the current focus on evil has any upsides?

My seventh step is to appreciate the silver linings in suffering and evil, but we have to be very careful. Recognizing silver linings is not the same as knowing why God allowed suffering and evil in the first place. That we often simply do not know, and the silver lining must never be made into the purpose. But in the biblical view, there is no such thing as “useless suffering.” People often cite growth in character through suffering, and C.S. Lewis is famous for his idea that suffering is “God’s megaphone” and gets our attention. A rarer silver lining that is very important in answer to our postmodern, relativistic, nonjudgmental age is that absolute evil assumes and requires absolute judgment. When an atheist instinctively says, “Godammit!” and actually means it, he is right, not wrong, and is unwittingly praying a prayer that blows apart his atheism.

At the end of the day, it is challenging and sobering to look at human evil, let alone modern evil, in the white of the eye. But from the very depths of my being, with no attempt at propaganda or special pleading, I would say after years of looking into the question, that there is no answer to human evil deeper and more adequate than the answer that is ours as followers of Jesus. But we need to speak it out, and act it out, with clarity, courage, and love today. The world is hungry for it, and so are many in the church.

Author Insight: Os Guinness on Evil (Part 1)

Author and lecturer Os Guinness has written or edited more than 20 books, including The Dust of Death, The Call, and Invitation to the Classics. Earlier this month, HarperSanFrancisco published Guinness’s latest work, Unspeakable: Facing Up to Evil in an Age of Genocide and Terror. Stan Guthrie interviewed Guinness. This is the first in a two-part series.

Why did you write this book, and why now?

I actually had the date September 11 marked down in my calendar for a dinner discussion in Manhattan on evil, which was suddenly made all the more urgent by the terror strike, and I found myself in a passionate discussion of evil among leaders in New York and Washington.

Far earlier than that, evil has somehow been the horizon of my life ever since I was born in China in World War II. Twenty million were killed during the Japanese invasion that swirled around us, and 5 million—including my own two brothers —died in a terrible famine in Henan province, in three nightmarish months. My parents and I nearly died, too. Later, I witnessed the climax of the Chinese revolution and the beginning of Mao’s repression.

So my own life challenged me to think about the problem of evil at a very early age. This left me wanting to address what I have never seen elsewhere: a book that tackled both the personal and the public issues together: Why do bad things happen to good people? And what does it say of us, after the most murderous century in human history, that the people who did these things are the same species we are?

Why do we need to study evil?

Evil is quite simply the greatest mystery in human experience, the greatest challenge in our human lives, and the greatest problem in the modern world. Yet many people haven’t thought it through. If Socrates was right that the unexamined life is not worth living, many people are leading lives not worth living because they haven’t begun to think about life’s greatest dilemma.

For followers of Jesus, evil represents the greatest test for our faith—it has even been called the “rock of atheism”—so we are irresponsible if we haven’t taken the trouble to think it through.

Talk of evil is in the air, from the president’s listing of the “axis of evil,” to the televised beheadings by the Muslim terrorists and the Abu Ghraib prison abuses, and now the tsunami disaster. Several new books, including yours, are grappling with the topic. Yet you say in the book that we are illiterate when it comes to evil. How so?

Sadly, the terrorist strike found the United States as unprepared intellectually and morally as it was militarily. This is the country with the most radical and realistic view of evil at its core—expressed in the notion of the separation of powers in the Constitution because of human nature and the abuse of power. But various philosophies and ideas have undermined that view over the last 200 years, so that American views today are weak, confused, and divided. On one side, many progressive liberals still think that we humans are essentially good and getting better and better. On the other side, many postmoderns actually think it is worse to judge evil than to do evil. And in the middle, many ordinary folk plaster life with rainbows and smile buttons and wander through life on the basis of sentiment and clichés. All of these views and others are shown up as bankrupt by the savage reality of September 11—and Auschwitz and the other terrible atrocities right through to the ghastly spate of car bombings and beheadings in Iraq.

In the book, you mention how the terrible earthquake that hit Lisbon in 1755 undermined religious faith and bolstered the Enlightenment idea of man as the master of his fate. What role will recent tragic events, such as the South Asian tsunami tragedy, have in undercutting faith in God?

Natural disasters are like “nature’s terrorists,” showing us how helpless we are before the terrifying forces of the universe. But, mercifully, the Indian Ocean tsunami will do far less damage to our faith for a whole number of reasons—ranging from the fact that Christians are in the forefront of the relief efforts, seen to be demonstrating the compassion of Christ, to the fact that 20th century evils have put secularist views on the ropes. Recent secularist approaches to evil have proved even weaker than traditional ones. In fact, you might say that evil has reduced the secularist mind to reason at the end of its tether. Those who in the light of evil set out defiantly accusing God are now doubting themselves, their reason, and their ability to assume responsibility for the world —and no wonder.

