The Western Phalanx

What Went Wrong with Islam

2006-01-30T08:47:00.000-08:00

Bernard Lewis, What Went Wrong, Interview with Brian Lamb 11/18/01, C-Span.org.

Notes:

Starts with historical Islam, from center of culture and innovation to being roundly defeated. This absolute defeat in 1699 started a debate, which has gone on ever since. "Hitherto we have defeated the infidels, now they are defeating us." Defeat on the battlefield preceeded defeat in market place, and defeat politically and scientifically.

Tried to emulate economy, political systems, militaries of West. Nothing has worked. Situation has gotten worse and worse. Have come to be dominated by the West.

A debate which has been going on for three centuries, getting more ramified lately.

Lewis was in His Majesty's Service during WWII, saw much of the Middle East.

Two articles were his biggest initial contributions: "Root of Muslim Rage", 1990, he had come to realize more and more that there was a hostility towards the West and the US in particular.

Second article appeared in 1998, on Osama's Declaration of War on the US.

"Old enough to believe that history consists of facts supported by evidence."

Analyzes the phrase, "That's history", implying that something in the past is unimportant. Says Americans are generally ignorant of history. A major difference between the US and the cultures in the Middle East, where they have a very keen awareness of history and the narrative they fit into.

For example, in the Iraq Iran war, the war propaganda made frequent allusions to events of the seventh century, in the secure knowledge that the listeners and readers on both sides would pick up these allusions and understand them. When Osama, in one of his recent pronouncements, says "we have suffered this shame and humiliation for 80 years...", his audience understood him. He was, of course, referring to the fall of the Ottoman empire, the occupation and partition of that empire, ultimate point of degradation and humiliation of the Muslim world. At its height, extended from the suburbs of Vienna to the east of Iran. Mustafa Kemal "Ataturk" led an uprising and reeoccupied Anatolia, led a secular revolution and set up secular military state. From a Muslim point of view, this was the worst that could happen, eliminated the Caliphate.

The Caliphate is the head of Islam. Theirs is a religion subdivided into nations, not nation subdivided into religion. They do not define themselves in national terms, but in religious identities and political allegiance.

Koran was revealed by the Archangel Gabriel to Mohammed, Koran is "divine and uncreated." Exile and return is a theme in Muslim history. Mecca to Medina and back again.

Non-Muslims are not allowed to go to Mecca. "Only one religion in Arabia" is the maxim, which caused Osama so much grief when America based troops there. Important difference between Mohammed and his "predecessors" was that Mohammed was successful during his lifetime. Was not he that was put to death but his enemies. Put together a state, conquered with the Sword, made peace and war, all things a head of state does. Forms part of the core of memories that all Muslims share. Therefore, Islam is political in a sense that Christianity and Judaism are not.

Mohammed was not divine, but he was a prophet, chosen to deliver God's message. They also revere Jesus as a prophet, but consider it blasphemy to consider him son of God.

Modern history of Middle East begins in 1798. The French Republic sent expeditionary force to Egypt under Bonaparte. Taught the first "appalling lesson" that even a small European army could enter, occupy, and govern the Middle East at their leisure. The departure of the French was second lesson: only another European power can get them out (driven out by Sir Horatio Nelson of Great Britain). Departure was not achieved by Egypt.

Middle East was more or less passive object of greater power games from outside the region. In the final phase it was the US v. USSR. But this was the end of it. Bush I and Gorbachev ended this Imperial rivalry over the Middle East. America because they wouldn't, Soviets because they couldn't.

When it comes to defining American interests in the Middle East, two big topics: 1) Oil, and 2) Israel.

Oil. Oil was found in the first part of the 20th century. The development of oil made a tremendous difference in every respect: the radical Islam originated in Arabia as far back in 18th century, but it would have remained there if not for oil. The unlimited wealth allowed them to set up schools and colleges all over the world to spread their ideology, their brand of fanatical, extremist Islam. Without oil money, this type of Islam would have remained on the fringe. By buying oil, we are indirectly contributing to the continuation of this problem.

Oil has been a curse to the Arab world. Provided vast wealth to an otherwise pastoral system. "No representation without taxation." Didn't need the people and their taxes to govern. Traditional Muslim government is authoritarian, but it wasn't dictatorial or tyrannical. Only recently has the power of the ruler been augmented by oil. Either they will run out of oil, or it will be superceded by some other tech. Oil has strengthened autocratic government, made it more effective in its oppression. Inhibited the development of other forms of gainful economic effort.

Came to Princeton because they "made me an offer I couldn't refuse, a New Jersey expression." There was a difference between the students at Princeton and in London. Undergraduate education is better in England, but graduate education is more rigorous here.

Israel. Israel/Palestine question is not really of primary importance. That and anti-Americanism are the only grievances that are allowed to be freely expressed in the Middle East. So it is of secondary importance, the primary factor being political oppression and the general feeling of Muslim discontent.

"Either get tough, or get out"

Kind of wishy-washy policies are not going to work. Why do they hate us is the wrong question, they've been hating us for centuries. You can't be rich, strong, successful...and loved, especially not by those who have nothing. The question should be why do they not fear and respect us. There has always been a struggle between these religions, and now the wrong one seems to be winning. The hatred is axiomatic.

Something that comes out in writings of bin Laden. There were always rival powers before, if they were unhappy with US they could turn to the Soviets. Can't do that anymore. It has concentrated their minds towards us, and they think they destroyed the Soviet Union. Saw this as stage one on the road to victory, were scared of the Soviets, thought they were the worst.

They thought dealing with the US would be comparatively easy. Litany is always repeated: Vietnam, Lebanon, Somalia, etc. They say that we were there to install Imperial Somalia, and were driven away by a few casualties. How do we get tough?

Continue good work we've started in Afghanistan, then deal with other countries and terrorist groups that are supported by them. The only other alternative is to get out completely. He prefers getting tough to getting out. Getting bullied then retreating is not a good idea.

People's goodwill is inverse to who the governments support. Divide Middle East into three regions. 1)Governments support America -- these countries have rabidly anti-American population. Notably Egypt and Saudi Arabia. "It's no accident" that a great majority of the hijackers come from these countries. Regard governments as American puppets. 2)Governments are anti-American -- people are very pro-American. Remarkable demonstrations in Iran after 9/11. If you have an unpopular government, and the government tells you America is bad, you will assume America is good.

He hopes that what has happened in Afghanistan continues into Iraq and Iran. He's been told that after seeing the scenes of rejoicing in Afghanistan, it would look like a funeral compared to what the celebrations would be in Iraq and Iran were they liberated from their present rulers.

The desire for freedom is very natural. Contitutional democracy is a Western idea, freedom as a political ideal is a Western idea. However, in Muslim world, the ideal government is one of justice, mean what we largely mean by justice, enough room to squeeze in the idea of freedom under this rubric.

Third group: where both government and people are friendly to US. Only two states, both democracies (oddly enough!), Israel and Turkey, where the government can be thrown out by the people if it becomes unpopular. This eliminates the inverse relationship between the opinions and assumptions of the people, and that of the government.

On media: much information that we get here is trivial. Is devoid of context, presented bare and naked, and therefore meaningless. Media is supposed to be intellectually useful. The paradigm has shifted to being one of stimulation. We are prodded with electricity and diverted by red meat. We are no longer educated. Sheep are treated such.

He speaks briefly of the role of women, and how Ataturk focused on the issue of women's rights. Quotes Muslim philosopher, "Society that eliminates the contribution of one half of its citizens is like a human body that is paralyzed on one side."

Quantum Morality

2006-01-01T15:14:00.000-08:00

I think good and evil are helpful constructs, but they must be contextualized to have true meaning.

Killing, without context, is an amoral concept. Killing in war can be a good, likewise killing to protect your family. Were those imperatives universalized, without dilution, the world would be a better place. Even Kant could be convinced of their moral worth.

Murder, contextualized by its definition, is evil except at the extreme margins--where the victim, in life, had been a greater evil. (Of course, this leads into second order problems of who gets to decide who should be murdered. The answer, historically, has been to grant the authority to the State. Of course, the addition of "the State" into our matrix changes the context of the act, so the moral worth of the act changes. State "murder" becomes State-sanctioned execution.)

Good is that which is life-affirming. In any situation, it is defined by a matrix of contextualized data points.

Unfortunately, some of those data points exist in the future, as things that have not yet happened. Our knowledge of context is imperfect. Worse, we don't know if the unforeseen change in context will change the moral valuation--the good or evil of the act.

But the past is our glimpse of the future, and after a while certain patterns begin to form. With humans, these patterns became statistically sound maxims and moral rules of thumb: in other words, they became our Newtonian Ethics and Newtonian Morality.

But life is more complex than we can imagine, and at extreme pressures, Newtonian Morality breaks apart. Laws get flipped and turned upside down. Actions, amoral in nature, are rapidly reevaluated for moral worth. Murder becomes self-defense.

It is in the search for an underlying order in the chaos of high pressure where mankind cannot seem to find good answers. Until we get a statistical theory of morality, we never will.

Newtonian Ethics have worth, there is no doubt about it. It is just that they are shorthand for something else.

Where are the Savior Groups?

2005-12-11T09:44:00.000-08:00

Wretchard posts on China and environmentalism.

There are many reasons why human rights and environmentalist groups focus on America to the near exclusion of China, and all of them have to do with economics.

China is ignored because it is impervious to attack. In normal circumstances, success creates visibility, and visibility brings in donations. In a world of opportunity cost, one cannot expect many people to expend resources on ventures with zero returns. The Savior Groups, knowing this, spend their time in greener pastures.

Attacking America is ubiquitous because returns on investment are so high. The entry barrier is low, and success is not even required to gain visibility. There is a constant, unwavering spotlight over here, a spotlight that has its own gravity on the annointed.

Also, one must look to the economics of ego. Success, or alternatively visibility, vindicates feelings of self-importance, and nothing is so dependent on sustenance as self-importance.

No Crisis of Knowledge Here

2005-12-11T09:41:00.000-08:00

Cedarford, a commenter over at the Belmont Club, posted:

IN ten years, China has gone from producing less engineers and scientists to 6 times more, and have just surpassed America in producing hard science PhDs. Exceptional, too, more Asians now take those PhDs in America than native born Americans do.

I responded:

I wouldn't worry about that. Most of my complacency is based upon anecdotal evidence, but I am confident that America will not suffer a crisis of knowledge and expertise.

For instance: a Tibetan student I know who is over here getting an engineering degree. He kids us all the time about him finding an American wife to marry so he can stay here after he graduates. The earnestness in his eyes is heartbreaking when he talks about how lucky the rest of us are to be citizens in what he calls "the land of freedom."

I am not disputing the fact that many Chinese students arrive in America with nationalistic fervor and great pride in being Chinese. Many of these students are honoring their family and honoring their country by getting a first-rate education in America, and many of these students will not look back when they leave.

But many will look back. It is very similar to the greek myth of Orpheus, except these Orpheuses, these dynamos of their trade, are not leaving Hell, they are leaving heaven. The stakes are the same, though.

America is the great solvent. Once you let your guard down, once you look back in a moment of doubt, it is only a matter of time until the solvent breaks down all ties that bind. I have seen it happen. The longing starts while you are here, and it is relentless.

Iraq and the Scientific Method

2005-12-10T11:45:00.000-08:00

Rumsfeld (Brought up by Wretchard):

For starters, it must be jarring for reporters to leave the United States, arrive in a country that is so different, where they have to worry about their personal safety, and then being rushed to a scene of a bomb, car bomb or a shooting and have little opportunity to see the rest of the country.

By contrast, the Iraqi people see things probably somewhat differently. They can compare Iraq as it is today to what it was three years ago: a brutal dictatorship, where the secret police would murder or mutilate a family member, sometimes in front of their children, and where hundreds of thousands of Iraqis disappeared into mass graves...

The situation in Iraq is terrible...and it's never been better.

The divergence in opinion on Iraq flows from a divergence in standards of observation (this only applies to honest observers--many care nothing for truth). Those who measure backwards, using history as the control group, are divided into two camps: those who use Iraq's history (either written or experienced), and those who use their personal history (either ideological or experienced). Those who use Iraq's past as the comparative standard are generally optimistic about what they see on the ground. As Rumsfeld notes, when one has knowledge of both Iraq's past and Iraq's present (e.g. Iraqis and our troops), the present looks miraculous by comparison.

On the other hand are those who choose to be less rigorous in their measurements. For these observers any standard will do, and snap-judgments abound. A misremembered past becomes the standard by which to measure a misperceived present (e.g. Snowcroft's "50 years of peace"). As has been shown, these non-Iraqis who calibrate their judgment from ego are vulnerable to the pessimism of privilege (an affliction of the affluent) and the inaccurate intuition of the ignorant.

Of course, there are those who eschew looking backwards at all, judging everything by that which has not yet arrived. These chronic discontents, whose control group is possibility, will forever be disappointed and sceptical. Untethered by amnesia and distracted by perfection, these men know nothing at all.

This is true for more issues than Iraq.

Thine Eyes Have Seen the Coming...

2005-12-07T22:28:00.000-08:00

On Wretchard's Belmont Club, one of his posters, Ash, had this to say:

On the larger historical scale the event is really quite small. I repeat that approx. 3000 dead is not a big deal in the grand sweep of history.

I said this, and I thought it aptly represented my state of mind at the time, though it may sound like stream of consciousness when you read it:

Do you really believe that the number "3000 dead" is an exhaustive list of what happened that day? Perhaps if you narrowed the spaces in your filter, you would pick up the finer grains of truth and consequence that 9/11 came to symbolize.

Let me give you a less truncated account of that day, though it is still hopelessly abridged.

On September 11, 2001, a group of 19 terrorists boarded 4 airliners. They had nothing in their arsenal but box-cutters, hatred, and a willingness to die for their cause. These terrorists were beholden to a perverted, radical interpretation of the global region Islam, a religion that has over 1 billion adherents and not a few brainwashed radicals who dream of conquest and subjugation.

A mere 19 men. A mere 19 did that to us. 19 men killed three thousand American civilians, on American soil, during a time of peace. 19 men, using nothing but razors and airplane tickets, murdered 157 times their number and destroyed the lives of countless more, people who would show up at ground zero for weeks, with blank stares and vacant expressions, hoping against hope that they would find a loved one's body so they could have a proper burial and be at peace.

A mere 19 men, in minutes, destroyed two giant towers that took 10 years to build; 19 men caused $700 million dollars in damage to the Pentagon, and destroyed or damaged a further 23 buildings in downtown Manhattan. 19 men, spending only $400,000 from planning to implementation, closed down our stock market for a week, something that had not happened in 75 years, and when it reopened the cost in lost stock value came in at $1,200,000,000,000. 19 men caused our country $500 billion dollars in ongoing damages, and caused a debate in a free society over how much freedom we can afford and still be safe.

A mere 19 men, Ash! And they did this with nothing. Nothing!

But that is not the scariest thing about 9/11. The scariest thing about 9/11 is the glimpse it has given us of the future.

The Tupamaros terrorized Peru until the democratic government fell and a military dictatorship took over. The Tupamaros had thousands, but our enemy has more.

19 men, willing to die for a perversion, killed 3,000 innocent Americans, shut down our country, and caused over $1.7 trillion in damages and loss. They exposed the fragility of our existence, the illusion of our safety, and the bone-deep hatred of an enemy that wants to kill or enslave every last one of us.

Those are the facts. Never in the history of mankind have 19 men accomplished so much. Their acts are are historically unprecedented--HISTORICALLY UNPRECEDENTED...for now. Only for now.

Does that not make you tremble? Ask yourself, what will the next 19 do? If you can imagine it, then you know why we must act.

9/11 was the thunder before the storm. Only a fool would stay outside after that to see if it'll rain.

The Peace Activist and the Bag of Rights

2005-12-01T11:21:00.000-08:00

In light of the hostage-taking in Iraq of four peace activists, I decided to pay a visit to the website of a prominent member of Christians for Peace (hat tip Wretchard), a member named Joe Carr. Say it ain't so, Joe:

"I completely affirm Palestinians right to resist Israeli colonial occupation. Palestinians have the right to do much more than throw rocks at soldiers committing colonial genocide, and they must if they are to survive."

The formulation "have a right to..." always interests me, predominantly because it is used so loosely and haphazardly by people who usually have no idea what they are talking about. When these people talk of rights, they don't realize the ex nihilo assertiveness of their comment. Instead, they feel their statement has the force of empirical fact, a teleological truth of nature that, because of the stupidity of their strategic competitors, they must demean by saying aloud.

Questions that go unanswered:

What is a right? Is a right based in law, nature, or morality? Where do they come from?

How is the "right to resist" different from mere "ableness"? How is it different from a natural, or instinctive, imperative?

Is it always good to exercise a right? Is it always good to resist?

Are rights and responsibilities mutually exclusive?

Do Israelis have the same rights of resistance as the Palestinians, or does ability indirectly correlate with "rightness"?

