The resolute certainty that a “peace” through democracy is available for all men everywhere at all times is a result of the failure in modern times to recognize that particular men develop particular political orders representative of who they are as a People. It is not the other way around.

The Bush Administration, led quite conspicuously by the President, is in a State of Denial. Let’s be clear here, though. I did not read, nor will I, the insipidity passed off as fact by Bob Woodward. I am just leveraging the widely discussed title to make a far more important point.

To make this point clearer, the state of the administration’s denial is not about WMD, Saddam’s connections to al-Qaeda, the nature or strength of the insurgency, whether we are making progress in Iraq or Afghanistan or not, or the importance of our deteriorating relations with our European allies. All of these and other complaints by the Elite, which are used to argue for a retreat from Iraq and from what the government calls its “War Against Terror,” and to replace the Bush policies with a Global Villager police action guarded over by the UN, the Geneva Conventions, the ACLU and other human rights organizations, are transparent for what they are: a continuation of the destruction of national existence.

Unfortunately, President Bush’s state of denial is also a continuation of the destruction of national existence. The difference of course is that the Elite intend the destruction; President Bush and others of his caliber only effectuate it because they are incapable of confronting the responsibility of being a People with a distinct political order and thereby safeguarding and preserving national existence. To understand this point, permit me to place the Bush War Doctrine and his state of denial in context.

The President’s denial was on display during his recent Fox News interview with Bill O’Reilly, posted at the Fox web site as an online video in four parts and available in partial transcript form in three parts, here as Part 1, here as Part 2, and here as Part 3. The President made other televised stops over the past several days for additional public relations work, but the main theme throughout, evidenced well enough in the Fox series, was that the war in Iraq is hard but it will succeed if we stay at it. While the President has consistently maintained that US military tactics on the ground will change and adapt according to those employed in the field by the enemy, the overall war plan remains the same, he assures us. This is his now infamous “Stay the Course” refrain.

That war plan, based upon a two-pronged approach, I have detailed previously in our essay, “Is Democracy the Answer to Islam?” The first prong of the Bush strategy is a good one and a real departure from President Clinton’s, the Democrats in general, and indeed many from the President’s own political persuasion. This aspect of the strategy is to treat the foreign and domestic threat posed by Islamic terrorists as a war and not some kind of domestic or international police investigation. Part of this strategy included what used to be called the Bush Doctrine of pre-emptive war: those states that harbored or promoted terrorism around the world were our enemies in this war and America would pre-empt attack by targeting these state actors with our military, our diplomatic muscle, and our economic might, with special emphasis on the military club since diplomatic and economic sanctions have never worked very well unless a country was actually subject to military action or was convinced it was a real possibility. This is how we landed in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Many of us applauded the President at the time he announced his Bush Doctrine soon after 9-11 and continue to do so to the extent that this aspect of the war strategy remains extant – although we are today almost convinced this doctrine is dead. (See Secretary of State Rice’s fawning over Abbas and Fatah and indeed her olive branch to Hamas here, as an example.)

I am quite clearly not of the Buchanan school of conservativism or of the libertarian variety, both of which would rather bury America’s collective head in the sands of a foreign policy rapprochement blanketed with the cover of isolationism. As to isolationism, it is a viable policy when a country can in fact isolate itself. Today, given the scientific technologies available to any third-rate state and quasi-state actor (this includes al Qaeda), and given the immigration/open borders problem America and Europe refuse to confront (and they refuse to do so for the same reason and it is related to the failure of the Bush war strategy set out below), any attempt to avoid the War Against the West declared by Islam’s 21st Century political actors by hiding behind an imaginary wall will simply result in a continuation of 9-11 and worse.

It is, however, the second prong of the Bush War Doctrine that destroys the first and joins hands, unwittingly to be sure, with the Elite who actively seek the destruction of our national existence. This deadly prong is the wholly unfounded ideology that the Western tradition of individual liberty and representative government, now mostly if not remotely enshrined in the American constitutional Republic, is somehow a universal law of nature that when allowed to take root in other non-Western peoples will initiate a state of world peace hitherto unknown in human history and affairs.