Do you consider natural disasters like these to be evil, or simply unfortunate?

Following the tsunami, we saw a rush to judgment from many Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, and some Christian spokesmen. It happened for this or that reason, they said. This is quite wrong. We simply do not know why it happened or why God permitted it, and we can be as cruel as Job’s “comforters” when we say we know why when we don’t. We Christians must begin as Jesus did when he dismissed his contemporaries who judged the victims of the riots put down by Herod or those crushed by the collapsing tower. In the biblical view, natural disasters are the dark, sad fruit of a world gone awry because of the Fall, and they are clearly part of the creation that is groaning in anticipation of its coming restoration.

You say modern evil is worse than evil committed in prior eras? Why?

I am not saying we are more sinful or more evil than previous generations, but that we are more modern. The modern world has simultaneously magnified the destructiveness of evil and marginalized traditional responses to evil. From the Armenian massacre in World War I, through the Ukraine terror famine, Auschwitz, the Gulag, the Cultural Revolution, the killing fields of Cambodia, down to Rwanda, the Sudan, and the Congo, the terrible toll reaches into the hundreds of millions of humans killed by their fellow human beings. And the reason for the destructiveness is not weapons of mass destruction; only the U.S. has used one of those. The reason lies in the unholy marriage of modern industrialization and modern processes and attitudes with killing. And by marginalizing traditional responses, I don’t just mean that notions such as disturbance and dysfunction have replaced sin and “grief counselors” have replaced pastors. We have gone far further, and as Roger Shattuck and others have pointed out, we have destroyed so many moral boundaries and limits that we have made evil cool.

Many in the liberal intelligentsia say monotheism—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—is the greatest source of man’s inhumanity—if that is the right word—to man. Yet you say some of the worst atrocities, such as the Soviet Gulag and the Cultural Revolution, were committed in the name of secularism. Which is worse as a source of evil—secularism, or religion?

Monotheism is the “great unmentionable evil” at the heart of our culture, Gore Vidal thundered in the Lowell Lecture at Harvard in 1992, and his charge has been picked up widely and unthinkingly by educated people. The accusation is in fact ignorant, prejudiced, and dead wrong. On the one hand, monotheism is unquestionably the most innovative and influential belief in human history—for instance, its link to the rise of science. On the other hand, more people in the last century were slaughtered under secularist regimes, led by secularist intellectuals, and in the name of secularist ideologies than in all the religious persecutions in Western history combined—more than 100 million by the communists alone. The point is not to trade charges and countercharges about whether religion or secularism has produced more evil but to challenge secularists to engage in serious discussion about public life with a great deal more honesty and humility.

Next week: Part 2

Larry Summers Was Right

The other day, my youngest son had stuck a toy bus inside the cargo area of a toy truck. I told him I would fix it if he got me a knife. My game plan was to stick the knife in there and quickly pry the toy bus out. (I love to demonstrate my “manliness” with my boys.) But despite my surgical skill, the bus barely budged. As I was about to apply more pressure, my wife came to the rescue. She took the truck, got a screwdriver, unscrewed the cargo area of the truck, and handed the bus (unscathed) to my son.

When it comes to things mechanical, I am not the typical male. I don’t know screwdrivers from wrenches. My eyes glaze over at the mere mention of home repair projects. I’m much more comfortable inside a Barnes and Noble than in a Home Depot. I have a writer’s temperament and an unrelenting clumsiness with tools.

Providentially, my wife, who was a Phi Beta Kappa in college, is very handy. She can hang a mirror level, make minor faucet repairs, refinish furniture, and paint a room. While occasionally I think how nice it would be if I could do these “masculine” tasks, for the most part I am simply thankful that God put us together. Our gifts complement one another very well.

Yet the fact that we are not “average” when it comes to what is “typical” for men and women does not negate the fact that there are basic, inherent differences between the sexes. In these politically correct days, it can be dangerous to say so.

Harvard President Larry Summers, a former official in the Clinton administration, found that out recently. At a conference examining why women and minorities are underrepresented in science careers, Summers suggested three explanations for why there are such small numbers of women holding tenured math and science positions at elite universities.

