The premeditated vacuum of nightly lucubration...

Hugh Fitzgerald writes in an article today about the blindness of our Iraq War policy:

“These are the kind of things [i.e., eminently rational things about the problem of Islam which Hugh had just enumerated and described] that General Petraeus may not realize in the hectic vacancy of daily trying to create an alliance here, a compromise there.”

There’s that curious vacuum again. The way Hugh describes the problem of a Petraeus, there is nothing larger surrounding Petraeus—no massively dominant and mainstream sociopolitical culture throughout the entire West—that is moving him to see only what he sees, and no further to all the dangers and evils of Islam which a Hugh Fitzgerald finds so self-evident. No, as far as Hugh is concerned, it is mostly only the “hectic” schedule of Petraeus that is causing him to be so colossally blind and reckless to this single most deadly and important problem of our time.

And, of course, for Hugh this is pretty much the same explanation—with slight, horizontal variants—he applies to all those in high places who are so egregiously and catastrophically myopic to the problem of Islam. Either they are too busy, or they are too greedy, or they are too inflexible, or they are simply not intelligent enough. Such a diagnosis is absurd and, frankly—particularly when churned out by someone with the degree of influence Hugh has—, contributing to the problem.

“. . . so this, yet one more sign of the limits of his understanding and therefore of his usefulness in the war of self-defense against the Jihad, dismays.”

To which I would add, with only a slight twist:

“. . . so this, yet one more sign of the limits of his understanding and therefore of his usefulness in the war of ideas against the PC Multiculturalism that obstructs our ability to fight against Jihad, dismays.”

All that lucubration Hugh cultivates is evidently not enough—or perhaps too much. Perhaps he should quench the candle-flame once in a while and rise up out of his deep thoughts to the shallower level of level-headed common sense.