If both have a right to resist and survive, how is it meaningful to speak of rights in the first place?

And finally, if it is not always a good to exercise a right (either it conflicts with other virtues, or causes a bad result), how should one approach the question of whether or not to do so? Should one look at the situation entire and make a rational, result-oriented decision (roll-back), or should one follow the passions and be guided by the lesser spirits of vengeance, self-gratification, and pride? (Would our friend Joe agree that there is a right of self-gratification? That is, in a sense, what he advocates for the Palestinians. Is this right universal, or only for the downtrodden?)

The Palestinians are not operating in a vacuum. Exercising a right, insofar as it exists, is not free of cost (it never is, just ask Hollywood). One of the effects of the Palestinian blind exercise of their right to violence has been to remove rationalism as an option for engagement. By doing this, Palestinians have forced the Israelis to treat them as reactionary units of a certain set program, instead of as human beings with which to negotiate for peace. Basically, the Palestinians have become mechanical automatons in their interaction with Israel, an input/output system of peculiar characteristics. The input of this tragic system is the reality of Israel--the precise state of its existence at a unit t of time--and the output is the Palestinian response, which is stuck on a singular value: the exercise of the Palestinian right to resist.

The latter changes the input value insofar as it changes the defensive posture of Israel, but the interesting part of this dynamic is the static nature of the output. Israel has tried on several occasions to redefine its reality in regards to the Palestinians, but the output of violence did not diminish. In fact, it increased.

The fact that Israeli concessions (redefinitions) have done nothing to stem the exercise of the Palestinian "right to violence" has left the Israelis with only three options: they can eliminate the input (Israel), eliminate the output, or eliminate the effectiveness of the output on the input. The first option means suicide, the second means genocide, and the last means withdrawal and a fence. I hope the last one works, because Israel is not going to commit suicide. That leaves option number two, and if it comes to that perhaps our friend Joe will lament that the Palestinian bag of rights has succeeded in killing its carrier.

Thanksgiving

2005-11-26T16:29:00.000-08:00

Ben Bernanke is unworried about the American trade deficit. The core cause of such lop-sidedness is the sophisticated, post-industrial, and healthy consumerism of the US in contradistinction to the neo-industrial, wage-controlled "workers-hell" in China. We have a copious amount of discretionary income. They don't. We bought into the information economy. They haven't.

China and the Middle East are in the same dilemma. Their survival and relevance are dependent on the attentions of the United States and the particular type of market we help support. Our dependency on them is inextricably linked with the aged and dying paradigm of Industry. As the latter goes the way of the dinosaur, and as the United States gets richer, a single imperative will ring true with the Industrial nations of the world: evolve, or die.

They are in a precarious position, these niche players. The top of the food chain is moving skyward, as the ground falls away beneath their feet. As citizens around the world become more sophisticated due to cultural cross-pollination (internet, media), the universal question asked of government will soon become, "Where's the beef?" Without a compelling answer, national brain-drain to the US will proceed apace (see latest Economist).

Information is the new oil. And we (post-industrial nations) own all the refinaries.

On a side note, our national defense posture has shifted from retaliatory (pre-911), to preemptive (post-911), to preventative (post-OIF) in the space of five years. This means that any prospective enemy of the US will have to draw its followers and know-how from an ether filled with sentinels and guard dogs. Worse for them, once they find what they need, assembly--and speed--will be required.

A decentralized entry-barrier for our times. As we get richer and more powerful, outside threats diminish. Inside threats, however...

The Constitution is the Aegis that shields us from ourselves. On this Thanksgiving, it is something to be truly thankful for.

Loathing our Leaders

2005-11-20T19:46:00.000-08:00

As we struggle to classify, categorize, and incorporate the lessons of Iraq into our institutional memory, our enemies grow emboldened by our doubt and inertia.

I use to think the joke was on them. The joke, it seems, is on those who must clean up the cafeteria after the children stop the food fight. Unfortunately, when the chaos dies down, there will be bodies amongst the foul and rotten debris.

When the histories are written, they will record that Nero fiddled while Rome burned, and Americans masturbated.

Flotsam and Jetsam

2005-11-17T13:44:00.000-08:00

The difficulties of attempting to persuade an undiscerning public are indirectly correlated to the collapsibility of the issue at hand. Bush lied, people died is at least 50% right. It's implication, however, is 100% wrong.

The only thing worse than being wrong is being right, and alone.

The worlds we create in cinema now will be worlds to visit in our minds later. This turnabout will be here shortly, and it will not be relegated to the world of metaphor.

We don't realize it yet, but the inadvertent expressions of freedom that we take for granted will shine through to later generations in their moments of doubt and darkness. Seinfeld and Star Wars will last much longer than we. If poets are the unofficial legislators, we can take comfort in the worth of the laws we have passed. So long as they are remembered and recorded, we shall be free.

There is a growing suspicion in my mind that we must wait, and prepare. Leave precipitous action to the enemy. We must never lose our myth of virtue.

Many people who are not culturally mature will soon be granted an undeserved respite from nature's fury. Blame technology, but hold accountable the people, or our own Frankenstein's monster we will have made.

White flight will follow the space elevator out of the atmosphere.

We are building ourselves a world of distraction. Perhaps the alchemy of the senses is our last resort in our long, bloody fight against envy, and despair. If so, good riddance, and God help us.

Perhaps a machine can do better. Perhaps we will let it.

Response to Den Beste's media analysis

2005-11-14T15:20:00.000-08:00

Steven Den Beste posts on Redstate.org an analysis of Al'Qaeda's inherent weaknesses in a propaganda campaign that depends on headlines, on the one hand, and the support of fellow travelers on the other. My response:

Your analysis is correct that headline fatigue and revulsion work against the Islamists in the majority, but Al'Qaeda is not necessarily playing to the majority. Zawahiri expressly states that the goal of the "propaganda by deed" is to reach a mere 5% of the Muslim youth. Comparing this objective to reality seems to indicate that Zawahiri is succeeding in what he and Osama set out to do.

Whether 5% is sufficient and whether propaganda by deed is a good strategy are valid questions and deserve a systematic inquiry. Nevertheless, one might concede your analysis of Al'Qaeda's informational weakness and still hold the opinion that they will not be determinative in Al'Qaeda's defeat.

The underlying problem, for which we have relatively few answers, is the increasing self-identification of young men according to their Muslimness, and the corollary universalization of grievances as Muslim grievances. This phenomenon is most prevalent in young Muslim men who have some level of interaction with the West (see Sayed Qutb's rejection of the West after his visit to America). This interaction heightens their awareness of global status (comparative failure), which then reinforces the jihadi imperative.

5%, linked and reinforced through the internet, is a formidable force. Al'Qaeda's influence overall may wax and wane with the media cycle, but the resolve of this group will not.

Which means the arm of decision is predominantly a Western arm. The danger is an admixture of Al'Qaeda's propaganda by deed with the feeling of Western guilt propagated by a cannabalistic media. Our narcissism is unusual in that, while we cannot pull ourselves away from the looking glass, it is a self-immolating fascination with abomination that keeps us rooted. Such self-disgust and guilt, which are reinforced by a media and academia that trade in it, are the only factors that can create the necessary environment for Western defeat. We may be periodically disturbed from our trance, through rioting or the occasional attack, and we may lash out in annoyance, but pulling ourselves away from our self-obsession for any length of time is now almost impossible. How long before the roots take hold permanently? How long before our guilt--and the timid intertia it causes--transitions into decline?

Islamist terror is but one manifestation of rejectionist ideology--the most obvious and most visible (and therefore the least problematic). The real danger comes from within. To withstand the viral assaults on our society that will inevitably come, we need to be bolstered by self-confidence and purpose. Unfortunately, these are the virtues that are slowly being stripped away by our elite.

The cause in fact of a potential decline will be our academia, but the proximate cause will be an irresponsible and undiscerning media. Therefore, the media is a clear and present danger and must be engaged.

[Den Beste responded that 5% is an impotent mass]

Your points are well taken: that 5% cannot succeed against a motivated 95%, and that headline fatigue causes a flight to the macabre which then attrits the support of the fellow-traveler--a support necessary for a robust terrorist movement.

We should then fear not the macabre, but acts of ostensible revolution couched in language sure to hypnotize a vast segment of the disaffected, Marxist Left (riots in France, perhaps?). Islamists might not be nimble enough to manage this, though there are those in the West who try on their behalf (CAIR, e.g.).

I am not convinced that 5% is impotent against an undermotivated 95%, and I believe that is what we face for the foreseeable future.

New York Times, again...(sheesh)

2005-11-11T13:39:00.000-08:00

The New York Times once again misleads the American people about the war. This from today's article on Bush's speech:

The president has been consistent in saying American troops would remain in Iraq until the job is done, since he said otherwise during the campaign, when Matt Lauer of NBC asked Mr. Bush in a televised interview in August 2004 about the war.

"I don't think you can win it," Mr. Bush said, a remark Democrats immediately seized on as defeatist.

Reading this one could be forgiven for thinking that Bush was saying he didn't think we could win in Iraq. In fact, that's what Richard Stevenson wants you to believe. The problem, unfortunately for Mr. Stevenson, is that Bush never said that about the War in Iraq. Here is the context for Bush's statement to Matt Lauer, as reported in the Washington Post:

President Bush said in an interview broadcast Monday that the war on terrorism cannot be won in the traditional sense of victory, one in a series of statements he has made in the past few days to lower public expectations and mitigate political problems before he reintroduces himself to the nation Thursday night.

Bush has given a spate of interviews in the run-up to this week's Republican National Convention in New York, and he was asked by Matt Lauer of NBC's "Today" show, in an interview taped Saturday in Ohio and shown on the convention's opening day, if the war on terrorism can be won.

"I don't think you can win it," Bush said. "But I think you can create conditions so that those who use terror as a tool are less acceptable in parts of the world. Let's put it that way."

There is a huge difference between saying the war in Iraq can't be won, and saying the War on Terror (a war on a tactic) can't be won. This is either incredibly sloppy reporting, or it is an underhanded attempt to sell the subversive, anti-war propaganda the Times has come to specialize in. I report, you decide.

One Giant Leap for Mankind

2005-11-08T10:50:00.000-08:00

Every so often I revisit the issue of the war on drugs, and every time I do I get more frustrated. Since I am once again mulling over all the bad consequences of such an ill-advised "war", I thought I would post an excellent analysis by William F. Buckley et al. that I read a while ago. I read this shortly after September 11, when the seriousness of that attack and the persuasiveness of these articles fused together into an everlasting opposition to victimless crime in general, and the war on drugs in particular. Here is an excerpt:

WE ARE speaking of a plague that consumes an estimated $75 billion per year of public money, exacts an estimated $70 billion a year from consumers, is responsible for nearly 50 per cent of the million Americans who are today in jail, occupies an estimated 50 per cent of the trial time of our judiciary, and takes the time of 400,000 policemen -- yet a plague for which no cure is at hand, nor in prospect...

I HAVE spared you, even as I spared myself, an arithmetical consummation of my inquiry, but the data here cited instruct us that the cost of the drug war is many times more painful, in all its manifestations, than would be the licensing of drugs combined with intensive education of non-users and intensive education designed to warn those who experiment with drugs. We have seen a substantial reduction in the use of tobacco over the last thirty years, and this is not because tobacco became illegal but because a sentient community began, in substantial numbers, to apprehend the high cost of tobacco to human health, even as, we can assume, a growing number of Americans desist from practicing unsafe sex and using polluted needles in this age of AIDS. If 80 million Americans can experiment with drugs and resist addiction using information publicly available, we can reasonably hope that approximately the same number would resist the temptation to purchase such drugs even if they were available at a federal drugstore at the mere cost of production.

And added to the above is the point of civil justice. Those who suffer from the abuse of drugs have themselves to blame for it. This does not mean that society is absolved from active concern for their plight. It does mean that their plight is subordinate to the plight of those citizens who do not experiment with drugs but whose life, liberty, and property are substantially affected by the illegalization of the drugs sought after by the minority.

I have not spoken of the cost to our society of the astonishing legal weapons available now to policemen and prosecutors; of the penalty of forfeiture of one's home and property for violation of laws which, though designed to advance the war against drugs, could legally be used -- I am told by learned counsel -- as penalties for the neglect of one's pets. I leave it at this, that it is outrageous to live in a society whose laws tolerate sending young people to life in prison because they grew, or distributed, a dozen ounces of marijuana. I would hope that the good offices of your vital profession would mobilize at least to protest such excesses of wartime zeal, the legal equivalent of a My Lai massacre. And perhaps proceed to recommend the legalization of the sale of most drugs, except to minors.

Ending the drug war would be a giant step forward in our domestic and foreign policy. There must come a point when policy initiatives are revisited, measured for success, and finally thrown out if they have been unmitigated failures. The War on Drugs is such a failure.

By any metric, this pseudo-war has been a disaster (except in the feel-good, I'm-a-politician-and-I'm-on-a-soapbox metric). Drug use has not declined, drug crime has not declined, drug supply has not declined, and drug potency has not declined. This after unprecedented effort by the government over a span of several decades. A substantial amount of our prison population were incarcerated because of drug possession or sale. The removal of drugs from the white market has caused an immense growth in the black, which leads to gangs and turf-wars and terrorist groups like the ELN and FARC.

One of the first uses of the Patriot Act was by the DEA. In an age of global terrorism, can we afford to expend such manpower and assets trying to keep citizens from deciding what to put into their own bodies?

The only argument for the drug war is a moral one. All the utilitarian arguments have been invalidated by facts. Its supporters say that a society that allows drug use is a rotten society. This is an interesting formulation since, while we don't currently allow drug use, we have quite a bit of it, and since it is illegal, instead of worrying just about use we must also worry about gangs, crime, murder, terrorism, and dysfunctional states. I'd rather have a society with legal access, where the private sector can control use through drug tests for jobs, than a society with all the other problems listed above that, despite such heavy-handed laws, still has drug use.

Not that it's likely to end anytime soon. Any politician that puts forward such an agenda would be labeled "pro-drug", instead of pro-order and pro-freedom and pro-personal-responsibility. It's too bad. The crimewave that spawned from Prohibition is revisited in spades by the ill-advised war on drugs.

Riots in Paris

2005-11-03T09:33:00.000-08:00

Wretchard, over at the Belmont Club, is trying to figure out the causes of the Parisian rights, and the question seems to turn on whether these riots are racial/sociological or racial/religious in origin.

I don't think the composition of race riots and Muslim riots is really that different. Both depend on group instead of individual identity, both use awareness of ostensible status as a foundation for grievances, a status that is conferred to the group and therefore transmuted to the individual. Segregation heightens this perception of collective grievance, and also reinforces the group identity at the expense of the individual's.

Sociologically, the conditions are the same for both types of unrests. It is dangerous to combine group identity, segregation, descrimination, and grievances within walking distance of their causes. The determinative variables, if one starts with the premise that a group is in fact subject to the above situations, are the strength of that particular group identification and the immediacy or primacy of the catalyzing injury.

Islam is unique because it is so successful at supplanted the self with the ideas and loyalties of "Muslimness," which, as Wretchard points out, provides a reckless vitality to Islamic mass movements. It is a lesson worth learning, because if one has a Muslim minority exposed to the sociological tripwires mentioned above, the admixture is uniquely toxic and flammable and might be uncontainable once ignited.

So the answer is that the riots are sociological in their origins, but specifically Muslim in the intensity of their manifestations.

Obstacles and Solutions

2005-11-02T09:09:00.000-08:00

In my previous post I posited that, if one starts with the premise that the long war is predominantly fought in the heart and mind, the enemy we are fighting is human despair, what Kierkegaard called the sickness unto death. My thesis is that radical Islamism, nihilism, perhaps even subversive faiths like orientalism and socialism, are all particular manifestations of an underlying cancer. Kierkegaard lays much of the ground work for my thesis in his philosophical treatises on the self, and all I did was extrapolate his dialectical paradigm to cover and explain the current evils and obstacles that humanity now faces in the world.

Kierkegaard writes, "The ever increasing intensity of despair depends upon the degree of consciousness or is proportionate to this increase: the greater the degree of consciousness, the more intensive the despair." I think we must at least look at the possibility that Islamism is in fact a reaction to Islam's reemergence as a globally conscious ideology. Such a global consciousness, such a vivid awareness of how one "fits" into the overall dynamic, must weigh heavily upon one whose first observations, after gaining consciousness, are of failure and defeat. Muslims are especially vulnerable to a heightened "intensity of despair", because they hold in their mind a vision of absolute authority and superiority that is irreconcilable with what they see every day.

