But there were more insidious problems Communism had infiltrated European intellectuals for a half century and taken control of debate: if fascism were wrong and defeated, wasn’t the answer its most bitter enemy, Communism?

Americans, mercifully not given to ideological argument, have left it to Germans and French — and hypocritical Indians and Third Worlders. [Does anyone remember Barzan el-Takriti, Sadam Hussein’s evil half-brother who just had his head severed during hanging, once presided over the UN Human Rights Commission? or at the UN Indians defending the 1956 Soviet Hungarian invasion?]

In Germany 1945, American Military Government amateurs fiddled..[In the democratic satire tradition it’s okay to laugh now at Bell for Adano but then it was a critically serious matter.] Not only was there an enemy, but — as the saying goes — "G__d deliver me from my friends". Germany’s largest political movement, the social democrats were ambivalent. Traditional wisdom said they would be the permanent German government party if there was reunification because they represented the Protestant majority and held the northern cities. Even the few stalwart veterans who staggered out of Nazi death camps said they wanted neutrality in the Cold War blossoming only three years after WWII slaughter ended.

Harry Truman responded to socialist Ernest Bevin’s plea for a coordinated economic rebuilding. But few in American government took seriously reconstructing European minds — dragged through collaborationist filth or catalepsy as six million Jews at the heart of European civilization were murdered.

But wonderful American pragmaticism took over. In Berlin, Radio RIAS [Radio in the American Sector] with the world’s greatest orchestras appealed to the oppressed under Communism. A sharp, young New Yorker ex-Trotskyist, Melvin Laski, with the backing of U.S. military ["using Hamiltonian methods for Jeffersonian ends" is the way German professor Michael Hogeschwender puts it; so much for the argument you can’t instill democracy in Iraq by the sword!], started an intellectual magazine. Der Monat, revolutionizing debate anong endlessly bickering German illuminati taking places left by Hitler’s persecutions and the war.

A patchwork grew up — Radio Liberty to reach into the Soviet Union, Radio Free Europe called Central Europeans [whom President Gerald Ford claimed were not under Communist domination in in a famous malapropism which may have cost him the election and the U.S. its credibility in the Carter Era of total foreign policy confusion]. The CIA-funded Congress for Cultural Freedom globalized Der Monat as Encounter and a half dozen other publications and hundreds of gabfests before being exposed by a successful Soviet black operation, Bombay’s Blitz.

Ronald Reagan finally came along throwing the final firecrackers imploding an ostensible impregnable Soviet empire, appeased over decades by Henry Kissinger and the supposedly hard-nosed, practical realists. Even among Bush’s critics’ opposition to "Iraq", of even his "war" on terror ["we must get to fundamental causes", that line runs, as for example, perhaps, the fundamental evil of some human beings?] Few argue against the theoretical importance of propaganda and the importance of ideas. The Charles River crowd talk incessantly of it.

But not to put a fine point on it, one looks around in vain at the current war on terror.for anything resembling the audacity and the effectiveness of the Cold War campaign. The Administration has had a penchant for turning this one over to incompetent ladies ["soft power"?, what a sexist thought!] The first, an advertising executive, spent millions on movies not permitted to be shown in the Islamic world. The second, a Washington apparatchik, retreated to Wall St. [as so many have], using the "fundamental issues” alibi. Bush’s acknowledged domestic media mavim, the third candidate, appears to have dissolved into a flood of tea with Arab ladies and State Dept.’s fear of actual public diplomacy.

At the outset of this contest, the usual suspects [G__d forbid they should be called Cold Warriors or neoconservatives!] tried clumsily to mount such an effort in Rumsfeld’s Pentagon. But his own media chief either presided over, or encouraged, a rabid campaign against it led — of course by The New York Times, who else? It might, they said, create a blowback whereby U.S. propaganda would infiltrate the American media. These same guardians of the holy grail of journalistic integrity have correspondents rarely outside Baghdad’s Green Zone, who depend on Iraqi "stringers" [part-time correspondents] and interpreters whose loyalties they never check, or, in fact, who apparently sometimes do not exist.

A half-hearted effort has been made at Arab-language electronic services beyond a diminished Voice of America. [At the same time that Al Jazeera English, pays former foreign service officers for interviews!] But where is that Arabic journal for intellectuals? Where is the militantly anti-Jihadist network of academic conferences? Where is the avalanche of cheap, popular Arabic anti-jihadist publications and entertainment films? Where is the attempt to amplify anti-jihadist Moslem South Asia intellectuals?

Alas! "Fostering Intellectual And Human Capital By Creating An Expert Community Of Counterterrorism Professionals . . ." is cumbersomely bundled item mentioned in Bush’s December 2006 announcement of new tactics. The hour is late.

Sol W. Sanders, (solsanders@cox.net), is an Asian specialist with more than 25 years in the region, and a former correspondent for Business Week, U.S. News & World Report and United Press International. He writes weekly for World Tribune.com and East-Asia-Intel.com.