Framed this way it becomes rather tedious and unnecessary to critique the ideological democracy-building part of the Bush Doctrine. As a leap of faith it is sheer folly to believe that all men can be Western men, irrespective of their genetic makeup, their long-held religious faith, their culture, their language, and their social structures and loyalties. But, such is the folly by which men live today.

This ideological leap of faith, well meaning to be sure, is a terrible distortion of the Judeo-Christian principles embodied by the West. This can be understood quite simply with but a quick glance. Judaism is most certainly not, and never has been, a universal or hegemonic religion. Given its position in Exile for 2000 years, with little or no political franchise, this state of affairs is only made all the more a de facto reality of contemporary Judaism. Even assuming a messianic or pre-Messianic return to a Jewish Commonwealth, Jewish law is restricted to that specific Jewish political society.

Christianity, even as it embraces, unlike Judaism, a universal faith of love, peace, and forgiveness for all men equally both in its offering and in its faithful observance, still requires a man to be a Christian (by a free and uncoerced choice of course). What President Bush and all of the so-called neo-conservatives who have embraced this democracy ideology have crafted is a notion arising from its own negation. In other words, they wish to suggest that men can remain faithful Muslims and behave like Christians.

But Islam and its faithful exist as a brute fact incapable of Christian behavior irrespective of the wishful machinations of the hopeful men of the West. The now reams of good scholarship by Bat Ye’or, Robert Spencer, Andrew Bostom and others document beyond refutation or denial that a peaceful Muslim prepared to live in or with the West in civil harmony is simply not a faithful Muslim living according to the legal dictates of his religion. Islam was founded as a violent political ideology, has been so for 1,400 years, and remains this today as is rather grossly on display daily around the globe. That worldwide surveys show substantial majorities of Muslims desiring to live in a world dictated by Islamic law, even if that means a violent imposition of the Shari’a, is only the most recent of empirical evidence fully documented by history and the Muslim faithful themselves. (See, e.g., the reference to the Pew study in my essay here.)

It is this singular but acute failure which renders the Bush War Doctrine, and the specific strategies he and his generals will develop to bring about a peaceful democracy, an abject failure. And, it is why, whether Democrat or Republican, the US government will flee Iraq and the rest of the Islamic world in one last gasp to make peace.

The resolute certainty that a “peace” through democracy is available for all men everywhere at all times is a result of the failure in modern times to recognize that particular men develop particular political orders representative of who they are as a People. It is not the other way around. But because we begin in the modern post-Enlightenment world with the scientific notion that all matter, including men, are indefinite and essentially a singular thing, meaning of course subject to the symbolic abstraction that is mathematical physics, it is not possible to make such distinctions among men or People.

When we no longer value our own Peoplehood as unique from and superior to all others, we are incapable of defending any political order because none can exist. Political order (as in Telos not “law and order”) is surrendered and replaced with political method. Political method, meaning of course democracy, avoids the question of Truth in human affairs because it is based on the “modern truth” that such things are void of certainty and that only the mathematical method of science grants such a perch. In its place, we say that man “progresses” as he embraces yet greater methodological “truths,” otherwise referred to as “processes,” in the absence of the truth of national existence or peoplehood. This is why democracies incline toward the World State.

And, now we see why it is that the Democracy Builders, the democracy ideologues, while hated today by the Elite for even suggesting that any form of war on behalf of the nation-state is necessary, share the most fundamental assumptions about the human condition. This brings us front and center with what I have termed the Redirection, following the teachings of Robert Loewenberg. What is this Redirection to which I have devoted so much energy?  It is quite simply when men of faith are left with their “beliefs” intact, but science, meaning mathematical physics, remains the one and exclusive certainty known to all. In this world, democracy indeed is the great liberator. It is, as we see in spades today, the liberation from national existence and the defense of a People under a vicious assault by Mohammad’s warriors.