Connectivity cuts both ways, and it may be said that with Muslims, both cuts are deeper. This from Theodore Dalrymple:

Even if for no other reason, then (and there are in fact other reasons), young Muslim males have a strong motive for maintaining an identity apart. And since people rarely like to admit low motives for their behavior, such as the wish to maintain a self-gratifying dominance, these young Muslims need a more elevated justification for their conduct toward women. They find it, of course, in a residual Islam: not the Islam of onerous duties, rituals, and prohibitions, which interferes so insistently in day-to-day life, but in an Islam of residual feeling, which allows them a sense of moral superiority to everything around them, including women, without in any way cramping their style.

This Islam contains little that is theological, spiritual, or even religious, but it nevertheless exists in the mental economy as what anatomists call a “potential space.” A potential space occurs where two tissues or organs are separated by smooth membranes that are normally close together, but that can be separated by an accumulation of fluid such as pus if infection or inflammation occurs.

The other side is represented by Muslims in exile like Salman Rushdie and Hirsi Ali. These Muslims have avoided the pitfall of despair by, ironically, being subject to constant, withering, and sometimes murderous persecution from other Muslims. They have avoided, or rather supplanted, the bedrock identity of "I am Muslim" and the consciousness that attends it. They have walked that final step and embraced the self, embraced the primacy of the self, and in doing so inoculated it against the erosion of despair.

Rushdie and Ali have avoided despair because they do not despair of themselves; they do not will themselves to change. Instead, they will the world to change and keep for themselves a rock-solid identity that is inviolable. Therefore, whatever their trials and tribulations, Muslims like these succeed because they avoid the vicious feedback loop that conquers their contemporaries; by refusing a group identity that, in its current iteration, hawks grievances and victimhood in the present while promising conquest and glory in the future, they have sidestepped most of the radical pathologies.

Nevertheless, anxiety in the face of freedom yields more anxiety, and group-identity Muslims have a considerable amount of anxiety to bring to the table.

Dalrymple demonstrates this anxiety in his essay, particularly in his talk to a would-be suicide bomber:

Suicide was a mortal sin, according to the tenets of the Islamic faith. No, when he got out of prison he would not kill himself; he would make himself a martyr, and be rewarded eternally, by making himself into a bomb and taking as many enemies with him as he could.

Enemies, I asked; what enemies? How could he know that the people he killed at random would be enemies? They were enemies, he said, because they lived happily in our rotten and unjust society. Therefore, by definition, they were enemies—enemies in the objective sense, as Stalin might have put it—and hence were legitimate targets.

I asked him whether he thought that, in order to deter him from his course of action, it would be right for the state to threaten to kill his mother and his brothers and sisters—and to carry out this threat if he carried out his, in order to deter others like him.

The idea appalled him, not because it was yet another example of the wickedness of a Western democratic state, but because he could not conceive of such a state acting in this unprincipled way. In other words, he assumed a high degree of moral restraint on the part of the very organism that he wanted to attack and destroy.

We are his enemies because he is unhappy. We are his enemies because he despairs, and we do not.

This dynamic, the misrelation of the self, is aggravated for another reason. Kierkegaard writes, "Despair is intensified in relation to the consciousness of the self, but the self is intensified in relation to the criterion for the self, infinitely when God is the criterion." The young Muslim sees the world as ungodly, sees his place in it as a farce, or a cruelty, and wills himself to be other than who he is. He rejects his role as an immigrant, as a student, as a lower-middle class, ordinary boy, and becomes something more, and something less. His rejection of himself creates a void where the "idea of being a Muslim" can grow, filling his being and becoming his sole identity. The self subsumed, the world becomes Manichean, grievances become universal, and he takes up the cause of his God. His consciousness of his own despair and his intimate relationship with the infinite God lead the young Westernized Muslim to deny, and then defy, the world as he sees it:

First comes despair over the earthly or over something earthly, then despair of the eternal, over oneself. Then comes defiance, which is really despair through the aid of the eternal, the despairing misuse of the eternal within the self to will in despair to be oneself.... In this form of despair, there is a rise in the consciousness of the self, and therefore a greater consciousness of what despair is and that one's state is despair. Here the despair is conscious of itself as an act.... In order to despair to will to be oneself, there must be consciousness of an infinite self. This infinite self, however, is really only the most abstract form, the most abstract possibility of the self. And this is the self that a person in despair wills to be.

The story of Sayyid Qutb is enlightening:

Qutb's special ability as a writer came from the fact that, as a young boy, he received a traditional Muslim education -- he committed the Koran to memory by the age of 10 -- yet he went on, at a college in Cairo, to receive a modern, secular education. He was born in 1906, and in the 1920's and 30's he took up socialism and literature. He wrote novels, poems and a book that is still said to be well regarded called ''Literary Criticism: Its Principles and Methodology.'' His writings reflected -- here I quote one of his admirers and translators, Hamid Algar of the University of California at Berkeley -- a ''Western-tinged outlook on cultural and literary questions.'' Qutb displayed ''traces of individualism and existentialism.'' He even traveled to the United States in the late 1940's, enrolled at the Colorado State College of Education and earned a master's degree. In some of the accounts of Qutb's life, this trip to America is pictured as a ghastly trauma, mostly because of America's sexual freedoms, which sent him reeling back to Egypt in a mood of hatred and fear.

Qutb was the epitome of the Westernized Muslim. His education and experience in Western Culture and dominance forced him to make a choice early on. Either he would subsume his Muslim identity into the self, or his self would be subsumed into his Muslim identity. The former takes much more courage because, in a world of free individuals, failure is one's own fault. The latter's message is quite different, and takes much less bravery.

More on Qutb:

The Islamists and the Pan-Arabists tried to cooperate with one another in Egypt in those days, and there was some basis for doing so. Both movements dreamed of rescuing the Arab world from the legacies of European imperialism. Both groups dreamed of crushing Zionism and the brand-new Jewish state. Both groups dreamed of fashioning a new kind of modernity, which was not going to be liberal and freethinking in the Western style but, even so, was going to be up-to-date on economic and scientific issues. And both movements dreamed of doing all this by returning in some fashion to the glories of the Arab past. Both movements wanted to resurrect, in a modern version, the ancient Islamic caliphate of the seventh century, when the Arabs were conquering the world.

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To deny freedom, to deny the primacy of the individual, is to deny the self, which leads us to a solution.

Muslims must embrace individuality, must embrace the primacy and inviolability of the self for both men and women, if they are to survive this war. As Kierkegaard would say, they must become men of this world, and happy with the self as it relates to it, if they are to avoid despair. Muslims must also develop the bravery to be introspective and self-critical while still accepting and loving the self. It is no accident that cultures and people who have the courage to look inside themselves are the most successful and the least prone to despair.

Freedom, and the concepts of possiblity and necessity that adhere to it, can lead to self-denial, self-guilt, and ultimately to despair. To deal with these currents, the self must rest firmly between the finite and the infinite. It must become the relationship between the two, and then relate that relationship back and forth between the finite world and the infinite. In doing so, the perfection of the infinite and the imperfection of the finite play out their differences through the medium of the self. Happiness can only be found in the interaction between the two. Embracing too fully one at the expense of the other can lead to emptiness, anxiety, and ultimately to despair.

The final question is one of metaphysics, and perhaps theology: what is the infinite? I posit that the infinite is Truth. Part of that Truth, a subset of it, is the answer to the question "How can humans live together and survive?". The answer to that question is morality, or virtue, as the art of living together. But that is truth on the macro scale.

Luckily for us, societal happiness and individual happiness have the same cause. Embracing virtue--a way of behaving, but using it as a way of defining oneself--guards against the sickness of despair. The virtuous man does not will himself to be different, and he interacts in the world confidently, knowing that the world is imperfect, but he less so.

Individuality (enlightened selfishness), freedom, and virtue. That is how we win the war. In other words, we will win when everyone becomes, in their mind, the ideal American.

"First they came for the mannequins..."

2005-11-01T09:07:00.000-08:00

From Regime Change Iran:

Police in Iran have launched a new crackdown on alluring mannequins rounding up 65 feminine mannequins.

What the hell can you say about that?

The Sickness Unto Death

2005-11-01T06:11:00.000-08:00

Wretchard posts a provocative essay on The Long War, what Newt Gingrich describes as "an inherently offensive war in which we have to actively defeat our opponents. Furthermore this war resembles the Reformation-era wars of religion in which fellow nationals may be traitors serving the other side (examine Elizabethan England and the origins of the English secret service as an example)."

I think there is something deeper--something more primal--that we are fighting for, and fighting against. Our enemy is more than the "irreconcilable wing of Islam", though it is that, too. It is more than terrorism--which is nothing but a particular manifestation of our enemy--and it is more than nihilism, though nihilism is a direct consequence and a dangerous ideological iteration of our underlying foe.

In the year 2005 of the common era, we find ourselves in a state of flux. We are witnessing a shift in the human condition, one that is global and fraught with...unknowns. That there are so many unknowns gives rise to caution, perhaps even fear and trembling, for in our depths we know that chaos, chance, dynamism--these things bring storms as often as they bring light.

We are in the twilight of an era. Many of us, if we are observant, can see the sun setting on a vast array of ideas and a previously-powerful set of ideologies. Memes that are as old as man and thoughts only recently born are giving way to a new order, one not yet consumated but brimming with its own potential energy. Some ideas will carry over, and some will perish in the night. That we know not which is cause for some concern.

Peggy Noonan senses the twilight in her recent essay:

I think there is an unspoken subtext in our national political culture right now. In fact I think it's a subtext to our society. I think that a lot of people are carrying around in their heads, unarticulated and even in some cases unnoticed, a sense that the wheels are coming off the trolley and the trolley off the tracks. That in some deep and fundamental way things have broken down and can't be fixed, or won't be fixed any time soon...

I'm not talking about "Plamegate." As I write no indictments have come up. I'm not talking about "Miers." I mean . . . the whole ball of wax. Everything. Cloning, nuts with nukes, epidemics; the growing knowledge that there's no such thing as homeland security; the fact that we're leaving our kids with a bill no one can pay. A sense of unreality in our courts so deep that they think they can seize grandma's house to build a strip mall; our media institutions imploding--the spectacle of a great American newspaper, the New York Times, hurtling off its own tracks, as did CBS. The fear of parents that their children will wind up disturbed, and their souls actually imperiled, by the popular culture in which we are raising them...

I have wondered if it hasn't all gotten too big, too complicated, too crucial, too many-fronted, too . . . impossible...

Our elites, our educated and successful professionals, are the ones who are supposed to dig us out and lead us. I refer specifically to the elites of journalism and politics, the elites of the Hill and at Foggy Bottom and the agencies, the elites of our state capitals, the rich and accomplished and successful of Washington, and elsewhere. I have a nagging sense, and think I have accurately observed, that many of these people have made a separate peace. That they're living their lives and taking their pleasures and pursuing their agendas; that they're going forward each day with the knowledge, which they hold more securely and with greater reason than nonelites, that the wheels are off the trolley and the trolley's off the tracks, and with a conviction, a certainty, that there is nothing they can do about it.

I suspect that history, including great historical novelists of the future, will look back and see that many of our elites simply decided to enjoy their lives while they waited for the next chapter of trouble. And that they consciously, or unconsciously, took grim comfort in this thought: I got mine. Which is what the separate peace comes down to, "I got mine, you get yours."

Cicero, at Winds of Change, also senses a shift:

And there we have the Old Order, nursing their drinks and watching the sunset. "Who knows about the coming sunrise," they lament, looking confused. And so it is confusing -- none of us see the sunrise to come. We only see the sunset. We remember the warmth of the long day. We knit together pleasant memories and the certainty of past convictions, admiring the clarity we once had.

I think both 'sides' within the West -- left and right, European and American -- really are after the same thing: to preserve what they have.

Cicero speaks of this shift as a law of nature, and our reaction to it a law of man:

I think that's where Ms. Noonan's at. She's from a generation that saw great things in itself, and in its nation. What comes next is beyond comprehension. We're in flux -- change only seems to bring about more change, over and over again. Older people want to hang on to what they have, perhaps more so than keep up with the times. I empathize -- I know that none of us on the cutting edge should be so smug as to think we're past getting cut by it ourselves. Compounding innovation exacts a heavy toll, and can leave many people behind. None of us can say what the outcome will be.

Ms. Noonan is witnessing and lamenting the passage of an era -- one that needs to pass by. It's hard, because we are a part of that era. Looking to a waning era's elite for consolation is understandable, but it will not ease the bewilderment. New worlds are being built, while old ones fall. Somehow, we have to be brave, put away the photo albums, and engage this flux.

Cicero speaks of the way forward, but his analysis also implies a destination of sorts. A physical destination it is not, nor is it stationary, but it is a place we must get to nonetheless. Our lives--our survival--depend on it.

The goal--the destination--is elusive, and it cannot be held down nor spoken of in precise terms. As Marcus Aurelius said of Rome, it is but a whisper, an idea so fragile that to speak it causes it to vanish. It is drastically vulnerable to invasion and subversion. Enemies, it may be said, are all around.

What I speak of is a posture, an outlook and a direction to look out. I would call it truth, for it is that, but that is not enough. Bravery and courage are elements of it; goodness and virtue define it. Compassion, rigor, vitality, decency; patience, hope, temperance, and faith--how many coordinates must be given before the constellation begins to take shape?

The name of the constellation is elusive, but as Shakespeare said, by any name it smells as sweet. Like many things, it exists as relation. More specifically, it is a relation that relates to itself:

The human self is such a derived, established relation, a relation that relates itself to itself and in relating itself to itself relates itself to another.

That is a quote from Soren Kierkegaard, taken from his book "The Sickness Unto Death." Enigmatic? Maybe, but it is not impermeably so. One can approach it, weigh it, taste it even, and its truth, like a kernel, is there to find if one looks hard enough. It is the truth of who we are, who we can be, who we should be. The disconnect between those concepts is our danger--our bane of existence. It is the sickness that afflicts many, a nothingness that spreads everyday. It is despair:

Despair is the misrelation in the relation of a synthesis that relates itself to itself...

An individual in despair despairs over something. So it seems for a moment, but only for a moment; in the same moment the true despair or despair in its true form shows itself. In despairing over something, he really despaired over himself, and now he wants to get rid of himself. For example, when the ambitious man whose slogan is "Either Caesar or nothing" does not get to be Caesar, he despairs over it. But this also means something else: precisely because he did not get to be Caesar, he now cannot bear to be himself. Consequently he does not despair because he did not get to be Caesar but despairs over himself because he did not get to be Caesar.... Consequently, to despair over something is still not despair proper.... To despair over oneself, in despair to will to be rid of oneself—this is the formula for all despair.

Our enemy, the one we fight in this long war, is despair. Our problem, and perhaps our contradiction, is the freedom we are spreading, wittingly and unwittingly, across the entire world. Let me explain.

A man who cannot be Caesar, who has no hope of being Caesar, does not despair when he remains himself. A man who is born, lives, and dies with a knowledge of place, of status, of inevitability does not despair over unrequited dreams of conquest and glory, fame and fortune. A man who is chained, who understands the inevitability of those chains, looks upon his condition with resignation, perhaps with hatred, perhaps with indignation--he does not, however, regret...and he does not despair. It is not himself he wishes to be rid of. It is the world that abuses him so violently and unapologetically that he finds disgusting, and unworthy. He wills himself, as himself, a better life. But he does not despair; he does not will to be rid of himself.

Freedom is defined by Kierkegaard as "the dialectical aspect of the categories possibility and necessity." It is the relation of these two concepts that defines freedom--possibility and chance pulling one side while necessity and determination pull the other. The self, when thrown into this violent vortex, can be ripped apart by the competing currents, and that is where you can find despair.

Our problem--our test--is that we are building a world that is eminently likable, an existence of perfect malleability that at once seduces and taunts our passions, and our soul. We are building a world of freedom and prosperity unlike any that has ever been seen, yet we are blind to the implications and dangers that lie beneath the surface. When the world is perfect, the self suffers in comparison. When you can be Caesar, when the world opens that door, it is the self that is hated for not walking through. The self despairs, and wills away its existence.

In a world of freedom and opportunity, the self can no longer look outwards for definition, though it will try. It will try to subsume itself into a group, or an ideology, or a mass movement--these efforts will manifest themselves as spasms, and they will afflict our new world most grievously:

When feeling or knowing or willing has become fantastic, the entire self can become that, whether in the most active form of plunging headlong into fantasy or in the more passive form of being carried away.... The self, then, leads a fantasized existence in abstract infinitizing or in abstract isolation, continually lacking its self, from which it moves further and further away....To lack infinitude is despairing reductionism, narrowness.... But whereas one kind of despair plunges wildly into the infinite and loses itself, another kind of despair seems to permit itself to be tricked out of its self by "the others." Surrounded by hordes of men, absorbed in all sorts of secular matters, more and more shrewd about the ways of the world—such a person forgets himself, forgets his name divinely understood, does not dare to believe in himself, finds it too hazardous to be himself, and far easier and safer to be like the others, to become a copy, a number, a mass man.... When a self becomes lost in possibility...it is not merely because of a lack of energy.... What is missing is essentially the power to obey, to submit to the necessity in one's life, to what may be called one's limitations. Therefore, the tragedy is not that such a self did not amount to something in the world; no, the tragedy is that he did not become aware of himself, aware that the self he is a very definite something and thus the necessary.... The determinist, the fatalist, is in despair and as one in despair has lost his self, because for him everything has become necessary

The enemy, therefore, is within, but so is our salvation. I do not know how we can win, but win we must.

