Behold the Frog - OpEd

Behold the frog, that ubiquitous creature. We are told by those who say they are in the know that if you place a frog in hot water, it will immediately realize its peril and escape. Ahhh, but if you are clever and place the frog in temperate water, it will remain contentedly as you gradually turn up the flame beneath the pot until it is boiled quite nicely to death. My fellow Americans, We’re the frog! We’re in the water, and the water is approaching boil.

We have been the object of war since at least the first attack on The New York World Trade Towers, and we just don’t get it. To compound our confusion, we cannot directly blame one nation or one easily definable group as we flail about trying to contain a growing conflagration fought by warriors who reject the very pillars of our world as decadent.

The Pope gets it! In his recent speech at the university at Bonn, The Pope pays obeisance to the traditions of the university process, the specialization of study but coming together truly as universitas scientiarum to consider questions of blended specialization. He finds nothing inconsistent in the attempt to correlate faith and reason, and it is the coming together of these separate approaches that has provided the basis for the humanism that propels western society. Without limiting God we seek reason to understand Him, and at least since the Reformation, find nothing inconsistent in that approach. We believe the scientific progress that has created the modern world permits us to better understand God and in no way separates us from Him.

To the Pope, “God is not pleased by blood, and not acting reasonably is contrary to God’s nature. Faith is born of the soul, not the body. Whoever would lead someone to faith needs the ability to speak well and to reason properly, without violence and threats…to convince a reasonable soul, one does not need a strong arm or weapons of any kind, or any other means of threatening a person with death…”

To the enemies of his world view, ( i.e. Islamic jihadists), he would have been in trouble enough if he had stopped there, but citing Theodore Khoury, editor of the 14^th century text of a dialogue of emperor Manuel II and an educated Persian, he continues by citing the dialogue: ‘But for Muslim teaching, God is absolutely transcendent. His will is not bound up with any of our categories, even that of rationality’ (not even his own word). It was Manuel II who said ‘Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached’.

In this dictate, Mohamed crosses over from faith as we understand it to political action. We cannot imagine the God we worship ever doing so, but for the jihadists it is Allah’s will and that is enough. Our Western ways are “decadent” and mark us for extinction.

There are rewards for the warriors in the after life if they die striking a blow for Allah, and thus time as we think of it and our relationship to the world around us is also just a measure of our corruption. As I wrote two weeks ago, this is not a time to be debating giving Miranda warnings. These are warriors from outer space that blend in with several hundred million other Muslims that just want to lead a peaceful life.

Here I do have a gripe. It would be easier to justify our western notions of equal rights to not “profile” those who may pose our society a lethal threat if the hundreds of millions of Muslims who wish nothing to do with Wahabi Jihad would vocally and actively stand up to denounce what they are doing to Muslim society. We do have many allies in the region, but it is for those who live in the Middle East to help us to eliminate from their midst this cancer eating at their vitals.

For us “no good deed goes unpunished”. We are a foreign element in a far land discordant in our ways. Even if they do not like the jihadists, they might wish us to be less in evidence. Will Roger’s quip comes to mind, "When you get into trouble 5,000 miles from home, you've got to have been looking for it." Well, we were asking for it, if not exactly “looking for it”. There is a great deal of truth to the notion that we are there because of oil.

Our Founders warned against entangling alliances. To that proscription I would add as even more important entangling resource dependencies. They are an even graver threat to our nation’s security. We should never have allowed ourselves to become so dependent on critical supplies for our modern economy from such an unstable part of the world.

We NEED to be there now. We SHOULD be there now to protect our national security. That is what nations do, but to be so dependent on energy resources from the region is truly a castle built on sand. It also provides ammunition that has been used effectively by our enemies and the forces of chaos to paint us as self serving invaders not liberators.

At the end of 2005, we produced 4.86 million barrels a day of domestic oil and imported a little over ten million barrels a day, much of that from the Middle East. Our other potential sources of supply Russia, Mexico and South America are also problematical. The permutation of possible solutions is complex and perhaps the subject of a future column. Whatever we do the solution to our dilemma will be long and painful in coming, but we’d better get at it today. Tomorrow may be too late.

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Robert E. Freer, Jr., president of the Free Enterprise Foundation, is a visiting professor and the John S. Grinalds Leader in Residence 2005-2006 at The Citadel. He is a regular contributor to the Mercury and may be reached at Robert.freer@citadel.edu. Have a favorite column from the past? Copies of his earlier columns can be found in the archive at www. FreeEnterprise.tv.

Charleston Mercury October 11, 2006. Page 16.