On Tuesday I sent, in response to Wretchard's foreboding suggestion that assertive democratization "cannot reduce the hatred, fanaticism and irrationality that possessed [the London terrorist bombers] in the first place," the following:

Just a tiny point to haggle over, since I understand what you're trying to say: the dictatorial Near East is the heart pumping blood to Islamist appendages across the world. Just as with the Fascists and the Communists, strongmen and thugs who want to try on Islamofascism need a cynosure. When it goes, Islamism will clear up in a fraction of the time it took to fester. Gentleman's bet.

Wretchard graciously replied:

I hope so and would be glad to lose that bet. I think half the heart is the Middle East, but the other half, perhaps a slightly different half is the fantasy part of radical Islam, the kind that lives in the Western academe, where ideas have a way of outstaying their time.

Yes, I answered, relativists will always incubate collectivist, nihilist and nescient ideologies. But I wonder if our understanding of leftist academia is static when it should be dynamic; leftist elites earnestly adopted illiberalism in the first years after the Second World War, and through culture and news media established a Western intellectual monopoly. Universalism and rightism survived in spite of that, and over the past fifteen years new media has shown leftism to be a feckless contender.

Even if the London bombers were Britons whose seduction into evil was facilitated by a permissive and indifferent society, a line can probably be drawn from the young men — through those who inculcated, trained and armed them — leading right back to the Near East. Two questions. First, if lawless societies are reformed, will the left's self-destructive predilections create physical threats to democracy or poseur bootlickers? Second, if the left cannot withstand debate or independently distributed information, what kind of cultural force will it play in coming years?

Yesterday John Derbyshire, who has been rather parochial about the war, echoed a disbelief in the infectious cultural power of authoritarian societies, especially influential to free societies suffering from stagnation or ambivalence — like, arguably, Britain. (Whereas Iraq and Afghanistan, imbued with considerable democratist momentum, are actually influencing the autocracies surrounding them.) Unconvincing to some. "Given," Derbyshire wrote, "that the entire premise of current U.S. policy is that we can end suicide bombing and other terrorism by bringing liberal democracy to the Middle East; shouldn't we be re-thinking our policy?"

No, I wrote to him, only accelerating it.

From where might those capable of the terrorist bombers' indoctrination — if not training and outfitting — have originated? The fascist Near East. What John suggested runs counter to history, as if Seyss-Inquart, Henlein, Ortega or Castro operated independently. That free societies (like the United Kingdom) are susceptible to illiberalism does not belie an authoritarian source — it underscores the incompatibility of democracy and dictatorship.

This morning it was reported that the "home-grown" British terrorists were tutored for their diabolical task by agents in the region that President Bush and his allies are working to militarily and diplomatically reform. Free societies cannot forfend sociopathy but they punish and thereby mitigate it. Tyranny is a celebration of inhumanity. The four killers did not invent al Qaeda; they reached out to Mohammed Atta's homeland for materiel consultation. Take a long, good look.

The right sees what the left cannot. United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan is agnostic on Iran's affront to his own charter:

When asked by a New York Sun reporter if he would speak out on behalf of Mr. Ganji in light of the president's statement Tuesday, Mr. Annan said, "I don't know enough about the case, so I'd prefer not to comment."

Iranian authorities initially arrested Mr. Ganji in 2000 for publishing a book and writing news stories charging his country's political leaders with playing a role in the murder of dissident intellectuals in the late 1990s.

That is sovereignty to the secretary.

As predicted, violent esurience is losing its regional appeal. The opportunity for freedom, come as a steel-and-tracked American guarantee, has been seized. Time, support and diligence will see democracy's culmination.

Hounded and castigated by the ruling theocracy's plainclothes roughnecks, Iranian demonstrators called out — in English — to the free world for succor. They pled for Akbar Ganji, an imprisoned democrat journalist who is deathly ill from hunger strike.