Our war is against despair. It is a melancholy joke that its forebearer is freedom.

Playing Chicken with the US of A

2005-10-31T12:37:00.000-08:00

Incredibly interesting article by Amir Taheri where we get this little gem:

The idea that the Islamic Republic faces a game of “chicken” against the West was publicized last month by Ali Larijani, the new “security czar” in President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s administration. But the man who first came up with the analysis is Hassan Abbasi who has emerged as Ahmadinejad’s chief strategic guru.

Abbasi heads the Center for Security Doctrines Research of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (RGC). His friends call him “The Kissinger of Islam”, after Henry Kissinger who served as US secretary of state in the 1970s.

“To Iran’s new ruling elite, Abbasi is the big strategic brain,” says a European diplomat in Tehran. “More and more officials quote him in meetings with foreign diplomats.”

According to Tehran sources, Abbasi is the architect of the so-called “war preparation plan” currently under way in Iran.

Last month Abbasi presented an outline of his analysis in a lecture at the Teachers Training Faculty in Karaj, west of Tehran.

The lecture merits attention because it offers an insight into the way the new leadership in Tehran approaches issues of international politics.

According to Abbasi, the global balance of power is in a state of flux and every nation should fight for a place in a future equilibrium. The Western powers, especially the United States, still wield immense military and economic power that “looks formidable on paper.” But they are unable to use that power because their populations have become “risk-averse.”

“The Western man today has no stomach for a fight,” Abbasi says. “This phenomenon is not new: All empires produce this type of man, the self-centered, materialist, and risk-averse man.”

Read the whole article.

We are moving into the orbit of war. The strategy paper I linked to thinks we can somehow find the Lagrangian point and stabilize the descent. I am not so sure, and Iran's recent hardline posture makes me even less so. With Ahmadinejad's recent asinity, the tug of gravity grows ever stronger, and the probability of controntation rises.

Dark Times Ahead

2005-10-30T15:10:00.000-08:00

We have much to worry about.

First, I would advise everybody to read "Reassessing the Implications of a Nuclear-Armed Iran." Available here.

Second, I would keep in mind Ahmadinejad's recent statement when reading the paper's assessments of Israeli options concerning Iran's nuclear ambitions.

Third, I would remind everybody of the inevitability of Hezbollah infiltration into the US. Iran has been scared to death for four years and has been planning accordingly. There are sleepers here in the country, and they will be activated if things come to a head with Iran.

The paper's assessment of US options are bleak, and their conclusion seems to rest on the inevitability of Iranian nuclear capability and the subsequent regional containment strategy of the US. Containment and MAD may or may not work. The fact is we do not have any great insight on how the Mullahs make decisions and how sane the ones who do, are. But we could handle it if Iran existed in a vacuum. Unfortunately they do not.

If we attack Iran, we risk alienating the Iranian people and strengthening the regime's hold over a strongly nationalistic citizenry. We also risk suicide bombers in New York, or Boise, or Knoxville. We also risk further alienating our allies and strengthening China's role as the less volatile superpower. To add to the frustration, a military attack only buys time, it does not buy a guarantee that Iran will not develop nukes. (The only thing that would buy such a guarantee is if we invade and occupy Iran, but that is politically impossible now.) Any way you slice it, our military options are bleak.

Diplomacy won't work with an Iran so bent on nuclear acquisition. Even those Iranians opposed to the regime believe it is their right to have nuclear technology. Russia and China will block action at the security council. For god's sake, the EU-3 began their negotiations by taking the military option off the table. Machiavelli would be embarrassed, and insulted.

So, it looks like everything is moving towards a nuclear armed Iran. Everything, that is, except Israel.

Even assuming we could handle a nuclear armed Iran and all the cascading problems that would flow from it, we have to get there first. Israel becomes the condition precedent for the strategy of containment, and at the same time it is the condition precedent for a vast regional war. Israel is the great variable upon which everything depends.

We cannot get to containment if Israel attacks Iran. We won't get to a regional war if Israel stays her hand. Israel and Iran are dangerously unaware of each other's redlines, and as we move closer to the tipping point the danger of miscalculation from one or the other grows and compounds.

Which brings us to Ahmadinejad's statement, perhaps the most precipitous event in that region since the assassination of Hariri. I am afraid that statement moved us closer to an all out regional war. If we get pulled in, if it happens, who knows what will follow?

Worst case scenario:

1. Everybody in the region believes bin Laden's conspiracy theories and think a Zionist-American effort at domination is truly underway. Iraq turns against us, or splits completely. Regional wars and battles pop up everywhere and oil production slows to a trickle. European economies, which depend almost exclusively on Middle Eastern oil, tank, and America and Israel are seen as global pariahs by our erstwhile allies on the continent. And then the same people who hate us start to lose jobs.

2. China's economy starts to slow and, in the midst of the largest urbanization experiment in history, begins to generate countless millions of angry unemployed living in close quarters in the cities. China in such a state would be incredibly dangerous and could do anything. Taiwan could be the least of our worries as China seeks to solidify her hold on oil reserves around the world and grows her army to alleviate the unemployment pressure.

The rest I will leave up to your imagination, but this thing could turn global in a flash if Israel strikes Iran. We have no good options, and several deadly ones. And the media obsesses over Plamegate.

More (from Reuters):

Iran is permitting around 25 high-ranking al Qaeda members to roam free in the country's capital, including three sons of Osama bin Laden, a German monthly magazine reported on Wednesday.

Citing information from unnamed Western intelligence sources, the magazine Cicero said in a preview of an article appearing in its November edition that the individuals in question are from Egypt, Uzbekistan, Saudi Arabia and Europe.

They are living in houses belonging to Iran's Revolutionary Guards, the report said.

"This is not incarceration or house arrest," a Western intelligence agent was quoted as saying. "They can move around as they please."

The three sons of Osama bin Laden in Iran are Saeed, Mohammad and Othman, Cicero reported. Another person enjoying the support of the Revolutionary Guards is al Qaeda spokesman Abu Ghaib, the report said.

This is all moving in slow motion, but things are coming to a head in Iran. It is a time for caution, and resolve.

UPDATE: Also read this.

Why do they hate us?

2005-10-17T08:30:00.000-07:00

I think we must resign ourselves to the negative effects of globalization. Eric Hoffer once wrote that envy and proximity are directly correlated, so that the closer you get to the top the more militant are your grievances. Someone living hand to mouth has no inclination to envy the wealthy aristocrat, for the aristocrat's life is as distant as Saturn for the pauper in the street. But let a man live in a slightly smaller house on the same street as our aristocrat, and his envy for his neighbor can become a ruinous obsession.

We see this phenomenon in racialist movements, feminist movements, socialist movements, etc. The rhetoric of liberation becomes the sophistry of powerlessness, with the latter as disingenuous as the former was sincere. A history of past gain becomes a reminder of present want. A taste of success, and an agitated addict is born.

For the time being we are that aristocrat on the hill, and our presence and power mocks those with lesser means. Amongst themselves the powerless vent their passions, but before their superiors the powerless are polite. We should expect and tolerate the former. If the latter should cease, if politeness should give way to open belligerence while we remain at the table, then worry we shall, and with good reason. In such a way is a Brutus born; in such a way does a Caesar fall.

Until then, vigilance should suffice. Let them believe their tropes, so long as we believe ours.

The Rest of the Story

2005-10-07T18:57:00.000-07:00

“How can the United States expect other nations to follow its lead in light of the Abu Ghraib prison scandal?” So asked one of America’s best and brightest—in high dudgeon and evocative self-righteousness—of America’s Ambassador to the United Nations, John Bolton, after he delivered a speech at the prestigious Yale University. Cheers erupted on the heels of our questioner’s words, as a giddy and self-satisfied crowd let their views be known. Heads nodded and fists were raised. Everybody who was anybody knew the answer was the question, so why wait for the response? As Bolton looked on in despair, the valets of our morality threw down their gavel—a sentence cast before an apology aired. Premise assumed, conclusion foregone: game, set, match for our enlightened youth.

The assertion that Abu Ghraib renders America unfit as the world’s moral leader is often heard, yet rarely examined. We are told that a group of young American service men and women tortured and demeaned Iraqi prisoners, and we are told these actions prove that America is no better than her enemy. Abu Ghraib, we are told, was evil within embarrassment wrapped inside hypocrisy. That it occurred meant America should hide her head in shame, that it was photographed meant even worse. The existence of a bad act was, all by itself, enough to cast judgment on the global and pretentious hegemon. America, because of a crime perpetrated by a few, had relinquished the beacon of virtue and was sent into moral exile.

This is the conclusion sold by our elite. We are made to feel shame for crimes committed by a few. We are held morally responsible, as a country, for crimes that took place thousands of miles away in a gritty, unsupervised, and unscripted environment. Because evil deeds walked that prison, the society that unleashed them has been judged unworthy.

But let's back up a second. If we are to accept this conclusion—that the existence of a bad apple speaks decisively for the orchard—must we not first examine the premises of those who preach it? And what are the premises?

Well, one of the most obvious is the premise that the existence of a bad act somehow speaks poorly of the society from which the perpetrator sprang. An alternate way of saying this is that in a virtuous regime, no bad acts are possible; in a morally attractive society, there are no evil deeds. This is assumption number one.

Another assumption that flows from the first is that ultimate moral responsibility rests with society. If bad acts are possible only because of societal defect, man is no longer accountable for his immorality. Human beings are no longer morally autonomous agents—they are simply vehicles that expose the virtue, or lack thereof, of the polis. A truly virtuous society creates virtuous men; an immoral society creates immoral men. The two are inextricably linked, with the former a condition precedent of the latter.

More assumptions flow from this last: man is perfectible because society is perfectible; society corrupts man, instead of the opposite; man is a noble beast, his nature inherently good; crime can be completely eradicated; human nature is benign; utopia is possible. Etc., etc., etc.

But all of these assumptions are false. Utopia is not a place to go; utopia means literally “no place at all.” Human nature is not noble, benign, or inherently good, and neither man nor society is perfectible. Crime cannot be eradicated from the polis no matter how virtuous its people; evil deeds cannot be thoroughly purged in a society made of men. Even in the most virtuous society human frailty will remain. The most moral of worlds would see occasional crime, indecency, and inhumanity. If men are gathered together, bad acts are inevitable. It is inarguable that society can be improved and evil contained, but we must realize that human nature will always demand our attention, loudly and demonstrably. Society can limit and deter the more evil manifestations of our nature, but it cannot eliminate them. Any belief otherwise is naïve at best.

At worst, the false premises of our youthful elite are corrosive, and dangerous. The belief in perfectibility can go much further than mere moral preening over Abu Ghraib, and the idea of utopia can damage much more than America’s image and moral leadership. The belief that a perfect polis is possible—the belief that a virtuous society with no evil can truly obtain—is a pernicious and subversive faith that leads to only one place: totalitarianism. If one truly believes that evil can be eradicated, then the very presence of evil demands more regulation, more restrictions, more vigilance, and more oversight. If society is responsible for man’s corruption, society, it will be argued, should be finely tuned and heavily imposed so that corruption does not happen. Afterwards, when evil inevitably survives, the believers will argue for increased measures, and more power. Grips will be tightened, and shackles will be brought out of the attic. Evil, instead of being purged, will move up the organizational ladder, and in the void freedom will wilt and despair will reign. This is the end-game of perfectibility.

And so we arrive back at our question, but armed with truth, not with preening. Is it true that Abu Ghraib speaks to the heart of America’s worth as a moral leader? The question would be yes if the actions of Abu Ghraib were done on behalf of America—sponsored, advised, and supported by our policy—and the answer would be yes if the perpetrators were not held to account. If either of these two scenarios obtained, our moral authority would truly be lost.

But they don’t obtain. The deeds of Abu Ghraib were perpetrated independent of American sponsorship, without supervision, and in contradistinction to our policy. These were the acts of a few individual sadists, acting on their own, subsequently investigated and prosecuted by the same military that our enlightened elite decry and slander. The people that brought us Abu Ghraib are still spending time in prison, but now they are on the wrong side of the fence. When faced with the darkness of human nature, embarrassed in front of the entire world, America didn’t flinch. She investigated her own, apologized to the victims, and dispensed a painful justice on those who would perpetrate evil deeds in her name. Is this not virtue? Is this not leadership?

That Abu Ghraib happened was a terrible embarrassment for our country—that is without a doubt—and the actions of the soldiers involved were indeed despicable and immoral. But bad and evil acts will always happen, even in the most virtuous of societies, so something else must inform our analysis of a regime. Another way of saying this is that, in a society’s equation of virtue, evil is a constant, and constants don’t tell us much. Variables, however, do tell us much, for the value of their input can change the value of the output. The variable we must look to is not the existence of evil deeds, but the response of the society after they are committed. Bad acts are only part of the story, the first part, the inevitable part. It is the rest of the story where we must judge virtue.

The Media, Diet Pills, and Iraq

2005-10-04T08:59:00.000-07:00

War is hard. Nevertheless, the media think you solve a difficult problem merely by unleashing exceptionally bright people. They cannot embrace the fact that "difficult", in war, means accepting a string of failures that culminate in victory.

So, the first sign of turbulance and the media cries foul. Continued turbulance produces proclamations of failure. In our weird age of self-indulgence, easy successes are praised while hard-fought victories spawn committees.

Cesarean sections and diet pills, hard work be damned! Thus are the preferences of our effeminate elite. It was not always so.

The Provincials are Coming!

2005-10-04T07:03:00.000-07:00

It's frustrating, instead of amusing, to watch our media make fools of themselves, because their ignorance is somehow transmuted to the rest of society. In the movie Serenity, the Operative triggers River's insanity by sending subliminal messages through the TV. Our insanity is also triggered by watching television, but it is a much less subtle message that does the triggering.

Lost in the three-to-one
independently-operating Iraqi-battalion debate is whether the numerical retrogression in type I battalions is also a retrogression in effect and capability overall. The whole media focus on this number, when the entire remainder of Casey's information is positive and hopeful, is pathetic, especially when they are not even curious about it's net effect.

Yes, three is greater than one. So, going from three to one is a priori BAD, right? Actually, no, but you can see why the media grabs onto such information. It's easy. It takes no work, no study, no education to understand the concept of going from 3 to 1. And because it is so easy to understand, and therefore so easy to complain about, it is the lead story coming out of the Casey-Abizaid-Meyers-Rumsfeld interview. It's pathetic.

It's pathetic because there is no context in the complaint, nor is there curiosity in how this number fits into our strategy to win. We do want to win, remember? That is the point, isn't it? Instead, the media stands back and studies information coming out of Iraq as if it's sole importance is how it plays to the American people. The only type of campaign the media understands involves elephants and donkeys, so they project this paradigm onto campaigns involving bullets and blood. Russert asks Casey about selling the war, and the national IQ drops another point.

The chutzpah of the media--who control the information fed to the public, then use the negative coverage of the war to attack those who fight it--is astounding. But even more so is their provincialism. "3-to-1 means we've lost two!" is the extent of their analysis, and the extent of their message. Lost is any question of capability in the field, that maybe retaining American support in combat is a good thing, that maybe winning is more important than PR.

Alas, I do not expect much from our media, and I especially to not expect much of their military analysis. But every once in a while there is an episode that engenders from me complete contempt.

This is one of those moments.

The Question of Belief

2005-10-01T10:49:00.000-07:00

At the Belmont Club, a discussion arose concerning the belief in God, and how the lack thereof correlates with the weakness in Western society.

My response:

I wonder whether believing in God, is, in fact, a necessary condition for righteous action, or whether it is merely a handy mental shortcut that resembles but does not equal the truth. I've said this before, but once again it is pertinent to the discussion.

Paul Berman, in his book Terror and Liberalism, had this to say about the anti-war French Socialists of the thirties, and how they thought the true enemies of peace were the warmongers and profiteers of the French right; in their eyes, these men, not Hitler, were provoking war:

Those were the arguments on the anti-war left, the political arguments. But the political arguments rested on something deeper, too--a philosophical belief, profound, large, and attractive, which was reassuring instead of terrifying. It was the belief that, in the modern world, even the enemies of reason cannot be the enemies of reason. Even the unreasonable must be, in some fashion, reasonable.

The belief underlying those anti-war arguments was, in short, an unyielding faith in universal rationality...That belief was the other face of liberalism--not liberalism as the advocacy of freedom, rationality, progress, and the acceptance of uncertainty, but liberalism as blind faith in a predetermined future, liberalism as a fantasy of a strictly rational world, liberalism as denial...

