One of the arguments in Dinesh D'Souza's new book contrasts what he calls traditional Muslim attitudes with radical (and more militant) ones, proposing that America dial down what he regards as the trash of our popular-culture exports to prevent the traditionalists from being radicalized. One of the many problems with this way of conceptualizing the challenge of terrorism emerges in this dispatch from National Public Radio. When curiosity and needs for excitement and identification motivate members of other cultures to create cultural artifacts controversial within their own cultures, should we automatically side with whomever is angry with the latest innovation, for example by not exporting works that might spur on the Saudi avant garde?

Efforts to implement cultural conservatism as a tool of public diplomacy invite constant self-doubt and embolden increasingly censorious impulses among foreign commisars struggling to stem the raucous tide of cultural creativity. (How would reflexive capitulation to voices of fear and conformity really protect modern liberal societies in a globalized world? Who knows from what corner of our cultural life another country's cultural rebels will draw their inspiration?)

As I've implied, the entire project D'Souza advocates along these lines is not simply fraught with random difficulty; rather, it is likely be be counterproductive because it is actually incoherent. After all, the development Kenyon describes, occurring in one of the more culturally restricted settings in the Arab world, illustrates the prohibitive contentiousness of populist or oligarchic attempts to draw a meta-line, conceptually, between benign and harmful cultural products. Qualitative aesthetic judgment is crucial to many individual and social goals in any culture, but it best occurs in thought and conversation amidst the backdrop of a vigorous civic array of art, ideas, folkways, and other cultural forms, not as a matter of a necessarily stagnant canon of received wisdom. To set oneself, or worse, one's country, as fundamentally opposed to the dynamic nature of imagination and its unpredictable unfolding within a social context is to fight a battle that can only be won temporarily and partially by the imposition of totalitarian social organization (and heaven help the culture that "succeeds" in this task for any length of time). This losing-battle dynamic obtains within a country and also, essentially, across cultures. The concept of an open society carries more challenges, but also more uses and levels of meaning, than we often appreciate.

Even though the public has turned against the war, it obviously hasn’t done so decisively enough for its escalation to be politically unfeasible. One reason for this merely lukewarm antiwar sentiment is the fact that antiwar elected officials still often speak uncertainly (evading the topic) or stridently (evading many of the relevant details). To an extent, I think Glenn Greenwald, typifying the left antiwar argument, falls into this trap in what is generally an important, valuable post written in his usual hard-hitting style.

Glenn puts forth the “how dare they” argument -- as in, How dare they question our patriotism, or our interest in fighting terrorists? But while hawks phrase their point in rather demagogic terms, there is also substance to their concern that ending the war will have consequences for al Qaeda's perception of the military viability of attacking Americans or American forces. Bin Laden’s reasoning on the issue, drawing on such incidents as the 1993 Mogadishu withdrawal, prior to Sept. 11 is well-known. This phenomenon has become something of a Republican talking point, but that’s because it raises a real issue. Glenn’s post really doesn’t speak to it.

To evade this issue is catastrophic in both political and policy terms. We need to earn voters’ trust on national security in future elections and we cannot wish the issue away or rely for much longer on Bush as a foil to avoid our own reckonings with defense crises. We need specifically to be able to argue to the voters that any strategic advantage al Qaeda gains from US disengagement will be outweighed by the strategic advantage we gain from doing so. The most prominent arguments we’ve managed so far when we broach the issue are that the Iraq war has been a recruitment aid for terrorism and that it’s diverted resources from Afghanistan and other fronts. The first point is important, but rhetorically it’s rather weak tea -- removing a recruitment tool from the other side is not the same thing as doing something to actively harm them. The second point has been made in detail by Russ Feingold and recently by Hillary Clinton. It needs more elaboration and exposure, but it too may not be enough. In any event, we need as much as possible to bring into the common parlance of national politics a progressive vision of what it means to protect ourselves in an globalized world, a vision that does not restrict itself to homeland security funding.

Soft power is among the most important components of such a vision, but we can’t argue for it in the abstract, as John Kerry did, without risking looking ridiculous, thereby losing the argument and the opportunity to produce a change in policy. (I might note that even though we finally managed to leave Vietnam, the public elected Ronald Reagan less than a decade later.) The Iraq debate provides an important test of our ability to articulate the relative merits of various alternatives and to address strategic contingencies seriously and unsentimentally, in addition to asserting our economic and humanitarian concerns about a war that shows no sign of ending.