Opinion: Here are three small news items from around the world you might have missed:
(1) An unemployed waitress in Berlin faces the loss of her welfare benefits after refusing a job as a prostitute in a legalised brothel.
(2) A British court has ruled that a suspected terrorist from Algeria cannot be detained in custody because jail causes him to suffer a "depressive illness".
3) Jeffrey Eden (17) of Charlestown, Rhode Island, has been awarded an A by his teacher and the "Silver Key" in the Rhode Island Scholastic Art Awards for a diorama titled "Bush/Hitler And How History Repeats Itself".
A trio of itsy-bitsy little stories from the foot of page 27 of your daily paper, if they made it at all. But they're as revealing about the course of the war as anything going on in Iraq. The Germans, in the bad old days when their preferred field of combat was France rather than Fraulein Helga's government-regulated bondage dungeon, used to talk about "wehrwille" - war will. America, Britain, Australia and a select few other countries have demonstrated they can just about muster the war will on the battlefield. On the broader cultural front, whether this war in the end will be won, there's little evidence of any kind of will.
The waitress forced into prostitution by the government is, at one level, merely an example of the unintended consequences that follow every legislative initiative. But, at another, it's the logical reduction of the modern secular welfare state.
Like all those European utopias John Kerry wants America to be more like, Germany has a permanently high unemployment rate and, as a result, penalises those who refuse to take available jobs - like providing "sexual services". The welfare office in Gotha ordered a 23-year-old woman to attend an audition for a job as a "nude model".
So now the welfare office is modifying Queen Victoria: lie back and think of Germany. And why not? When you cede to the state the responsibility for feeding, clothing, housing yourself, for your parents' retirement and your own health care, it's hardly surprising they can't see what the big deal is about annexing your sex life as well. If a welfare state were a German S&M club, the government is the S and you're the M. The "security" of welfare is not usually quite such literal bondage, but it always is metaphorically.
When the Germans legalised their brothels they thought it showed how relaxed and enlightened they were. The al-Qaeda types take a different line: they think it's a sign that the west is decadent and weak and cannot survive. And they have a point: The government forcing women into prostitution is merely the latest example of the internal contradictions of secular progressivism.
That British court judgment is another. SIAC, the United Kingdom's anti-terrorist court, found in 2003 that the 35-year-old Algerian male in question had "actively assisted terrorists who have links to Al-Qaeda". But he was released from Belmarsh Prison because of his "depressive condition".
I'd be in a depressive condition if I were a terrorist: the Afghan camps are gone, the Great Satan's liberated Iraq, and Osama re-emerges from his three-year sabbatical only to release a floppo "Vote Kerry!" video recycling a lot of lame Michael Moore gags.
The more Islamists in a depressive condition the better. Maybe if they get sufficiently depressed they'll stop being terrorists and become trainee accountants or male hairdressers. By western standards, every Islamic terrorist is "depressive" - for a start, as suicide bombers, they're suicidal.
Senator Kerry, you'll recall, thought terrorism should be like prostitution - a nuisance. But, if these court judgments are any indication, it seems to be more like German prostitution - they're out and about, free to do what they want, and with the full backing of the state.
In such a world, it's good to know we still have the guts to finger the real bad guys.
Thus, when Lynn Norton, art teacher at Chariho Regional High School in Rhode Island, set her pupils the task of expressing an idea three-dimensionally, Jeffrey Eden immediately thought of a diorama comparing Bush to Hitler.
You might think that ought to be disqualified on the grounds that characterising Bush as Hitler is about as two-dimensional as you can get, and it's less of a diorama than the diarrhoea of leftist rhetoric, as poured forth by millions of moveon.org drones and California's saggy nude feminist protesters and European activist puppeteers. But there's always room for one more, and Jeffrey's schoolmarm was thrilled at the way he did it so cutely, draping a swastika on one side and the Stars and Stripes on the other, and putting in little plastic soldiers - Nazi and American, though who can tell the difference, right? - and then adding his own penetrating observations on both Bush ("Saddam had no affiliation with the Taliban") and his predecessor as Führer ("Hitler's own justification was his own hatred." Hmm).
Well, Jeffrey's 17. One day, with a bit of luck, he'll realise Bush isn't Hitler. If he was, Jeffrey would be in the Bush Youth doing patriotic exercises in shorts every morning and singing the special Texan lyrics to the Horst Wessel song, and he wouldn't have time to do dioramas of dissent.
But what are we to make of everyone else in this sorry story? The art teacher who gave him an A. The 15 judges in the Rhode Island Scholastic Art Awards who awarded him their "silver key". The proprietor of Alperts Furniture Showroom in Seekonk where the winning "art" work is proudly on display.
I'm not worried about Iraq. As they demonstrated on January 30th, they'll be just fine. The western front is the important one in this war, the point of intersection between Islam and a liberal democratic tradition so mired in self-loathing it would rather destroy our civilisation just to demonstrate its multicultural bona fides.
It's not that young Eden knows nothing, but that neither his teachers, judges nor furniture showroom proprietors do. By contrast, our enemies know us very well, at least when it comes to courtroom strategies and canny manipulation of the fetish of "tolerance".
It's an open question whether the west will survive this twilight struggle: Europe almost certainly won't, America might; on the other hand, the psychosis to which much of the culture is in thrall may eventually reach a tipping point into mass civilisational suicide. And then the new barbarians will inherit, and young Master Eden will end his days pining for the rosy-hued epoch of the Bush-Hitler tyranny.