THE BELL CURVE:Logic, not rhetoric

In a world where football coaches, former presidents and retired generals with an ax to grind and a book to be autographed can pull down $100,000 to read a speech they often didn’t write, the Newport Beach Public Library Foundation — which doesn’t have 100 grand to spend on a speaker — has done a fine job this year in finding provocative attractions for its Distinguished Speakers Lecture Series.

Case in point: Reza Aslan, the Middle East analyst for CBS News and top-listed author of “No god but God: The Origins, Evolution, and Future of Islam,” delivered so much well-documented good sense over a library podium two weeks ago that listening to him powerfully reinforced the anger and embarrassment so many Americans are feeling at the god-awful ride this country has been taken on for the past six years. And Aslan’s audience didn’t have to speculate about whether he had written his own speech because he held forth for well over an hour without ever looking at a note.

“Recent polls tell us that 87% of Americans say we’re losing the war on terror,” he began, “but the very idea of a war on terrorism is part of the problem. Who is the enemy? Is it Islamic fascism? Is Osama bin Laden the head of this monolithic movement?

“Such thinking is disingenuous. The insurgent groups can barely stand each other. Only terror holds them together — that and their hatred of the United States.”

Then Aslan told us how such rhetoric is aiding and abetting the insurgents and what kind of new thinking is essential.

“We need to come up with vastly different responses,” he explained. “We can’t defeat an ideology with guns and bombs. The insurgents know that winning on measurable terms is impossible and ludicrous for them. So they have reshaped their efforts as a cosmic war — good versus evil. Light versus darkness. What they fight for is a heavenly game where the stake is one’s own soul — a game that they can’t lose, negotiate or surrender. The jihadists see themselves as standing between Islam and its destruction by the western world.

“In an ideological war, our most useful weapons are words, but the terrorists are able to use our words against us because we’re absorbed in the same view they are, that anyone not with us is against us. There are true believers on both sides of the aisle, and that is truly frightening. We need to quiet our officials who are saying that the enemy in our war on terrorism is Satan,” which simply plays into their concept of a cosmic war.

All of this makes so much more sense than the rhetoric coming out of Washington these days. Yet it’s almost a slam dunk that any office-seeker who made these arguments in a political campaign wouldn’t have a prayer against the true believers because their time hasn’t yet come, and — God help us — may never come.

Remember the retired generals and colonels and journalists like Seymour Hersh who also stood at the library’s podium in past years and gave us chapter and verse on the lies and deceits and stage managing that is now surfacing in Washington? If we had been ready to listen then, maybe public opinion could have been brought to bear on the direction of this country long before we dug the hole we’re now in.

We have a long record of galloping to the very edge of serious damage to the pillars of this country before wising up and pulling back. Think of the damage wrought by Sen. Joseph McCarthy, the deep divisions over Vietnam, the resignation of President Nixon, and now the use of a national tragedy to browbeat us into accepting a war initiated and supported on lies.

Someday we’re going to wait too long, but not if the Aslans in our midst continue to get a hearing.

Aslan is the sort of super-academic the true believers like to scorn. He has degrees from Santa Clara to Harvard University by way of the University of Iowa in fields as far apart as Islamic and Middle East studies and a fellowship in fiction writing, which, he says, he will turn to after his new book, “How To Win a Cosmic War” is published next year.

There, among other things he will be saying: “We work on rigid postulates like ‘Don’t negotiate with evil.’ Diplomacy is not a reward for good behavior.” Or: “We must differentiate between their tactics and their grievances. They have legitimate grievances.” Or: “We don’t want anything but autocracy we can deal with.

“We support autocrats to keep radical fundamentalists out. So it’s anti-democracy that keeps them out. We only want democracy when the people we want win.”

Next up on the distinguished speaker agenda is a balancing act by Andrew Sullivan, who will talk about how we’ve lost the conservative soul, and how we can get it back — which is the way this series should and does work.