One Western man responded:

As Tehran University students clashed with police in Iran yesterday during demonstrations demanding the release of political prisoners, President Bush, from Washington, joined the growing movement calling for the release of dissident journalist Akbar Ganji.

"The President calls on all supporters of human rights and freedom, and the United Nations, to take up Ganji's case and the overall human rights situation in Iran," a statement released by the White House yesterday read. Calls for comment to U.N. spokesmen were unreturned at press time last night. "The President also calls on the Government of Iran to release Mr. Ganji immediately and unconditionally and to allow him access to medical assistance."

Akbar Ganji won't get any help from the United Nations or Iran's fascist regime; the latter put him in jail for exhorting peaceful liberalization and the former grudgingly accepts Tehran's claims to sovereign brutality. Even with typed words President Bush has done more than his European colleagues, who in their preoccupation with the impossible — convincing strongmen, through nuclear freeze by committee, to yield the tools of subjugation — will be nonplussed.

Yet there are thousands of Ganjis, millions of followers. All despots may reign over people who know by divination that they inherit liberty but Iran is strong irony, the capital of terrorism and the epicenter of a miraculously potent democratic uprising. Saddam Hussein's deposition inspired Near Eastern liberals and placed civilization's military warrant at tyranny's borders. Only when Tehran's Khomeinist skeleton collapses can the war in the Near East be won, our having traded an enemy for close, long-captive allies. President Bush must do as he has promised, and call the Islamic fascists out.

ADVERSARIES WITHIN: A dictatorship's hostility to liberalism should be expected; from an American foreign affairs office, that opposition is reprehensible.

It was a painful moment when I realized the original Star Wars trilogy might no longer be a refuge from the unbearably vapid prequels — that thanks to George Lucas' compulsive tampering the ponderous, unrhythmic and patchwork Special Edition films would introduce the series, and very well leave little Johnny wondering how such mediocrity could dazzle a box office. Children will endure Lucas' puerile obsession with the ethics of Han Solo's defense instead of marveling wide-eyed at Rodian bounty hunter Greedo, torched by a point-blank blaster shot, as he pitches face-first into a Mos Eisley tabletop. Thankfully, the unspoilt theatrical cut can still be found on VHS tapes — and someone in the Skywalker Ranch inner circle must realize that if asked, older audiences would prefer the Star Wars they grew up with, imperfect yet better.

As if an angled glimpse of the ringed planet weren't enthralling enough, the Cassini probe will be zipping past Saturnine moon Enceladus this Bastille Day.

Busy day; commentary regarding Earthbound events tonight.

Wall Street is up, the market is brisk, jobs are for the taking and unemployment is falling with the federal budget deficit in perfect rhythm. High times are apparently no better time for MSNBC to volunteer that quite possibly, maybe, more likely than not ever, perhaps, if conditions are right, there is just that trifling chance of a housing crash.

For commentary that trades a little less in politics and a little more in learned economics, turn to Larry Kudlow.

(Note that MSNBC is currently promoting the housing opinion piece with the splash "Bubble Trouble" which does not, unfortunately, more appropriately refer to the mainstream media's insularity.)

National Review's Warren Bell disagrees with Reverend Paul Hawkins of London's Saint Pancras. Hawkins spoke plainly to his flock today, telling them that "There are no Muslim terrorists. There are terrorists."

Metaphysically, Hawkins has a point. Someone who trains and conspires for months or years to kill as many targeted innocents as possible has a claim to neither grievance nor sanity, let alone one to following the instructions of the prophet Mohammed. Islam has trouble with interpretative passages but if the problem were Islam itself, rather than the tyrannical culture wrapped around Islam's home neighborhood, that which has rewritten many other doctrines to service its squarely bestial aims, every Muslim would be armed and on the warpath.

The objective here — perhaps unintentionally furthered by Reverend Hawkins — is to confiscate from our enemy any reputation for devotion or piety, which is what he is and has been regularly granted by an international leftist elite working to define him for us (and, really, for themselves) as something other than, something more than, a murderer with a head empty save for delusion. Drivers can be dangerous even when they are dumb. William Shirer did well to examine in his The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich the Teutonic-Hegelian-Nietzschean mish-mash behind Mein Kampf and Nazi Germany, and show for every reader what fourth-rate nonsense it was.

