IRVINE, CA--"America is not winning the war," said Dr. Onkar Ghate, a senior fellow at the Ayn Rand Institute.
      "To achieve victory we must incapacitate the aggressors. But our politicians lack the intellectual power even to identify our ideologically motivated enemy. They pursue some terrorists but cannot grasp the principle that we must disarm militant Islamic fundamentalism--by eliminating its main state sponsors--just as we disarmed militant fascism in WWII."
      "Even when the Bush administration takes aim at individual terrorists like bin Laden in American self-defense," said Dr. Ghate, "its actions are compromised and without conviction. In Afghanistan, for instance, unconvinced of America's right to self-defense, Bush backed down at the first sign of world disapproval. He would neither commit the number of American ground troops required to capture the enemy nor authorize the kind of massive bombing necessary to kill the enemy before it fled."
      "Such ineffectual action," said Dr. Ghate, is a consequence of "our leaders' intellectual and moral indecisiveness," which he attributes to their schooling in pragmatism, the "do whatever works" philosophy. Pragmatism rejects principles, or permanent truths, as impractical and replaces them with whatever seems to "work" at the moment. The tragic irony, said Dr. Ghate, is that the nation founded on the absolute principles of "reason, individualism, secularism and capitalism" is attempting to conduct a war in self-defense--by rejecting all principles!
      As a result, we are losing the war, but "our cause is not yet lost," said Dr. Ghate. Since we have the military might to defeat the enemy, "nothing more is needed to achieve victory than to replace the pragmatism and self-sacrifice now dictating America's actions with the principles of reason and rational self-interest. Anything less will continue to endanger the lives of Americans."

ARI senior fellow Onkar Ghate is available for interviews on this topic.