First, Summers postulated, women with young children might not be willing or able to put in the grueling hours these positions require. Second, girls generally have lower scores on math and science tests than do boys, and these differences might be innate. Third, discrimination might be a factor.

A balanced assessment? Not to MIT biologist Nancy Hopkins, who walked out halfway through the speech and who later told reporters she felt “physically ill” when Summers mentioned basic sexual differences in the sciences. Hopkins said if she hadn’t left, “I would have blacked out or thrown up.”

Later, 100 Harvard professors took their president to task in an open letter that said such comments “serve to reinforce an institutional culture at Harvard that erects numerous barriers to improving the representation of women on the faculty.”

On the willingness of women to put in the hours required to reach the top in math and science at the expense of family, our era is becoming a disappointment to the bra-burning women of a generation ago. More and more women are choosing to stay home, regardless of their innate abilities. The Census Bureau reports that in 2003 about 5.4 million mothers with children 14 and under stayed home, an increase of a million since 1995. In 2001, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, a majority of women with kids under 6 worked only part time or not at all. Just 42 percent worked full time.

Stay-at-home moms are not just from America’s wealthier classes. Half of them come from households with a family income below $50,000. A 2003 CBS News/New York Times poll found that 61 percent of adults believe kids are better off if their mother stays at home instead of holding an outside job.

On innate differences in ability between men and women, 30 years of scientific studies show that men and women have different aptitudes. Men do better, generally, in mathematical reasoning, mechanical understanding, and spatial relationships. Women tend to do better in language, reading, and other verbal tasks. Even when women do as well as men in the hard sciences, they often choose to work in fields with a higher social component.

On whether discrimination holds some women back, doubtless that does still occur. However, judging from the heated reaction Summers received from Hopkins and from members of his own faculty, one has to wonder how widespread this is in academia. After all, if women really are in short supply in the hard sciences, one would reasonably presume that those qualified to compete at the highest levels would get every benefit of the doubt from those making the hiring decisions. After all, political correctness is a much bigger fact of life on campus than is political incorrectness.

So can women match or even excel what men can do in business, politics, on campus, or in the sciences? Yes (though not inevitably or always). Are men and women different? Yes, again. Is a woman only valuable for what she can produce in the work world? Thank God, no.

As a Duke sociologist told the New York Times, “The feminist literature of the ‘70s and ‘80s made marriage and childbearing sound like it was just drudgery. The truth is that a lot of people find having kids incredibly rewarding.”

I know one talented, intelligent wife and mother who would wholeheartedly agree.

Courage, Cowardice, and Calculation

If America wondered about George W. Bush’s courage, there can be no doubt about it now. During the State of the Union address, the commander-in-chief did something few politicians before him ever attempted—and lived to tell about it. Mr. Bush proposed reforming the ultimate entitlement program: Social Security.

The president said both parties must make hard choices now. “The system,” he said, “on its current path, is headed toward bankruptcy. And so we must join together to strengthen and save Social Security.”

To avoid what he sees as a looming fiscal and demographic meltdown, the centerpiece of Mr. Bush’s approach would be to allow younger workers to keep a portion of their Social Security payroll contributions in their own accounts (which, unlike the current system, they could pass on to their heirs). Workers 55 and over would be grandfathered in and see no changes.

The president also said other reforms—such as raising the retirement age, indexing benefits to prices rather than wages, discouraging the early collection of benefits, changing the way benefits are calculated, and limiting benefits for the wealthy—are on the table.

“I know that none of these reforms would be easy,” Mr. Bush said. “But we have to move ahead with courage and honesty, because our children’s retirement security is more important than partisan politics.”

Not surprisingly, the party of FDR cried, “Heresy!” Harry Reid, the Senate’s new minority leader, apparently intends to follow in the footsteps of his predecessor, the former obstructionist-in-chief Tom Daschle. During the Democratic response, Reid labeled Bush’s ideas “dangerous,” likening them to “Social Security roulette.”

That’s not what the Democrats said when Bill Clinton was president, of course. In 1998, Clinton proposed using budget surpluses not for tax cuts, but to “save Social Security first.” Vice President Al Gore said, “Social Security faces a serious fiscal crisis.”

Why the suddenly cold feet? There’s more than political cowardice at work here. Democrats are making a cold political calculation.

One of the Democrats’ few remaining advantages over Republicans with voters is the perception that Democrats care more. What more powerful symbol of this alleged concern than Social Security, created by FDR during the Great Depression as a last-resort measure to keep Grandma from being thrown out on the street? If Democrats lose control of this issue, they risk losing control of the people who have come to depend on them for handouts. They also risk being the minority party for a generation.