The totalitarian movements arise because of failures in liberal civilization, but they flourish because of still other failures in liberal civilization, and if they go on flourishing, it is because of still more failures--one liberal failure after another.

The refusal to believe that pathological mass movements are possible--movements with no rational causes, movements that cannot be addressed with rational solutions--this is the failure of liberal society that allows evil to flourish. Is the denial a godless one, or is it merely the refusal to look at history empirically?

We look at the anti-war left, we see they are godless, and we assume causation. We look at the resolute right, we see they are devout, and we assume still more.

But how to explain someone like me? I can recognize evil, though I do not recognize a God. I believe in empiricism, but I do not have blind faith in rationality. I believe in blind physical and moral evolution, but I also believe in progress, and better. I look at history, and have no problem seeing pathology.

My eyes and my memory allow me to discern, and in that way they make me selfish, and give me the courage to discriminate. But it is an enlightened selfishness, not the drivel put forth by a novice of Nietzsche, and it is a rational discrimination, acceptance bleeding into tolerance bleeding into condemnation, and that which is condemned is that which I seek to destroy. My enlightened selfishness forces me to accept that my well-being is inextricably tied to the well-being of others; because there are masses of enemies who would destroy me, I must subsume myself into an even stronger mass. I accept any that believe likewise, that are willing to die for my freedom because I am willing to die for theirs, but in the end it is still selfishness. Without this nation of exceptional virtue, without its strength, I would be vulnerable and defenseless. And so I defend her unapologetically, and unabashedly clamor for her success.

I arrived at none of this by way of God. I know many others who feel the same, who do not need God to discern good and evil, who do not need religion to have the courage to do what needs to be done. We look around us, at the wealth, and decency, and opportunity of this land, and we simply know.

I guess a more precise statement would be that I arrived at my beliefs without also having a belief in God. I do not factor a deity into my analysis.

Whether or not God is causing me to arrive at these conclusions, or allowing me to arrive at these conclusions, is quite beyond my ability to know, though I doubt it. Descartes rejected "God the Deceiver", and I tend to doubt "God the Self-Denier".

As to why, who knows? The Anthropic Principle suggest that, in an infinite probability theater, it is unhelpful to ask why, because "why" means nothing more than "is". There is life in this universe because there is life in this universe. We can ask why because in this particular iteration of the universe we exist to ask why.

I never claim to be certain. But if an idea doesn't rise to the level of belief for lack of evidence, i.e. the existence of God, I discount it in my analyses. I could be wrong, but then again, so could you.

Being an empiricist, if I am to be intellectually honest I must defend the virtue of Judeo-Christian ethics because I celebrate the obvious results of their supremacy. I also am forced to concede that such ethics were probably a condition antecedent to our present situation.

Where I tend to disagree is on the issue of reality. That we have developed a useful mental construct to enable man to live with man does not mean that construct is true. Such ethical narratives can be necessary without being fact. But by necessary I mean necessary to get to this point, this time, not necessary metaphysically (an ethical version of the Anthropic Principle).

It is not curiosity that kills the cat, however the saying goes. It is exposure that kills the cat. Exposure to reality, exposure to phenomena for which it was defenseless or unprepared, that destroys it. Curiosity may be the proximate cause, but "reality" is always the cause-in-fact.

The same goes for belief and memes. They may be the proximate cause of ethical development or civilizational success, but the cause-in-fact is much more interesting. My belief that I can fly may make me leap from a building, but the cause-in-fact for my death must take into account neurological posture, prior experience, gravity, biology, etc.

The same principle applies to beliefs in general. Beliefs can correlate with reality without equaling reality (which is how I see Christianity--supplying the correct form without supplying the correct reason). The closer to equaling reality they are, the better they enable man to exercise power and survive. While man may have developed an unbelievably complicated mental universe, nothing can change the fact that we are mere animals, moving through and affecting reality, arbitrary in general, but precious in the particular.

A Time to Speak and a Time to Act

2005-09-29T14:24:00.000-07:00

I'm torn between two different inclinations. The first is in perfect agreement with you. We have the power to openly declare our aims, so why not go ahead and do so? Open debate is what our country is founded on, why should we be afraid or timid to proudly declare what most nations already know?

The second inclination, however, gives me caution. I do not trust the vision or fairness of whichever party is out of power, be it Democrat or Republican, but specifically I do not trust the Leftist wing of the Democratic party. Accusations of imperialism, of unilateralism and arrogance, would drown out any serious discussion of whether or not the pacification or connection strategy is a good one. For the far-Left, and I think this is beyond any doubt, America can do no good in the world. Their global paradigm only has room for the exploited, and the exploiter. Those who exercise power for self-interest, i.e. America, are prima facie exploiters, so any attempt at persuasion falls on deaf ears.

Chomsky's simplistic theory of international relations is fine-tuned and ubiquitous in this crowd, ready to tear any persuasive attempt apart. War is all about profit and power; lost in this explanation is any possibility that American self-interest can coincide with the truly oppressed (that they currently do is due to Bush and his radical foreign policy departure). America is in a tough position with her far-Left constituency, especially when their words resonate with the largest generation to ever grace the nation: the baby boomers. And especially when the Democratic Party is in thrall to their monies. Most of these fellow-travelers, schooled on Vietnam, disfavor any foreign action that utilizes the military-industrial complex for self-interest.

Luckily, this crowd is also poorly read on events not reported in the New York Times or Reuters, so much of what we do occurs under the radar. We have troops in scores of countries right now, training indigenous armies and nurturing local relations--a favorite tactic of ours is impromptu medical checkups for the locals--and this is, for the most part, going swimmingly. Robert D. Kaplan makes this point in his new book, Imperial Grunts.

The American and European Left do not like the unilateral exercise of American power on principle, regardless of what it is used for. As a fundamental tenet you can understand it, for power can corrupt even the most well-meaning of people. But as the saying goes, "All beliefs taken to the extreme are extreme." We are in an ephemeral moment of global dominance, we are probably the most virtuous society that has ever existed, we are a decent and idealistic people, and we could make a hell of a lot of difference, for our children and for the world.

9/11 was a wake up call for those who act. While we get ramped up, I'm willing to let the critics go back to sleep.

A Discussion at Belmont Club

2005-09-29T11:46:00.000-07:00

GMAT:The fact is, four years after 9/11, it is still more dangerous, even in Iraq, let alone the rest of the arab world, to be pro-American than to be anti-american.

Me: It strikes me that the level of pro- and anti-Americanism is not a good metric by which to judge our war strategy. We are not waging war to be liked, a common misperception.

Infinitely more important is whether Iraqis feel it more in their interest to be pro-Government or pro-Insurgent. In that regard, we are winning decisively.

GMAT: I'm more concerned about the inversions of those actually leading (if you can call it that) the so-called Global War on Terror.

Whatever you want to call it, it is a necessary war that we are winning. While Bush could do better at explaining the war to the public, I find it intellectually unattractive to say we are not being led. Everything that has happened in the last four years is unprecedented--historically shocking, in fact. While it may be a travesty to have to partially disrobe to ensure your safety on board a flying missile, I must note that while you have been taking off your shoes we have conquered the unconquerable Afghanistan, eliminated over 600 Al'Qaeda leadership (80%), stabilized an ungovernable Balisan (Philippines, the other half of Enduring Freedom), are training armies in the Horn of Africa to defeat the terrorists, dismantled Baathist Iraq, arrested Saddam Hussein and killed his sons, held the first ever free elections in the Arab world, dismantled the nuclear blackmarket run out of Pakistan, shut down Libya's WMD program, held firm in Ukraine, demanded and got Syrian withdrawal from Lebanon, boxed in Iran, marginalized Assad, oversaw the Iraqi Constitution, opened schools for girls in Afghanistan, and did all this with only 2,000 combat deaths worldwide.

Don't confuse leadership with oratory. Our generals and our President are doing a fine job on the war, even if they stumble fighting the war on the war. For better or worse we seem to be putting all our faith in propaganda by deed. In an age of language inversion and adverse press, why not?

So, I'm sorry about your shoes, but let's keep some perspective here. We are winning, and winning decisively.

GMAT: Winning decisively? Your list was most impressive. After two tours in Vietnam, I could have produced an equally impressive list of our accomplishments.

However, it's a poor substitute for clearly expressed war aims, the accomplishment of which are measurable, define victory, and mark the end of extraordinary executive war powers.

Angelo Codevilla on Victory: "Common sense does not mistake the difference between victory and defeat: the losers weep and cower, while the winners strut and rejoice. The losers have to change their ways, the winners feel more secure than ever in theirs."

Me: I don't deny that the public front is important, but the stakes are much higher now than in Vietnam, and in many ways speak for themselves. I think it was Wretchard who commented on an earlier thread that the reason we don't hear of a real push to withdraw is that nobody wants to be responsible for the inevitable chaos that would follow. Having an Al'Qaeda victory hanging around ones neck is not a good way to get elected.

But I wonder if we are not imposing our will more than you think. If we have changed the way we do business since 9/11, it is in the other direction: we are now more assertive internationally than ever before. Historians may write about the irony of our situation, because in the last four years our global power and credibility have actually increased, immensely in fact, even while our image has taken a beating. We have truly become a global colossus, gaining footprints in Central Asia and the Middle East while at the same time cementing our role as the arbiter of world affairs. We see this role in almost all situations, from Palestine/Israel to EU/Iran. Progress on all these fronts is impossible without a US stamp of approval, and, much more importantly, so is conflict.

China, with the North Korea situation, has a play to check that influence if they succeed in solving the nuke problem when we couldn't, but the damage is already done to their West. The war in the Balkans and Afghanistan, the deal with India, our bases in the 'Stans and our influence in Mongolia are new additions to our power structure, unprecedented global gains in so short a time.

Your concerns over Bush's inability to clearly expressing war aims are well taken, but I wonder if expressing our true intentions--global pacification--is better left unsaid, or at least better left implied. We may be talking softly, but our stick has become legendary.

Proportionality in Journalism

2005-09-19T10:02:00.000-07:00

Journalists take objectivity to mean fairness; they understand their primary imperative to be, "Get both sides of the story."

The problem is thus: if an entity is objectively bad, or even objectively evil (and both do in fact exist in the real world), the journalist's drive for fairness makes his reporting inherently biased towards evil, because he will reestablish the statistical median artificially and inaccurately, which has the effect of watering down knowledge and discarding lessons of history. A phenomenon like Nazi Germany, which produced data with a negative to positive statistical ratio of about 1000 to 1, becomes a much different creature when a supposedly enlightened journalist revisits that balance and creates a negative to positive ratio of, lets say, 11 to 2.

The sophistication of our journalists, as we are well aware, also inaccurately skews objective good, but in the other way towards bad. This is even embraced by journalists, if by implication, when they claim dissent as a virtue of its own, without regard to that which is dissented from. The inevitable "but" that attends good news from Iraq is a true, but disproportionate, qualifier, much like "Mussolini making the trains run on time." The confines of time and space make even mentioning it suspect. If the qualifier appears in a 600 page book, its harm is limited. If it is mentioned in a 600 word article, it is almost obscene.

Objectivity is hard, there is no denying that, but the short-cut rule of "fair and balanced" is a sure way to miss it. It speaks of a loss of judgment, a misplaced value system that can only gain credence in an abstracted world that has ceased interacting with reality. Journalists in that sense are cultural autistics and historical amnesiacs.

Most things are non-neutral, so a neutral approach to reporting news is bound to fail. When there is a finite space to report almost infinite data, proportionality must be adhered to. Anything less is unsophisticated.

Journalism in the 21st Century

2005-09-19T09:58:00.000-07:00

When anything but perfection is "not good enough", and when war is always "worse than we imagined", progress is always outweighed by disproportionate qualifiers. If a journalist wants to report the negative, fine, but when he uses it to change the complexion of an otherwise positive development he is doing a disservice to his audience.

"But" Journalism is the art of turning victory into defeat, and it is a symptom of a larger problem: the naive disbelief in opportunity cost and the childish faith that anything can be certain. 8.5 million Iraqis participate in the first free and fair elections the region has ever seen, but (fill in the blank). If we think it might fail, it has failed already. If we must pay for it, it already costs too much.

The difference between the wise and the educated has become vast. The wise know that everything may not be okay. Our elite hear this, and feel betrayed.

The Managerial Empire

2005-09-16T14:23:00.000-07:00

Read Imperial Grunts by Robert Kaplan.

"The effort in Iraq, with its large-scale mobilization of troops and immense concentration of risk, could not be indicative of how the U.S. would act in the future. It was in Colombia where I was introduced to the tactics that the U.S. would employ to manage an unruly world."

A managerial Empire for a nation of MBA's. This highlights the folly of analyzing Iraq, and Vietnam for that matter, too broadly. As Kaplan says, the world is Injun Country, and our small bands of adventurous men are trying to mid-wife civilization and decency across the entire globe. I commented earlier that it is in the vanguard of the American imperium where you can find real true believers. Read this book and you will see the truth of that statement, and be proud.

Another point Kaplan makes is more worrisome. Colombian FARC and ELN are being supported by Chavez, and he has trained these terrorists to sabotage the Colombian oil pipe-line so the U.S. will be more dependent, and therefore more beholden, to Venezuelan oil. Chavez is also handing out Venezuelan ID cards to men from Yemen, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, etc.

Chavez is Castro's protege, and it must be remembered that Castro, in 1967, began the era of international terrorism with a grand meeting of Leftist radicals in Havana, and afterwards became a type of centrale for terrorist leaders and funds. The agenda of the 1967 meeting was to destabilize democracies everywhere, thereby setting the stage for communist revolution. From this meeting of the terrorist minds sprang Europe's terror decade of the '70's which spilled over into the Middle East.

It is no secret that there is a common cause between the radical left and the radical right, what Claire Sterling referred to as Red and Black terrorism respectively. What is Chavez up to that we, as amateur analysts, cannot see? I'm afraid Chavez is planning to annex the choke-point of the American economy and thereby gain disproportionate influence and power, while retaining plausible deniability for the attacks. The tactic of blowing up Colombia's oil pipe-line could easily be transported to the Middle East, or Mexico, or even Canada, our number one supplier, leaving Chavez the arbiter of the price and supply of American oil, which would increase his influence immensely. A Castro with oil is a scary proposition, but an oil-rich Castro in control of U.S. supply, who wields terrorism freely and unapologetically, and unlike the real Castro young and still virile, is a serious national security threat, ripe for the Chinese to massage to their advantage.

I do hope we are not being blinded by the concentrated risk of Iraq. If we are to get out of this century still the leader of the free world, it is going to take the eternal vigilance of Americans, both military and civilian, to remain the former and preserve the latter.

Imperial March

2005-09-15T07:29:00.000-07:00

After reading "The Terror Network", it struck me how much we can blame communism and its fellow travelers for the age of terrorism. Terrorism in its first instance is an attack on liberal democracy; it is dangerous because it turns our strengths against us and makes the virtuous society untenable. The communist revolutionaries of the 70's knew that democracies were highly impotent against terrorism. People want safety more than liberties, and governments that could not supply the former would end by taking away the latter. Once the society is militarized and oppressed, the patient communist can find the fodder he needs to feed the beast of revolution. Start by stealing from the rich to feed the poor, and eventually the wind and the people are at your back. With such justification is tyranny and fascism embraced over democracy; this is the reason far-Leftists cheer dictatorship and abuse. Abuse and oppression are necessary preconditions of revolution, and revolution is what they fight for. If democracy is two steps away from the Worker's Paradise, tyranny is but one.

Thus, the Tupamaros could celebrate their accomplishment of fascism, though it was much different than what they desired, because their biggest enemy had been discredited and defeated. They had pushed society down the slippery slope to communism, and the end would justify the means.

Thus, George Galloway makes common cause with fascism, but he is not for it. Both Osama and Galloway believe the same thing. To rebuild, you must first tear down. To create, you must destroy.

The War on Terrorism is a final insult added to communism's injurious defeat. Instead of devolving our liberties at home, America took it upon herself to change the world. The revolutionary narrative was incomplete; nobody ever thought what might happen if America pushed back. The price of that omission is now being shouldered by our erstwhile enemy Osama, and his unfortunate allies the Baathists and the Taliban. As an Emperor once said, he has paid the price for his lack of vision.

The power and influence of America has now reached every state on this planet, by necessity and by right. Something great and unprecedented is underfoot, a unique story our enemies did not predict and cannot believe. America has become an Empire of the Mind, and she is pressing her advantage. In her vanguard are the real true believers.

You might say the revolutionaries are dreamers, but they are not the only ones. Not by a long shot.

Tribunal of the Left

2005-09-13T06:13:00.000-07:00

Wretchard writes:

If we start regarding the Palestinians as men like other men and hold them to the same standards we will accomplish two things: utter the greatest Liberal heresy possible and treat them as equals.

