There now exists a considerable faction of conservative critics of the war effort, of which a cadre of apparently disaffected retired military officers forms a large and increasingly irrational part. While some of these conservative critics are political opportunists or self-absorbed attention-seekers, I believe most of them do have their hearts in the right place. Yet too many of even those whose hearts are in the right place have nonetheless become so obsessed with attacking Rumsfeld and the "neocons" that they have lost the capacity to discern how their agitations affect the higher and more pressing concern of sustaining the public will to pursue the war.

Allied with them is an online conservative friend of mine who misses no opportunity to disseminate as widely as possible every criticism of the war effort in general and Donald Rumsfeld in particular, no matter from what quarter that criticism arises. My friend's latest find requests our attention to a recent column by liberal pundit Mark Shields, who waxes indignant that:

Because of the incompetence or indifference of this nation's civilian leadership of the war, Americans in Iraq are living with an increased risk of death.

All the official transcripts of White House signing ceremonies for every defense spending bill, all the presidential proclamations for Veterans Day and every prepared statement by the secretary of defense before a congressional committee include the same stock phrase. U.S. troops are invariably referred to as "the best trained, best equipped" ever. Best equipped? To call today's American troops in Iraq the "best equipped" is more than an exaggeration; it is bilge, baloney and cruel.

An America coming out of the Great Depression somehow found the leadership and the will to build and deploy around the globe 2.5 million trucks in the same period of time that the incumbent U.S. government has failed to get 30,000 fully armored vehicles to Iraq.

The Bush administration has appropriated $34.3 billion on a theoretical missile defense system -- which proved again this week to be an expensive dud in its first test in two years, when the "kill vehicle" never got off the ground to intercept the target missile carrying a mock warhead -- but has been able up to now, according to congressional budget authorities, to spend just $2 billion to armor the vehicles of Americans under fire.

How surprising it is that Mark Shields has become a proponent of increased military preparedness!

Well, it would be surprising . . . if one believed Shields cared more about the troops than he does about using their travails to advance his left-wing agenda.

But as with many of those on the left who have lately discovered within themselves an intense interest in armor plating, Shields' fascination with metal arises not from its capacity to protect our troops against IEDs and RPGs, but rather from its utility as a novel camouflage for his leftist goals, of which the intermediate ones include ending the Bush tax cuts and canceling development of a national missile defense. Shields' more immediate motive--which he shares with my online friend--is to unseat Donald Rumsfeld. He pursues that subsidiary strategy of discrediting Rumsfeld in furtherance of a longer-term goal--which my good-hearted online friend does not share, but nonetheless advances--to undermine the public will and confidence to pursue the war.

In that effort to break the nation's will to win, Shields carefully nurtures the unwitting assistance of those like my online conservative friend, who, to borrow a phrase from Milan Kundera, have become "the brilliant allies of their own gravediggers."

Shields' trendy indignation about armor plating is of the same variety as the solicitous concern Ted Koppel pandered for three consecutive evenings this past week on "Nightline," which featured the exploitation of the emotional sufferings of troops returning from Iraq. A blurb now on ABC's website promotes the series thusly:

Wednesday, Dec. 15 through Friday, Dec. 17: "Nightline" investigates the psychological toll of war in a three-part series: "Coming Home: The Invisible Casualties of War."

In case you didn't catch the allusion, recall that "Coming Home" also happens to be the title of a 1979 post-Vietnam anti-war movie about a paraplegic veteran just returned from battle and a nurse who falls in love with him. The film stars none other than Jane Fonda who won an Academy Award for the performance.

Can anyone be so gullible not to see what Koppel and Shields are all about?

The "psychological toll" they most worry about is the one they wish to inflict upon the American will to win. As important as is the matter of our troops' armor, much more so is the matter of our nation's will to win. Beyond all else, the durability of the latter shall decide the outcome of the present war and whether the sacrifices of the warriors, about whom Koppel pretends to care so much, shall have been in vain.

In his latest column, "The New Red-Diaper Babies," the New York Times' David Brooks has dreamed up a new age sounding name--natalism--for a phenomenon James Taranto had long ago and much more thoroughly described as the "Roe Effect." (See e.g., "Birds Do It, Bees Do It, Even GOPs Do It" or "Quantifying the Roe Effect".)

In a nutshell, Taranto's theory of the Roe Effect notes that, by aborting tens of millions of their own offspring, liberals have earned themselves a place on the Endangered Species List:

We base this [theory] on two assumptions. First, that liberal and Democratic women are more likely to have abortions. Second, that children's political views tend to reflect those of their parents--not exactly, of course, and not in every case, but on average. Thus abortion depletes the next generation of liberals and eventually makes the population more conservative. We call this the Roe effect, after Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court's 1973 decision that established a constitutional right to abortion.

