printMark Steyn’s essay, “Facing Down Iran: Our lives depend on it,” appears in the Spring-2006 issue of City Journal. The Journal is billed as “the nation’s premier urban-policy magazine… an idea factory” on policy questions.
Let me stipulate for the record that Steyn is an entertaining writer and fun to read. There is, moreover, a great deal that is valuable in this piece—and in his work, in general. However, I don’t think Steyn’s epistolary razzmatazz should be confused with in-depth analysis, or be passed as such in policy-oriented publications.
What do I mean in the context of his Iran run-down?
Just one example: Steyn is courting a confrontation of biblical proportions with Iran. But for me one of the profound questions is this: the West, including the U.S., consists of a bunch of deracinated nations, only relatively free, whose governments are engaged in indoctrinating their respective populations about the twin wonders of Islam and Muslim mass immigration. The Crusaders we are not.
On what philosophical basis, then, does Steyn wish to wage war on a belligerent Muslim country? What are we fighting for if we’ve surrendered already—we’ve welcomed their infiltration of our societies and institutions? (See my expose of this process in the winter issue of The New Individualist)
Surely the real war is at home? Surely the fight for self-determination—individual and national—must be waged against government and its sundering of our sovereignty, individual and national?
Apropos Mark (indirectly, that is), Michael Pinto-Duschinsky, a director of the International Foundation for Election Systems, recently wrote in Times Online: “Increasingly, bodies such as the AEI [American Enterprise Institute] are less keen on sponsoring thinking and research. They are giving desk space and star roles to a breed of fast-talking practitioners of the television soundbite.”
I think it’s fair to say this is a general trend.