So while President Bush tries to deal in facts, the Democrats predictably have returned to their old playbook of scare tactics. (Remember “Mediscare”?) Apparently they will block any action not proposed by Democrats. That’s what happens when you run out of ideas and your primary concern is political power.

In contrast to the scare tactics, here are some facts:

• When Social Security began in the New Deal, 16 people were paying into the system for every person who collected benefits;

• Today three people are paying in for every person collecting;

• In a few years, it will be two paying in for every one collecting;

• In 2010, the first of 76 million Baby Boomers will turn 65;

• In 1935, when Social Security began, only 5.4 percent of the U.S. population was over age 65; today, 12.5 percent is;

• The program will begin running deficits in just 13 years if nothing is done;

• By 2033, if current demographic trends continue, the system will be running a $300 billion annual shortfall;

• By 2042, Social Security will be bankrupt;

• By 2060, according to the Cato Institute, Social Security will gobble up 71 percent of the federal budget.

Yes, of course there are risks, but the bigger risk lies in doing nothing. Bankruptcy or vastly larger payroll taxes—right now at 12.4 percent—would be a certainty. As to the fear-mongering charge that the stock market is too risky for Grandma to invest in, the real risk is in sticking with the current approach, which is terminally ill.

Reid and his cronies continually invoke magic words like “Social Security trust fund” and “lockbox” to give the impression that they can keep the system as it is. But despite what they imply, there is no “trust fund” bulging with Grandma’s contributions awaiting her retirement, and no “lockbox.” The government spends the rapidly dwindling annual Social Security surpluses, replacing them with IOUs. The only sources of her future “guaranteed” benefits are future workers—and proportionally there will be fewer and fewer of them, at that.

And while the current “guarantee” may be cut, so will many of the current constraints limiting annual returns. That means more money for seniors. According to Cato, Social Security recipients retiring today will receive an annual return of 2 percent for all their contributions over the years—barely above money market and CD rates. Future workers would likely get even less. Meanwhile, the Social Security Administration itself conservatively estimates stocks to return 6.5 percent annually in coming years (historical returns have been much higher).

Which rate do you think Grandma would prefer—2 percent or 6.5 percent? As Bill Clinton once said in another context, “Isn’t it obvious?”

Apparently not to Democrats, who are too cowardly or calculating to even discuss needed changes. If they don’t, they risk being exposed for the obstructionists they have become. They also face losing out on the credit that will accrue to those who—like President Bush—have the courage to take on this difficult issue.

Et Tu, Peggy?

The response to the president’s speech was predictably harsh. Historian Henry Steele Commager said, “It was the worst presidential speech in American history, and I’ve read them all.” The New Republic said the president was guilty of “staggering oversimplification.” Columnist Richard Cohen said that the president “likes to see things in black and white and so he has enlisted God on our side.” Anthony Lewis of the New York Times described the speech as “simplistic” and “dangerous.” Even presidential speechwriter David Gergen complained about some “outrageous statements.”

The focus of their ire, however, was not George Bush’s controversial second inaugural address elucidating “the policy of the United States to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world.” No, it was Ronald Reagan’s “evil empire” speech given to the National Association of Evangelicals in 1983.

Just as large segments of the intelligentsia initially mocked Reagan’s speech, calling it naive and simplistic, so the same groups, even some of the same people, have mocked Bush. Echoing Commager, writer Gore Vidal called Bush’s address “the most un-American speech I’ve ever heard.” The Washington Post called the speech “exceptional in its untethering from the world.”

Even presidential speechwriter Peggy Noonan said, “The inaugural address was startling. It left me with a bad feeling, and reluctant dislike.” Responding to the president’s several allusions to the Almighty, a headline writer at the Wall Street Journal titled her reaction column “Way Too Much God” (a title Noonan quickly disavowed).

But just as history has vindicated Reagan, so it will vindicate Bush–we all must fervently hope.

(Of course, many pundits and editorial writers liked the address. William Safire called it one of the five best second inaugurals in the nation’s history. Dick Morris, a former political aide to Bill Clinton, called it “the greatest [inaugural] since John F. Kennedy’s and one of the five or six greatest of all time. It was beautiful, it was poetic … and it articulated a bold new doctrine for American policy. It was a very substantive speech.”)

Of all the critics of the speech, certainly the one whom conservatives probably take most seriously is Noonan. Noonan, no partisan hack, is one of the nation’s most gifted writers. Last year she took a leave of absence to help Bush win re-election. Nearly two decades ago she crafted some of Reagan’s most memorable phrases. If the speech worries Peggy Noonan, an undeniable friend (and sometime-advisor) of the administration, then perhaps there really is something seriously wrong with it. Et tu, Peggy?