Oh, but we no longer see men as morally autonomous. Standing to come before the tribunal of the Left--where redistributive redress and ideological injunction are bandied about with a cynical eye--is granted only to the well-organized victim group that speaks truth to power. These new pockets of political consequence are composed of men all too happy to trade their own individual interests for the newfangled glory of anger in defeat, supplicants and petitioners drawn to Stereotype's crescent of embrace, surprised when they find themselves in shackles instead.

Will Canada Formalize Shariah?

2005-09-10T13:02:00.000-07:00

From Wretchard's Cat and Dog, which highlights the fight against Canada's acceptance of Shariah as a formal legal entity to arbitrate family law for Canadien Muslims:

NoSharia.Com has found a clever way to prevent their position from cascading through their whole ideological system, and escalating into a wholesale opposition to "political Islam" by generalizing their argument as opposition to all "faith based" types of arbitration.

The secular faith of the far Left is waging an asymmetrical war against the established ethos and institutions of the West. The decentralized deconstructionists have formed cells in universities and coffee shops, they are ubiquitous and self-sufficient, and when a weakness is exposed they swarm and terrorize with brazen fervor.

Contradictory cultures, so long as they play victim, are embraced as fellow travelers, but these same cultures are attacked when they parley with the enemy. Repression that originates outside of the West is authentic, so long as it occurs in impoverished enclaves. When it formally joins the machine, though, all hands on deck.

The presupposition of badness ascribed to faith-based institutions is a bullet meant only for Christianity, a shiny stone to bring down the largest of Western Goliaths. Islam does itself no favors by being noticed. If it weren't so impatient, who knows what spoils would await.

Parallelism

2005-09-09T20:37:00.000-07:00

It struck me, when watching Talabani answer a question from an Israeli reporter, that the issue of "normalizing" relations with Israel is, for the Kurds, much like the issue of slavery for the North during the Constitutional Convention: something that was subsumed by the importance of unity and survival.

Good Fences

2005-09-09T20:16:00.000-07:00

Talabani said that Assad had invited him to visit Damascus, but Talabani replied that he would not come until Assad "prepared the ground for a successful meeting." Then he said,

"I'm sorry to tell you that all Arab media, without exception, is supporting terrorism, morally, by making propaganda for them, describing them as the heroes of the struggle against imperialism and Zionism, and encouraging them to come fight in Iraq.

I'm sorry to tell you that a Palestinian organization, when responding to the crimes in London, said 'I'm sorry to see these people go to London, why they not going to Iraq to fight there?'

At the end of his answer, Talabani used a saying that he could not himself translate into English, so he asked a minister of his to do it for the crowd:

"A man who digs a well for his brother to fall in, but instead it is he who falls in."

Our new policy in the Middle East

2005-09-09T19:50:00.000-07:00

"A document that the few cannot hold up as a banner of victory is a success for the many. In the new Iraq, there will be no victors, and no vanquished...

Thank you, America, for your dignity and courage. We fought together to end a civil war. There was a civil war, a civil war of Saddam Hussein against the people of Iraq.

Now, we continue to struggle side-by-side to uproot the Iraqi fascism that has long threatened us all. By treating the Iraqi people as partners, the United States has courageously made the final and most important alteration to its policy in the Middle East."

Jalal Talabani, President of a Free Iraq.

Think about it. Whatever this is, it is not a failure.

To Falluja

2005-09-09T19:49:00.000-07:00

I would like to highlight a colloquial observation from the Talabani conference.

President Talabani was asked about militias being dispersed under the new Constitution, and he said that Kurdistan, for instance, wanted to keep the Peshmerga until the terrorist threat went away, and then would convert them into a type of national guard.

He said that the consequence of immediately dispersing the Peshmerga would be "many Falluja." Falluja in this sense meaning "city taken over by terrorists."

This from Bill Rogio:

"To Fallujah" has now become a verb for Iraqis, Hickey explained later, synonymous with the violent leveling of a recalcitrant city. In mid July, in fact, Baghdad ominously announced that there would be a "solution" to the Tall 'Afar "problem" within 10 days. Three dozen men from Tall 'Afar and Mosul went to Baghdad to meet with the government to circumvent "a Fallujah." In this usage Falluja means "destroyed by America."

Interestingly, we now have proof of the efficacy of force as a meme generator. Because of our actions, in Iraq city taken over by terrorists equals destroyed by America. We have created a new noun with two simultaneous meanings. The meanings are irretrievably linked, so they are both avoided.

What Happened in New Orleans?

2005-09-06T07:05:00.000-07:00

Dan Darling has an excellent post here.

The Washington Post analyzes events here.

An article on the role of FEMA in emergencies is here.

Blanco balks at President's offer of help. On Friday.

Rich Lowry covers some of the basics here.

Information about the logistical challenge, and the swift federal response, look here. From a guy who does it as a career.

I think that about does it. The final score's still out, but it is becoming apparent that this was first and foremost a local and state failure.

Black and White

2005-09-04T11:44:00.000-07:00

Would Blacks across the country really rise up in solidarity with looters?

Whites would not. Asians would not. Would Latinos? Surely not Jews. Muslims?

When Blacks study hard and speak proper English, they are accused by their peers of "acting White", of being Uncle Toms. It is the Black Community, whatever that is, that defines its own culture, and it has embraced a characterization of negatives. What's left for them, when they reject Whitey's norms, is unsuccessful behavior, and victimhood. A poor strategy in a world of competitive labor.

What are the percentages of success for "acting White"; how many rise up out of poverty by "acting Black."

Tough questions, with tough answers. As Thomas Sowell points out, many Blacks in this country voluntarily define themselves as rednecks. As memes go, it is quite the virus.

Shame and Pity

2005-09-02T13:15:00.000-07:00

I think the reality on the ground is simply too complex to accurately distill post hoc imperatives. A city with major access points destroyed cannot simply be invaded without a large, comprehensive logistical plan; otherwise the troops, instead of being the solution, become part of the problem.

But I agree with you that something is drastically wrong. Americans are dying in the streets of New Orleans, and those who don't make it out will die thinking they have been abandoned by their country. Citizens still trapped on rooftops waive the American flag in a desperate plea to a country that does not seem to care. The "Help Me" signs failed them in days 1, 2, and 3; nobody came, nobody noticed. Desperate, they put their last hope in a symbol that, unbeknownst to them, somehow means less than it used to.

Whatever is wrong, we need to fix it. I watch the news and all I feel is pity, and shame. Pity for our countrymen suffering and dying, and shame for our failure and helplessness. I will never be able to forget the incomprehension of a young mother, holding her dead five-day-old daughter in her arms, as the camera came in close.

Today her world was shattered. America came too late.

It's not a Black Thing

2005-09-02T12:43:00.000-07:00

New Orleans City, according to the 2000 census, has a population of 484,674. Out of that number, 325,947 citizens are African American, which is about 67.25% of the population.

From what I can find, about 25,000 - 30,000 people sought shelter in the Superdome, and these are the people that you see on TV. Most media sources guess 100,000 people stayed in New Orleans to ride out the storm, with the highest estimate coming from UK's Independent, which pegs the number at 200,000.

Now think about it. We are hearing that this is a "Black" thing, that the only people suffering are African Americans. The innuendo behind these statements is an overall indictment of our system, and in many cases the statements have moved beyond implication to outright accusation.

Yet we are seeing only a small fraction of reality. Even if all 100,000 people remaining in the city are black, that means over 200,000 blacks were able to leave, which means it is absolutely inaccurate to assert blacks have it worse because they are black.

Many factors led the people who are now suffering to stay, but race is not one of them. In fact, from a purely statistical standpoint, being an African American in New Orleans gave you a pretty decent chance of getting out. If two-thirds of all blacks in New Orleans fled the storm, race will not tell you why some stayed behind.

SETI and Global Warming

2005-09-01T07:08:00.000-07:00

You can find an interesting speech by Michael Crichton, on the subject of global warming and bad politics, here.

Global Warming

2005-09-01T07:07:00.000-07:00

Two things to think about:

The "experts" derive their data from two sources. One, via classic scientific observation they gather emission (CO2), climate and glacier data points from all over the world, and document correlations and patterns that exist amongst the data (though other contradictory patterns are ignored, like the fact that Antarctic ice is thickening). Though conclusions remain elusive, newspapers, prostituting scientists and political operatives distort the nature of these observations. Causal links are asserted where none are claimed or exist.

Two, warnings and predictions are derived from advanced and complicated computer models. The programs and algorithms that underlie these models are fractal or chaotic in nature, which means all results from lengthy iterations are eminently dependent on initial conditions. The problem with using these climate model prognostications as guidance is obvious: the scientist, and therefore the climate model, is working from imperfect knowledge. A small omission or error will cause a drastic departure from reality, and the number of variables that affect Earth's climate make such omissions inevitable.

Other warming explanations, like land-use or the sun, are ignored by these true believers. Information, like the great difference in warming between New York and Albany, is not discussed. "Global Warming" is bandied about even though many places on the globe are actively cooling. Debate means heresy, and heresy means persecution.

The idea that Man's Industry is ruining the world is a strong tonic and heady brew for Eco-Leftists, and their favor (and fervor) has generated an industry of its own. Interests and dedicated factions have multiplied, and, much like eugenics in the early 1900's, bad science has spawned bad politics. Warming may not be global, but its sordid advocates surely are.

That is not to say that "global warming" has been disproved; man may be every bit as consequential as the environmentalists claim. But we do not know, and the question remains: is it prudent to constrain mankind's defenses against nature in the short term on the off chance that we have anything to do with climate change in the long term?

Nietzsche and Rousseau

2005-08-31T13:41:00.000-07:00

On Nietzsche's assertion that "Once we label something, we invalidate it."

This is true to an extent. Labels are inadequate representations. Defining an object reduces its reality, and much data is lost in the process.

On Rousseau:

Rousseau postulated that it is society that corrupts man (an otherwise noble creature). Society can be perfected, because man can be perfected. If corruption and evil exist, it is not human weakness that is responsible...it is societal imperfection. Hence the imperative: Society must be remade. Change as a goal, and motto.

Here we find the genesis of that elitist idea: the further from society one is (the loin-clothed barbarian, for instance), the more authentically noble one is. Instead of society being a shelter, a shield against the nature of man, it is a vehicle, to be discarded or rebuilt at will.

Opportunity cost was removed from the sphere of political science. Redistribution feels good, whatever the consequences. You can't hug your children with nuclear arms, etc.

Perfect became the enemy of the good. Thanks, Rousseau.

Thoughts on Belief

2005-08-31T13:39:00.000-07:00

Beliefs must be real because they can affect reality. Anything that can change the future exists.

Which brings me back to a paradox, one I often cite, a true moral dilemma for one who searches for truth.

What if it were True that the effect of a false belief was more beneficial than the effect of Truth itself? Or another way, is the premise "Mankind can handle the Truth", False.

A placebo, once truthfully labeled, no longer works. Another example of a false belief that is...better...than reality. Which highlights even more clearly my dilemma: is belief in God a necessary placebo? What is it that we gain, what would be lost?

Only slightly flippantly: would Mankind be able to survive a session in the Total Perspective Vortex?

Nietzsche spoke of "What comes after Man" and called it terrible indeed. Maybe it is Truth that awaits in the darkness to terrorize our people.

Looking out my Backdoor: Katrina and the Crisis of New Orleans

2005-08-31T13:35:00.000-07:00

I'm having a difficult time wrapping my mind around the scope of this disaster. We are looking at a mass displacement of hundreds of thousands of people for an extended period of time. Worse, most of these people are without means and poor, so they are truly adrift on a stormy sea for the foreseeable future. They will not be able to stay at motels, or eat at restaurants, or get jobs. They will be hundreds of miles away from their homes, resourceless and vulnerable. For months. What do we do? What can we do?

In the days ahead, we may see something truly uplifting, or truly terrible. Americans may open their arms and their homes, and rise to the challenge in what will be remembered as one of our finest hours. Or, we could all shrug and let the Government deal with it, which would be remembered quite differently.

We are at a turning point in our history. Which way will we go? Will citizens act for their countrymen, or will we punt and let Government act for its supplicants.

Either way, America, in the next couple of months, will be redefined.

Mourning in America

2005-08-31T13:27:00.000-07:00

This is re: mourning-by-cause, which I believe is a neutral proposition, but can be shameful in practice.

Sheehan is either a pathetic figure or a contemptible opportunist. She is either a grieving mother who has lost all perspective, or she is a despicable activist who is exploiting the death of her son to further her own narcissistic rage against the machine. I do not have enough data to claim one or the other.

But those who use her I do understand. They are the dangerous ones. They are the Destructors.

Claire Sterling, Cassandra

2005-08-31T13:24:00.000-07:00

If you are so inclined, you might find it worthwhile to read Claire Sterling's The Terror Network (1981). Here are some excerpts:

Many young people in this story set out with blazing revolutionary faith, only to reach the arid conviction that somehow, tragically, they had gone wrong. They wanted to make things better, and made them worse. In the end, they found a grotesque identity of interest with the Black terrorists, their hideous mirror image. Both were joined in a single-minded effort to disarticulate and eventually destroy the democratic order wherever they found it...

Terrorism...became a continuation of war by other means...

Not only is it easier and safer to be a terrorist in a free country than it is in a police state, it is ideologically more satisfying...

Methodically trained, massively armed, immensely rich, and assured of powerful patronage, they move with remarkable confidence across national frontiers from floodlit stage to stage, able at a word to command the planet's riveted attention...employing the power of impotence to expose the impotence of power, as a Western diplomat described the Iranian seizure of American hostages in Teheran.

The Tupamaros, who invented the original model for what has become the planetary fashion in urban guerrilla warfare, make a wonderfully instructive case...

Their ranks consisted of teachers, lawyers, doctors, dentists, accountants, bankers, architects, engineers, a model, a radio announcer, and an actress. They were radical Marxists, committed to profound revolutionary change, who unmistakably started out with fine intentions. They lived in a politically worldly society open to the winds of change and given to voting social-democratically left. Like middle-class revolutionaries everywhere, they were plainly moved by a strong sense of social guilt and an uplifting political vision. Even later, when they started to kill, they wept.

Signposts flashing through the night in vain, indeed.

Iraq's Constitution: A Thought

2005-08-31T13:22:00.000-07:00

I have been consistently outspoken in my opposition to a Shariah-based Constitution, so I feel obligated to come forward with my thoughts on what in fact has been recently codified (thought not ratified).

To be quite honest, I am pleased with the result. I can only imagine the excellent, informative debates in the Iraqi parliament over whether this or that Shariah law also upholds Constitutionally protected human rights and freedom of religion, or whether this or that democratic principal can be reconciled with Islamic teachings on the role of women, etc. That this debate is actually guaranteed, because of the Constitution's protection of competing and sometimes contradictory interests, is surely a great bonus for our cause, in Iraq and elsewhere.

It will not all be green pastures. Those who claim to be surprised by this are either being intellectually dishonest or they are partisan hacks, or both. But we have come a long way from Saddam and No-Fly Zones.

The Iraqi constitution has codified the friction of Western and Near Eastern philosophies and pegged the selective criterion to the will of the people, which means the determinative metrics will be the efficacy of governance and the prosperity of the people. Three regions under different laws means that people can and will vote with their feet, and with three regions of different religious strictures, comparisons of success are inevitable. This codified competition is very good for us.

If the Constitution is ratified (a big if), grab a front row seat. Iraq's parliament is going to be one of the primary arenas of the war and, most likely, one of the arbiters of our final victory.

We Have the Right

2005-08-20T09:25:00.000-07:00

The "what gives us the right" crowd needs this lesson more than any other: we have to live, or die, with the consequences of our actions and inactions.

From that fact alone obtains our right to judge and preempt. All beings have the right to stop the knife before it breaks the skin. And all civilized people have the responsibility to call a spade a spade.

Iraq, and Character Analysis

2005-08-20T09:09:00.000-07:00

Me and Howard Dean: strange bedfellows? My response:

You distort my position. Firstly, I can hardly be against a constitution that has yet to be written and ratified. I can only be against contingencies. The contingency that would cause me to proclaim Iraq a failure is Sharia being codified into the new constitution. A limited argument.

Let's call Sharia black, and liberal democracy white. There are many shades of gray in between that would be acceptable. I believe we will see gray, I just hope it drifts towards the lighter side. But if it doesn't, I will not hesitate to call an Islamist society with vast oil reserves a danger, and an American policy failure.

And let me jump into this debate between Truepeers and Ash. It seems that we have different levels of argument working here, with TP going back and forth between the practical and the anthropological, and Ash firmly planting his flag in the abstract, with occasional nods towards reality.

To make a practical claim, I would have Ash compute and divulge what he sees as the possible consequences of his argument, in the real world. Putting perspective analysis aside, what possible good comes from the Mullahs having the bomb, and what possible evil?