What cannot be lost on outward appearances is the uncomplicated and elementally indistinguishable evil that feeds authoritarians.

FROM THE TERROR CAPITAL: Via Glenn Reynolds, a podcasting democratist in Tehran explains to a reactionary Westerner why strongmen and state dictators, not the convenient channel of Islam, are the common enemy of good men — free or in tyrants' bonds.

ANOTHER FROM REYNOLDS: A Bahraini, part of a candlelight vigil outside the British embassy, made a point.

Since late 2003 good news from the marketplace has been a regular attraction for houses billing. This morning's collection of numbers settles any questions left from a heartening Gross Domestic Product revision ten days ago. While non-farm payroll employment missed estimates by about twenty-five percent, April's and May's figures have upon correction increased by about twenty-two and seven percent respectively — lifting the steadily accumulating payroll gross for the last two years to 3.7 million. Unemployment has fallen another tenth of a percentage point to 5%, and other indicators match the high note from yesterday's factory order report.

Wall Street has responded to the economic advisory with the investor's equivalent of a three-minute, whammy-bar, Bach-rock, jump-from-the-top-of-the-Marshall-stack-through-dry-ice guitar solo.

On his radio program this morning, Bill Bennett spoke to a gentleman from the Hudson Institute. Drawing from Cold War terminology, the guest identified three broad classes in the current war: terrorists, anti-terrorists and anti-anti-terrorists. Like their twice-against-communist counterparts, those in the third group are, in a paraphrase of the man's words but no less apparent to many of us, "More worried about John Ashcroft, Alberto Gonzales and George W. Bush than they are Osama bin Laden and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi."

Just over a week ago the Wall Street Journal featured a want ad in the form of an editorial, soliciting a "constructive opposition." That service is not to be found in the leftward Democratic Party, whose membership has invested over some forty months more rhetorical, monetary and electoral capital into domestic political victories — of unsuccessful consummation for token worth — than, in defense of this country and the free world it has helped rear, the defeat of an authoritarian threat that is so manifest in essence and intent as to preclude conversation that strays from plans for victory.

Victory? Nothing like that from the left. The Democratic Party's current national chairman Howard Dean once wavered on the culpability of leaders of the Baghdad Ba'ath and al Qaeda before he spoke of fellow Americans as "evil," "the enemy"; men who were certainly not his neighbor. In last year's presidential race the American electorate was proferred a new executive on the grounds that the one standing was a malevolent force of nature, those he liberated a score-of-a-million nuisance. To the left, triumphs are equally unimportant and distasteful; odd twists can be read, mocking fair elections in free Iraq and Afghanistan as stagecraft while clapping for the pastiche horror of fascist Iran. Losses are never accepted the property of war and serendipity but blamed on this country or its allies or, most crookedly, some sort of prerogative of stone-cold murderers.

If this war is difficult, it is in part because one-third of the country sidles back and forth between accedence and figment.

TEN THOUSAND: Contrary to the words of a ghoulish strongman's patsy like Briton George Galloway, Saddam Hussein's fall sowed the Near East with John Adams, Thomas Jefferson and Patrick Henry.

Our enemy comes again, today, on Seven-Seven. He will return as long as he is able and he will look to stay, and consume us. We can claim no "over there," no luxury of space, wealth or sophistication. The enemy's world of force, hatred and brutality is the old world: impervious to reason, poison to compassion, a circumnavigation of conquest by thoughtless want. It has been shrunk and must be shrunk again, shriveled in the sight of law, liberty and defense thereof, diminished by the peace through strength of free men.

SHOUT IT LOUD: There'll always be an England.

FEARLESS: Wall Street closed up in defiance of this morning's dismal predictions, with Europe and Asia hoping to follow.