In Noonan’s initial column, she suggested Bush’s speech might be evidence of “mission inebriation.” In a follow-up column–“A Sourpuss? Moi?”–Noonan sought to clarify her thoughts. “To declare that it is now the policy of the United States to eradicate tyranny in the world, that we are embarking on the greatest crusade in the history of freedom, and that the survival of American liberty is dependent on the liberty of every other nation–seemed to me, and seems to me, rhetorical and emotional overreach of the most embarrassing sort.”

Aside from the exaggerations, one can see that Noonan has graduated from the Henry Kissinger/Brent Skowcroft school of practical foreign policy. Reading those words, one can almost see Mr. Potter dismissing George Bailey as “a man of high ideals–so called.” Noonan wants us to be mostly practical, not too idealistic. (Or, as the first President Bush might have said, "Let's be prudent.") While Noonan clearly loves the beautiful ends Bush enunciated, she clearly fears the means needed to achieve them.

Instead of putting dictators on notice that the tide of history has turned against them and that the United States stands ready to help those who yearn to be free (as Reagan did), Noonan suggests leaving tyrants in place because they function as “garbage-can lids on their societies.” She says when these authoritarians are removed, “the garbage” (freelance terrorists, grievance merchants, and ethnic nationalists) comes to the fore. She cites France under the bloody reign of Robespierre as an example of what happens when an American president (in this case, Jefferson) uncritically supports liberty in other lands. Of course, Noonan is right to remind us that humility is a valuable asset now, and that “this is not heaven, it’s earth.”

Yes, freedom does not immediately emerge after the removal of autocracy, and there are often unintended consequences to even the best-intended acts. Everyone knows that the “freedom fighters” who drove the Soviets out of Afghanistan (with the considerable help of Reagan) eventually morphed into the Taliban, who provided sanctuary to Osama bin Laden.

But the fact that we cannot foresee all ends doesn’t mean we shouldn’t act on what we do know. While we did end up with the Taliban, we also ended up with the shattering of the evil Soviet empire, which was crippled by the bloody quagmire in Afghanistan. We also ended up, today, with the beginnings of democracy there–and, now, in Iraq.

Critics of Bush’s policy in Iraq have been known to point out that Reagan also tacitly supported Saddam Hussein–who in turn posed a security risk to the United States. Actually, they are making Bush’s case for him. The president is saying it harms America’s long-term security to support such dictators, and it is time to let the world know that we will do so no longer. Such regimes can no longer expect us to turn a jaundiced eye to their inhuman reigns.

Indeed, Noonan’s strategy of propping up dictators is precisely what got us into this mess in the first place. Islamists are infuriated by our perceived coddling of unjust, authoritarian regimes in places like Saudi Arabia and Egypt.

Militant Sheikh Omar Bakri Muhammad, leader of Britain’s radical Al Muhajiroun group, sponsored a meeting celebrating the 19 hijackers of September 11. Sheikh Omar told Christianity Today the conditions for peace with America.

“Peace could come,” he told CT, “if America withdrew its forces from the Muslim world, stopped exploiting Muslim resources such as oil, have decent relationships with Muslims, and stopped supporting the Zionist aggressors and Muslim puppet governments.”

In other words, if America removed its troops from Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and other parts of the Muslim world; if the United States stopped using oil; if we betrayed Israel; and if we allowed friendly governments to fall into the hands of fantatics … then the terrorists would leave us alone.

And why not? We would already have surrendered.

As is easy to see, the Noonan/Kissinger/Skowcroft plan to keep the “lid” on the “garbage” counts for precisely zero in the minds of people like Sheikh Omar. In fact, that is one reason they hate us so much.

The president’s critics (including Noonan) worry that Bush has issued an unending call to arms against the fanatical strain of Islam. But as Bush said clearly in his speech, “This is not primarily the task of arms.” This is a war of ideas. Going Noonan’s way would disarm our side before that battle has been fully joined. Given the democratic successes we’ve already seen in unlikely places such as Afghanistan and Iraq, lapsing back into realpolitik now would be a crime.

Yes, it’s going to be hard fight, and victory is not assured. But as Daniel Henninger, another fine Wall Street Journal columnist, noted, “We have to be in the game spreading our model because the other side is most certainly out spreading theirs.”

Ronald Reagan would agree. So should Peggy Noonan.