In its fundamental observations, Brook's natalism theory is pretty much the exact mirror image of Taranto's Roe Effect. The Roe Effect emphasizes how abortion contributes to a declining liberal birthrate, while Brooks' "natalism" (a less threatening name for essentially the same theory) maintains a polite silence on the impact of abortion and instead emphasizes the fact that conservative voters tend to have more children than liberals:

You can see surprising political correlations. As Steve Sailer pointed out in The American Conservative, George Bush carried the 19 states with the highest white fertility rates, and 25 of the top 26. John Kerry won the 16 states with the lowest rates.

In The New Republic Online, Joel Kotkin and William Frey observe, "Democrats swept the largely childless cities - true blue locales like San Francisco, Portland, Seattle, Boston and Manhattan have the lowest percentages of children in the nation - but generally had poor showings in those places where families are settling down, notably the Sun Belt cities, exurbs and outer suburbs of older metropolitan areas."

These statistics are highly interesting, undeniably important, and will provide diverting work to secure the careers of hundreds of otherwise useless, bored, and unimaginative graduate students in contemporary political science departments across this great land for at least another decade. Perhaps one of them could address the nagging question of why liberals don't really seem to like children. But the portion of Brooks' column that inspired me to sit back down at the keyboard after a long hiatus was something rather less momentous that I noticed in his three closing paragraphs, especially the penultimate one:

Natalists are associated with red America, but they're not launching a jihad. The differences between them and people on the other side of the cultural or political divide are differences of degree, not kind. . . .

. . . .Like most Americans, they wonder how we can be tolerant of diverse lifestyles while still preserving the family institutions that are under threat.

What they cherish, like most Americans, is the self-sacrificial love shown by parents. People who have enough kids for a basketball team are too busy to fight a culture war.

Now we all know that the main reason the Times hired Brooks was for him to serve as a token conservative voice in the cacophony of that liberal choir.

But the thing is, Brooks is not a conservative.

First of all, a real conservative, unlike Brooks, would never, ever, not in a million light years, write the cloying euphemism "tolerating diverse lifestyles," except as a most extreme form of sarcasm.

And no real conservative would ever be so mushy-headed to posit the particular tone of wonderment that Brooks attributes to "most Americans": "They wonder how we can be tolerant of diverse lifestyles while still preserving the family institutions that are under threat."

But more to the point of substance: Notice how the mild-mannered Mr. Brooks slyly tries to nudge the reader toward believing that in the minds of "most Americans" a concern for being "tolerant of diverse lifestyles" is somehow equal to a concern for "preserving family institutions." Yes, in Brooks' own mind, "tolerating diverse lifestyles" does indeed deserve consideration equal to that given to "preserving family institutions."

But that's not the way a real conservative thinks.

If presented a conflict between "tolerating diverse lifestyles" and "preserving family institutions," a real conservative wouldn't agonize over it the way Brooks pretends to. A real conservative would tell you, in two seconds, "To hell with 'diverse lifestyles'." After making that point clear from the start, if a real conservative thought you capable of receiving rational argument, he then would go on to explain patiently why, in the hierarchy of social goods, tolerating gay marriage, uh I mean "diverse lifestyles," can't rank anywhere near preserving family institutions. (But if a real conservative thought you incapable of reasoned discourse, he would tell you that you could take your "diverse lifestyles" and stuff them up your toleration hole.)

If the recent sweep of votes banning homosexual marriage, uh, I mean "diverse lifestyles," is any indication, "most Americans" aren't at all troubled by Brooks' dilemma, but instead agree whole-heartedly with the real conservatives.

But maybe I'm misinterpreting Brooks when he suggests that "most Americans" worry about how to "be tolerant of diverse lifestyles while still preserving the family institutions." Maybe the proper interpretation of the thing he's thinking "most Americans wonder" about is: "How the hell can we be so foolish to be contemplating even further undermining our fundamental social arrangements just to pander to the selfish demands of sodomites, uh, I mean 'practitioners of diverse lifestyles,' when our family institutions are already going to hell in a handcart?" If that's what Brooks meant, well then, I owe him an apology. But if, as I suspect, Brooks' real question in his own mind is, "How can we find a good way to convince those uneducated breeders to give in and accept homosexual marriage?" in that case, the New York Times needs to find a new token conservative.