Also, the idea of character has been lost somewhere in Ash's analysis. Two nations are equivalent in many areas: they are sovereign, made of people, and have needs and desires, etc. Yet these same two nations can be quite different in character. Ash wants to peg the privilege of nuclear weapons to the legal idea of sovereignty, which means every nation has a claim as a matter of right, and there is no way to distinguish one nation from the other in this respect.

Truepeers (if I am not misstating his argument) and I are arguing that the unique nature of nuclear weapons--unparalleled destructive power in an individual and portable device--should force us to limit the privilege of ownership. If one accepts this premise, that we must limit ownership of nuclear weapons, the argument from sovereignty is invalid, a priori. And so we look for a way to distinguish between nations.

Character is the most intuitive choice for a limiting filter, and this goes back to Charles Manson's knife. The Mullah's are not shy about their stance on Israel, and readily proclaim their contempt and hatred for America. They are also not shy about infiltrating Iraq and killing our troops.

Since we cannot know the mind of our enemy as it truly exists, we must use his actions and words as our evidence of his character and our insight into his intentions. In law this is the "eye in the sky" approach. A contract, in the abstract, is created by a meeting of the minds, but in a court of law it is only created by the actions and words of the parties. We may be wrong about the real intentions of the Mullahs, but our limit as human beings forces us to rely solely on their outward conduct as we try to determine their character. And their character determines the level of threat.

And to preempt any vacillation or equivocation, character must be judged from an American perspective. Abstract works until it doesn't, but reality works all the time. We are not simply impartial observers to this international crisis, and it is as Americans that we will feel the consequences of any misapplication of reason.

After taking this all into account, it is clear we cannot allow the Mullahs to have nuclear weapons. They are not politically mature enough to play nice with, or even be trusted not to not cause a wholesale slaughter of, the other kids in the playground. We have studied their character, and we have found it lacking.

Lessons, lessons everywhere yet not a sop to think.

2005-08-18T12:58:00.000-07:00

In response to Wretchard's post, here:

Yes, the parallels with the '30's begin to pop up everywhere.

When Italy invaded Abyssinia in the middle of that decade, Stanley Baldwin's stirring call to action convinced the League of Nations to stand firm, in what Mussolini contemptuously labeled "fifty nations led by one." Led by Britain, the League imposed sanctions on Italy, but in one of the more insane moments of this time Baldwin made sure that the sanctions imposed were only those that would have no direct effect on Italy or on her ability to wage war. The sanctions were cosmetic and superficial, stopping shipments of fruit yet allowing the transport of oil, built to send messages, not punishment.

Instead of pulling back, Mussolini raped Ethiopia at will, and the only change affected was Italy's turn against Britain and the joining of the Fascists to the Nazis. As Churchill comments, Baldwin had roused the British for righteous action, yet refused to deliver a war! The British one-worlders, in their disarmament plans and phony sanctions, played the worst of all hands when looking across the table at rabid militancy. They bluffed big, and then they folded.

And here we are with Iran. The EU-3 are embarrassed daily and their only response is more noise, more pleas, and more time. There will be a showdown in the UN, and the peace-loving countries of the world will once again have a choice: unrighteous peace or righteous action. Once again an English speaking nation will lead the charge against outright intransigence and provocation. Will we pull up short, and be labeled appeasers by our children, or will we do that which is painful, but necessary, to protect our people?

We cannot afford to follow the pacifist chimera again, not with nuclear weapons, not when they will be owned by a few men adhering to a death-loving ideology. Yet I fear we will, and much like the '30's, our loud noises and dishonorable inactions will purchase a darkness the world has never known.

Hitler and Versailles

2005-08-18T12:57:00.000-07:00

The debilitative remedies of the Versailles Treaty placed upon Germany were much more a cause of Hitler and National Socialism than Chamberlain and his ilk.

This is a common misperception. The cause of Hitler's dementia was his inability to believe that the Reich could possibly lose a war without some massive internal and external betrayal. After he regained his vision and was released from the Vienna hospital, he heard from his fellow soldiers dastardly tales of Jewish perfidy coming from Russia and the Bolsheviks. He then knew what had to be done. Since a nation composed of pure Germanic blood would inevitably take over the world, all one had to do was reunify the Germans and eradicate the Jews.

He used the Versailles treaty in the beginning to rally the German people much like he used British and French concessions later on. When the British allowed Germany to break both Versailles and the Locarno treaties, it did not improve Hitler's countenance nor the determination of the Nazis. In fact, the weakness and dishonorable appeasement led them to believe England wasn't even worthy as an ally. After all, why should they allow England to remain free when she was such a contemptible nag?

Had England and France actually enforced the Treaties for 15 or 20 years, Germanic fervor would have died down and the business of rebuilding would have proceeded apace.

A Child of Reason

2005-08-18T12:55:00.000-07:00

So what Moral Authority does the U.N. exercise now? No more than that which resides in D.C., London, and the capitals of other free countries.

My inclination is the same; the UN's moral authority has been shattered in recent years, if it ever existed at all.

Yet I still do not believe that a global, normative institution is unhelpful per se. It is a tool to be wielded, and like any tool it can be used for good or for evil.

We are at a turning point in history, where we can let the current UN dissolve into a gentleman's club for authoritarian diplomats and an incubator for high crime syndicates, or we can hope to restructure based on certain basic principles. More specifically: we can hope to remake the UN in our image.

I do not wish to bend knee to a global Leviathon, nor am I a romantic about our prospects, yet I believe that the idea of the UN, as an institution to enforce basic norms like women's rights (which is truly the trojan horse for all our enemies), is a sound one. Language can be codified that is so simple and so universal that no government would long survive the embarrassment of a public refusal to accept it as law.

At the very least, it is a perfect time to try. America is unparalleled in her might, and thanks to our honorable but sometimes mistaken efforts around the globe we currently command the attention of the entire world. Almost 5 billion people on this planet have access to media outlets. If we codify the most basic of rights and rules, along with the necessary and inevitable punishment to follow any transgression (which includes an acceptance of violence in defense of principles), we may be able to succeed where others have failed.

It all depends on the willingness of a hyperpower America to set the example, and light the fire. It's possible that this dream of enforced global norms will never rise above the realm of ethical alchemy, but it would be noble to try.

There are many things for which a people could be remembered. We could do much worse than a functional and moral UN.

Cindy Sheehan, Pathetic Figure

2005-08-16T18:14:00.000-07:00

trish: "Grieving parents of soldiers are allowed to say whatever the hell they want to say, no matter how mistaken or fruity."

Last I checked everybody in this country was extended that courtesy, by the Constitution, no less.

Sheehan's right to speak is not in question. Sheehan's right to demand a second audience with the President is not even in question. What's in question is whether the substance of her daily diatribes should be listened to and trumpeted around the globe by patsy fellow-travelers bored by the August news slowdown. What's in question is whether every left-leaning club, newspaper, and website is behaving ethically by using Sheehan's grief as a bludgeon on the American people, exploiting her "moral authority" to avoid critical argument so the Leftist opportunists can advance their subversive agenda of pacifism, socialism, and anti-semitism.

Sheehan has an almost absolute right of speech, and she has an absolute right to be wrong. She is currently exercising both.

On Marx and Islam

2005-08-16T10:46:00.000-07:00

Marx, in the instance of Jihad, is only relevant as a filter for the cross-cultural translation of Islam's imperial ambitions, yet this is enough to make it dangerous. Salafist and Wahhabist fascism is given cover from close criticism because the Imams and Jihadis have adopted the Marxist posture of grievance-mongering and victimology to espouse their position, a move that plays to the sympathies of the Western intelligentsia and our faux elites. Instead of evil and xenophobic conquerors, they become just one more group with legitimate complaints and demands against the European white man. Their bellicosity is thereby excused by their authenticity.

It is true that Muslims steeped in this Western pathology are more prone to adopt the fighting revolutionary role found in The Communist Manifesto; yet this is so only because their indoctrination begins with a recognizable language. Soon the focus shifts from a redress of grievances to an empowering jihad against the infidel.

The driving force behind terrorism is and will continue to be Islam the religion, coupled with the Imperial desire for a global Caliphate. Western Muslims may begin their reeducation via Marx, but their goal is pure Wahhabist in practice: they want nothing less than the total submission of those who, by their lights, are unclean and unworthy in the eyes of God. Even, and maybe especially, the oppressed Western proletariat.

Thoughts on a Saturday

2005-08-13T20:48:00.000-07:00

On Terrorism as a US tactic:

There is a great difference between covert action on a terrorist cell and actual terrorist action on a civilian populace. If I read you right, you are advocating the latter?

I think that is a horrible idea, and, thank goodness, incredibly unlikely. Terrorism is what the weak do to the strong. It is a defection from all international norms: because cooperation in such an ethical paradigm renders the terrorist impotent, he chooses to operate outside the arena of acceptable behavior to achieve his goals, whatever they are.

We have a very strong interest in keeping this dynamic alive. As long as terrorism remains outside the norm, and as long as we continue to offer large disincentives for its practice, it will remain rare and unattractive as a strategic option. If the strongest player in the game begins to operate outside the cooperative norms, then the norms themselves will crumble and there will be a large flight towards total defection. The only thing that keeps countries from defecting now is the strength and posture of a United States ready and willing to add massive costs to any such move towards the unethical.

If we are to truly become safe from terrorism, we need to strengthen this ethical paradigm, and we need to get better at enforcing it upon everyone else.

On Iran: If I remember right Rasfanjani publically vowed to destroy Israel, even if it meant losing 200 million Iranians to a counterstrike. As he said, one or two nukes and Israel doesn't exist anymore. With his perverted calculus, the cost to Iran would be worth it.

And he was the moderate.

We know that Israel won't live with that threat. America won't either, and Iraq already has a long list of complaints, a list that pales when compared to the risk of a nuclear Iran next door.

Iran will not give in to diplomacy. Sanctions from the EU and US are likely, but not from the UN because of Russia and China. Even then, it would not guarantee a nuclear-free Iran.

Therefore, from this vantage point US military action looks inevitable.

We want to make this look like a punitive action, so leaving it to Israel causes all sorts of diplomatic problems. It would be seen as a war of aggression by the Arabs, and all the conspiracy-theorists would be seen as vindicated about a Zionist plot to control the ME (C4). Plus, the US would have to okay the mission and Israel would have to use Iraqi airspace. The Israel option therefore seems untenable. If we dally, Israel will be forced to do it, but the cost to our overall strategy in the ME would be enormous.

Iraq would also cause problems, most of which has to do with the quality and success of the mission. That leaves us. In the near future, we will be forced to attack Iran.

Does anybody see any flaw in that argument, and if not, what happens when Iran comes to the same conclusion?

If something is inevitable, it should be done when chances favor us and we control the initiative. A slow wind up in the UN won't cut it, I fear, yet I expect it will happen anyways. In the meantime, Iran is getting ready.

I am not as sanguine about waiting as you are, and I don't think Israel is either. If Israel thought it was necessary to attack Osirak, they are not going to allow Iran to bring their nukes online. And an Israeli attack could shatter the fragile progress we've made in Iraq so far, and the entire region could erupt in turmoil.

I think it comes down to time, and we simply don't have any. If we had 15 years, then sure, a revolution would be our bet. But we don't. The processing plant is back in action, the bomb design is ready, the Shahab-3 has been remodeled, and the hardliners have taken over the entire government. Ahmadinejad is training thousands as suicide bombers, and the ruling elite do not even bother to hide their intentions: they are going to spread Islam, whatever the cost, and they are going to start with Israel and the US.

To quote Saruman: "What time do you think we have?"

C4: Israel is not a signatory to the treaty. And yes, that makes all the difference. They developed the tech on their own. NPT signatories do not, they are given nuclear tech in exchange for promises, which Iran has broken.

Give it up. Iran is not just a threat to Israel. They are our problem, too.

"That is the sound of inevitability."

2005-08-11T14:51:00.000-07:00

More innovations coming to Iraq, this from Defenstech.org:

New Scientist is right in saying that cells "provide a simple yet effective way for terrorists to remotely trigger a bomb." And that's why it'd be great news if an idea for "a portable device devised by US defence contractor Raytheon [to] quickly identify and disable such weapons" really works out.

The device includes a transmitter that mimics a cell phone base station and a metal horn to concentrate the signal from a 10 milliwatt power source in a single direction. Scanning... a concealed phone... with the tool... tricks it into thinking it is in range of a new network base station and blocks it from any genuine stations in the vicinity.

The suspect phone will also respond with a “handshake signal” containing its phone number, allowing a network operator to temporarily disconnect it from the real network, and preventing it from receiving a detonation call.

Wretchard's right. This is a game the terrorists can't win. The higher the stakes, the further back in time our enemies must go to find tactics that we haven't neutralized. Osama used to use email and satellite phones. Now he uses the communication tactics of Marathon.

The knowledge and skills we are learning in Iraq are probably the most underappreciated aspect of OIF. For decades we've studied how to beat powerful enemies; now, we are perfecting our approach to the weak. How long before the effectiveness of the car bomb and the suicide vest is deconstructed?

When the most powerful innovative force the planet has ever seen looks your way, it is only a matter of time.

The Power of Ideas

2005-08-11T14:49:00.000-07:00

The majority of innovations in this new war will not be technological. The networking of our military and the decentralized market of ideas it helps to foster will play a much bigger role in our victory.

Substitute "military" with "people" and the statement remains true, in general.

Michael Yon, American

2005-08-10T09:04:00.000-07:00

Wretchard pointed out Yon's latest, which is here.

Ed thought that taking the soldier to his parents was a good thing. It may be, but the reaction of the family and neighbors did not seem encouraging to me. I responded:

The terrorist's mom was proud of him. When they took this piece of shit out into his family's neighborhood, Yon says the neighbors shielded him. They looked on this terrorist as a hero for daring to stand up to the Americans.

Perhaps even more frustrating, the terrorist himself was imperturbed. These murderers know how good they have it with the Americans, how, once caught, they will get air conditioning and three squares a day and showers and all that. Yon writes that the mom was encouraging her son in front of our soldiers, wearing a smile and saying "Don't worry, you'll be released soon."

Then you have the rule that we cannot hand over a prisoner to the Iraqi police unless they assist in his capture. This is, of course, political correctness. Yon writes, "During lunch, the Chief persisted in his entreaties to LTC Kurilla, saying his police would find all the bombs, break the cell, and give the prisoner back tomorrow at the latest. And they could. The Iraqi Police could break the cell because they can break the man."

But we can't allow this to happen. If we hand one of our prisoners to the Iraqis, the NYTimes and Nancy Pelosi will grab onto that story will both hands and hold it up high: "We are complicit in torture!"

These Leftists and opportunists, who have no shame, register no interest in the only part of the story that matters. They willfully ignore the import of the first three acts, scan the second to last page of the fourth, find a terrorist who, though caught with a detonator and without uniform, was not given his Geneva Convention rights...and that becomes The Story that they will trumpet for the next two weeks. Instead of wondering whether the terrorist cell was in fact broken, and whether our troops were made safer, they wonder about Rumsfeld's resignation, time-tables for surrender, and how many dead soldiers' names they can fit onto a screen.

Meanwhile, the archetypes of courage and the drama of our success go unnoticed and unsung, except by a truly remarkable independent journalist riding, living, and maybe dying with Deuce Four.

Paul Campos Reads This Blog

2005-08-09T10:33:00.000-07:00

Well, probably not, but look at this:

An old philosophical joke goes like this: The student asks the great sage, "O Master, upon what does the Earth rest?" The sage replies, "O seeker of knowledge, the Earth rests on the back of an enormous turtle." The student then asks, "Tell me, Wise One, upon what does this turtle rest?" The sage answers with annoyance, "Well obviously it's turtles all the way down!"

Then, a bit later:

Thus scientists such as Richard Dawkins are guilty of idolatry (not to mention tremendous philosophical naivete) when they argue that Darwinian evolutionary theory refutes religious belief. Such arguments in effect transform the naturalistic axioms of the scientific method into pseudo-theological claims.

Then read this, this, and this from your humble blogger.

Crisis of a Paradigm

2005-08-09T10:22:00.000-07:00

From the NYTimes, no less:

As Westerners bow down before multiculturalism, we anesthetize ourselves into believing that anything goes. We see our readiness to accommodate as a strength - even a form of cultural superiority (though few will admit that). Radical Muslims, on the other hand, see our inclusive instincts as a form of corruption that makes us soft and rudderless. They believe the weak deserve to be vanquished.

Paradoxically, then, the more we accommodate to placate, the more their contempt for our "weakness" grows. And ultimate paradox may be that in order to defend our diversity, we'll need to be less tolerant. Or, at the very least, more vigilant. And this vigilance demands more than new antiterror laws. It requires asking: What guiding values can most of us live with? Given the panoply of ideologies and faiths out there, what filter will distill almost everybody's right to free expression?

Which brings me to my vote for a value that could guide Western societies: individuality. When we celebrate individuality, we let people choose who they are, be they members of a religion, free spirits, or something else entirely. I realize that for many Europeans, "individuality" might sound too much like the American ideal of individualism. It doesn't have to. Individualism - "I'm out for myself" - differs from individuality - "I'm myself, and my society benefits from my uniqueness."

Of course, there may be better values than individuality for Muslims and non-Muslims to embrace. Let's have that debate - without fear of being deemed self-haters or racists by those who twist multiculturalism into an orthodoxy. We know the dangers of taking Islam literally. By now we should understand the peril of taking tolerance literally.

The multiculti paradigm has engaged reality, and it has been shown to be wanting.

Et tu, Hawaii?

2005-08-08T09:15:00.000-07:00

From Opinion Journal:

Ms. Johnson laments that more people in Hawaii are giving up on integration and listening to those with "hate in their hearts." She says much of the history taught at her old university and now used to justify the Akaka bill is "a distortion of the truth." For example, her studies convince her that the U.S. was "not directly involved" in the forced abdication of Queen Liliuokalani in 1893 and that indeed much of the Hawaiian monarchy supported the annexation of the islands. She believes that "rather than talk about how haoles stole the land, people should take responsibility for their own actions and work with others of good will to better themselves."

While her advice might be the best way to preserve the famous "aloha" spirit and racial harmony for which Hawaii is justly famous, current trends are moving towards further politicization and polarization. If the Akaka bill creating a separate race-based government in Hawaii becomes law, look for other racial and ethnic groups on the mainland to view it as a model for their own bids for political spoils.

The Fires of Amon Din

2005-08-06T09:23:00.000-07:00

Sometimes we can never be sure. The world is a big place, and even the smallest village in the remotest deserts of Arabia has currents and tides too complex and too numerous to reduce to an article, or an essay, or even a large tome. The dangers of miscategorization and misinterpretation rise as our attention and our patience fall, until we find ourselves battling for one soundbite over another when both may be dangerously wrong, or, more often, both inadequately right.

September 11, if it did anything, broadened our attentions and enlargened our world. We had fooled ourselves into nonchalance, willingly hypnotized by the coziness of a predictability that wasn't, but our circumscribed lives never really existed, not in the way we thought. There was a blackness in the wilderness that we had chosen to ignore, until one fateful day it stepped into the light to spark a fire of its own. By this terrible new flame we saw that the danger, through our inattentiveness, had grown and multiplied. Darkness was everywhere, yet we knew what we had to do.

The enemy cannot be defined by what he is, for his mutations and permutations are many; instead, it is much easier to understand what he is not. I look around at the decency of our lives and the economy of our people; I gaze in awe at the prosperity and happiness that liberty and hope afford, and the enemy becomes very clear. We are in a fight with darkness itself, and darkness can only be known by its relationship to the light.

On Economic Mobility

2005-08-06T07:54:00.000-07:00

Richard Posner critiques Krugman's latest apologia for the French lifestyle:

Krugman's failure to relate the European model to Europe's Muslim problem is telling. To point to the upside of Europe's social model without mentioning the most serious downside is to provide bad advice to our own policymakers. The assimilation of immigrants by the United States, compared to the inability of the European nations to assimilate them--with potentially catastrophic results for those nations--is not unrelated to the differences between economic regulation in the United States and Europe. Because the U.S. does not have a generous safety net--because it is still a nation in which the risk of economic failure is significant--it tends to attract immigrants who have values conducive to upward economic mobility, including a willingness to conform to the customs and attitudes of their new country.

Social mobility implies the opportunity to fail. If society protects jobs, the employment opportunities of ambitious newcomers are reduced and they may end up at the embittered margin of society. Thus, it is not poverty that breeds extremism; it is social policies intended in part to eradicate poverty that do so, by obstructing exit from minority subcultures. If Muslims in European societies do not feel a part of those societies because public policy does not enable them to compete for the jobs held by non-Muslims--if instead, excluded from identifying with the culture of the nation in which they reside they perforce identify with the worldwide Muslim culture--some of them are bound to adopt the extremist views that are common in that culture. The resulting danger to Europe and to the world is not offset by long vacations.

Becker's response is also worth reading:

Krugman's recent New York Times article on French "family values" cited by Posner is the latest of many attempts during the past decade to justify, high labor taxes, restrictions on the ability of companies to shed employees, a French law that restricts work to no more than 35 hours per week, and various other restrictive labor-market legislation in continental countries. They supposedly lead to more civilized goals than are obtained in the freer Anglo-Saxon markets. That this leads to very high unemployment rates and limited job opportunities, especially for immigrants and young low skilled native-born men and women, and a shortage of part-time work for mothers and others, is the price that apparently has to be paid for these advantages.

But are any advantages of this system worth such a high price? Clearly, the European system of employment helps the "insiders" with good jobs, and works against "immigrants" and other newcomers ,or "outsiders" in labor markets. It is claimed that the European system promotes "family values" over individualistic ones. Yet the data do not support this contention since marriage rates are lower in Europe than in America, and not a single European country has birth rates that are high enough to maintain their populations without continued immigration.

Debate with Truepeers, third iteration

2005-08-05T15:24:00.000-07:00

re: changing my mind.

When I write of the origins of this or the fact of that, I write of assertions that I cannot prove. Most of these, like my belief in the emergence of group ethics, is no more than an educated guess precisely because I cannot truly know these things.

So, while I do absorb what you say and your words do broaden my inquiry, in the end my belief that experience comes before idea is dispositive. You seem to be saying that our nature was fixed or prefigured in some way, while I believe our capacity as animals was fixed from evolution, but any particular manifestations of that evolution was based on experiences iterated over time. This leaves us separated in debate because while I do not feign to know the exact progression of human beliefs, or aspire to explain the origins of individual permutations of societies, I do believe they stem from the capacity of the human mind and our biological traits developed by natural selection. The human mind is so adaptable that any number of naturally occuring events could explain the emergence of ideas that in their later iterations seem to have popped out of nowhere, like the idea of God. In fact, given that the idea of God is always built around unexplained natural phenomena like weather and water in its first iterations, it seems an earthly origin is undeniable.

Language is representation of ideas, and ideas stem from the active and passive correlation of impressions. Ideas and representations are attributed to the mind's ability to find patterns and continuities, and the raw data for these calculations are derived from experience. (I defer to Hume's treatise on the science of man on this.)

Language, like society, has organically built rules that derived from centuries of common usage; iterated experience led to an ethic of language, just like iterated experience led to an ethic of society. The human mind always strives for order in its thoughts.

Prudence Weighs In

2005-08-05T09:51:00.000-07:00

Sometimes where a message originates matters just as much as what it says. Therefore, I believe that the Iraqis will be the ones making the case for punitive action on Iran and Syria, with Bush in the role of advocate instead of principal.

Hoshyar Zebari, the Foreign Minister of Iraq, sets our timetable:

"We were supposed... we are now actually in the process to start the process of writing the constitution. This must be finished by the 15th of August. And also this really needs to have the approval of the majority of the Iraqi people through a referendum by October. And then we will have a new election at the end of December."

Since it is likely that insurgent attacks will continue during this period, expect a steadily building chorus of Iraqi, US, and eventually European voices invoking Syrian and Iranian transgressions on the floor of the UNSC. And then, with resolutions in hand, the new Iraq government, with the strength and legitimacy of the December elections behind them, will be the ones to lead the charge.

This has to be an Iraqi thing, I think. I get the sense that Bush is trying to stay behind the Iraqis to push, instead of getting out ahead to pull. Where the idea comes from could make all the difference in its reception, and we absolutely need a good reception. We may only get one shot at Syria and Iran with the goodwill of the world behind us. Prudence gives the floor to Iraq.

The Sheriff and the Wild West

2005-08-04T18:06:00.000-07:00

Wretchard: "But if so, it ought not to totally neglect the process of public salesmanship. Sometimes the US military resembles one of those companies with a good production division but really lousy marketing arm."

This has occurred to me, too. It seems almost unbelievable that we would sit on information that could facilitate our long-term goal of Syrian and Iranian regime change. Especially when you expose information like this almost every day: massive movements and offensives that extend hundreds of miles along the Euphrates, the astronomical casualties of the enemy, the nature and the origin of insurgent supplies and reinforcements, the governments that are fighting us, etc.

As a previous poster said, the war would have a very different flavor if the military and the Administration framed the debate the way Belmont Club has done, which is, really, nothing but the truth. When you read the statements of Rumsfeld and Meyers, you see that they grasp and understand the problem. In fact, almost every day these gentleman complain about the public's sources of information, yet they do nothing to supplement or improve them.

We are left to speculate whether it is all due to incompetence, which surely is a possibility, or whether these omissions are due to the restraints that adhere to some otherwise unknown overarching plan. I cannot believe that Bush is satisfied and mollified by taking down Saddam. There must be another step coming, right?

Syria, as I said, seems inevitable, the question is how and when. I think Bush was surprised by the international pushback over OIF, which he believed in his soul to be obviously, and urgently, necessary. I think he learned some lessons that he may never admit, but which are nonetheless constraining his strategy, and I think in the next campaign you will see the entirety of American might, with a profound focus on the diplomatic.

I have been waiting for a sign of forward momentum, and today I saw it. I have asked myself, "Why Bolton?" Why did Bush think that Bolton was so necessary that he would expend his scarce political capital to see him in the UN? My conclusion: the UN is Bush's chosen vehicle for global change, and Bolton is the guy that Bush believes can force through the necessary resolutions.

It comes down to cover, to the international legitimacy that so eluded the Iraq war. It comes down to the diplomatic nod that Bush discovered means so much more than it seems to, or should. We've always known we had the sheriff. Bush is looking for, and will probably get, his warrant.

Saddam the Bastard, His Victim the Iraqis

2005-08-04T14:45:00.000-07:00

From Windsofchange.net:

There is no insurgency in the sense of Vietnam, Algeria, or even Chechnya. There is not a web of like-minded (much less amenable) patriots gaining succor and inspiration from the populace. There are a thousand disparate cabals and petit punks and opportunists, each with competing motivations and interests. A water truck leaving a coalition base may be fired upon by a host of various suspects. The "usual suspects" rounded up may include:

1) a 17-year-old who was paid $50,

2) a competitor of the truck's owner who covets his contract,

3) a local tribesman who resents the presence of another affiliate,

4) a garden-variety criminal out to steal the truck, or embezzle the business,

5) a former Ba'athist apparatchik fearing the end of his gravy train,

6) a Jihadist from Yemen or Saudi Arabia or Egypt hoping to please God, or
7) an Iraqi, proud and nationalistic, believing the US is on a craven crusade to plunder his country's oil and rich culture.

In a way, more troubling than a simple insurgency. The human frailty on display in Iraq is sobering, and disheartening. Saddam was a bastard, and these truly are his people.

Diplomatic Cover

2005-08-04T14:42:00.000-07:00

trish,

If you think that the US government would turn down perfect diplomatic cover, I will not be able to tell you anything that will change your mind.

On our pacing, I too am sometimes impatient, but there are benefits in going slow, too.

The international fervor over Iraq has been quelled, which would not have happened had we gone immediately into Syria. Terrorism has been brought to the Arabs, instead of being an abstract, and the verdict is not looking too good for terrorism. Because we gave a chance for our narrative to catch up to our actions, and because so many people around the world finally believe we are doing what we have always said we would, even if they don't agree with it, any subsequent action on Syria will be viewed in the proper context. Iraq will stand with us shoulder to shoulder, and the world will nod or look the other way.

Working the political angle was slow and painful, but Lebanon is sure glad we did. Because of the January elections and the righteous anger over the murder of Hariri, Syria lost Lebanon and gained an enemy. Syria has long been labeled an international pariah, but now, even worse for them, they are seen as a weak and unstable pariah. Iran won't rush to defend them, Assad is boxed in and his regime is failing, and not since before Hafez Assad gained power in 1970 has Syria been so weak and vulnerable.

This may not have been the plan; in fact, it would be more than amazing if it was. But it is not all brown on this side of the fence.

Debate with Truepeers, cont.

2005-08-03T13:48:00.000-07:00

First let me say that, though I disagree with your ontology entirely, I have very much enjoyed our discussion so far.

When I say random, I mean random in the sense of chaos theory:

"Systems that exhibit mathematical chaos are deterministic and thus orderly in some sense; this technical use of the word chaos is at odds with common parlance, which suggests complete disorder. See the article on chaos for a discussion of the origin of the word in mythology, and other uses. When we say that chaos theory studies deterministic systems, it is necessary to mention a related field of physics called quantum chaos theory that studies non-deterministic systems following the laws of quantum mechanics." (from Wiki)

You write: "cultural evolution requires on behalf of its agents a learned understanding, at least on some intuitive level, of the nature of humanity."

I would dispute this with the example of elephants and apes, and the phenomenon of elephant and ape culture (likewise for dolphins). And I dispute pegging cultural evolution to the ethical. I peg it to organizational fitness, which is, of course, a survival value.

I think our ontology is simply incompatible. For me, ethics are purely representational of and contingent on survival behaviors. The first survival behavior we should concern ourselves with is that which led apes to form groups, and I define this behavior as the semi-rational desire to survive and not die violently (and on my blog I speak about the visual experience of empathy as being a primary mover in this regard). Once this happened, the formation into groups, the further evolution of the brain, the evolution of walking, opposable thumbs, etc. all created new dynamics in the group that led to new learned behaviors.

The group, which was dependent upon its members' behavior, was held together by the punitive dominance of the leader, or perhaps an oligarchy of elders. It was the threat, and occasional example, of corporeal punishment that kept behaviors in line, much as it does in the animal kingdom in all kinds of group dynamics.

The properties of the group, its goals, and its collective knowledge determined the type of ethical behavior that allowed it to survive and advance. For instance, once humans stopped living from hand to mouth, and started farming, the organizational structure of the group changed, different needs developed, and behaviors that were beneficial adapted.

As an example, concept of "stealing" probably began with the idea of possessing women and territory. Within the group the ethic of "not stealing" was enforced by the dominant male, and any group member who stepped over the line was punished in short order. The male that kept the tightest ship, who exercised his power most consistently so as to be predictable as a punisher, had better organizational success and therefore a higher survival value. It is important to note that his punitive actions were not derived from high-minded ethical abstraction, or from rational choice, but from the selfish feelings of possession and the jealously of power found in almost all animal males.

In another example, "telling the truth" was probably a response to the paucity of accurate information in ancient civilizations, with accurate information itself having a survival value. Inaccurate information, occasionally, would have drastic and dire consequences for the group, so it also was proscribed and deterred by this emerging ethic.

Fundamentally, these ethical behaviors evolved because order and survival were, and are, closely linked. Ethical concepts, therefore, are simply post-phenomenon representations of evolutionarily advantageous behavior. Codifying these ethics facilitated communication of norms, but the concepts came from experience, not the other way around.

I firmly believe that the group evolved, not from rational choices, but from the pre-language primate's desire to survive and not die violently. The success of the group in pursuing this goal would have been immediately apparent, even if none of the members could explain why the group dynamic was so benefical. These behaviors were then taught to the young, and they taught their young, and so on until language came around to supplement learning-by-example. And that is the advent of linquistic based ethical concepts.

(As an aside, love is a chemical state and can manifest in many ways outside the ethical. Resentment is the same, and these phenomena are found in other primates.)

If treated as survival traits, ethical behavior becomes no more mysterious than the tooth or the claw of the tiger. Without these survival tools, the tiger would not be around to study; likewise with ethics and man.

Because of this evolutionary paradigm, there was never any necessity in the rise of man. We are successful simply because our distinctiveness helped us to survive better than all other animals. Our distinctive mental and linquistic abilities, our distinctive posture and distinctive hands, and the distinctive accidents of memetic creation allowed our preeminence.

And that last sentence of the previous post was my attempt at a joke. It would take much more than a friendly debate to change my mind on these core beliefs.

I think you err in correlating my evolutionary understanding of society with idolizing it. If anything, the evolutionary paradigm diminishes society by diminishing its inevitability and necessity. I do agree that we are more free now than ever before and that history has had a visible direction towards liberty, but you must see that this may not always be the case. If the conceptual paradigm that humans have built for themselves runs into an unkind and incompatible reality, the whole thing could come crashing down.

Be careful not to idolize it to much, yourself.

Why we won't be an Empire

2005-08-03T09:28:00.000-07:00

Stephen Vincent, may he rest in peace, at NRO:

"That leaves conservation. Abbas estimated that if Basrans reduce their energy consumption by half, they could enjoy 24-hour electricity. "It would be a hardship, but not impossible." To test his theory, I asked friends if they'd be willing to cut back on their lights, wide-screen TV watching, washing machines and, above all, air conditioning. Without exception the response was no. "Why should we? Iraq sits on a sea of oil," is a typical response, followed by the usual slam against America.

"Well, of course," Abbas replied, when I gave him the results of my poll. "People were deprived of power for so long, they now feel they have a right to as much as possible." Sighing, he added, "Iraqis have no sense of moderation. If you're thirsty, you drink as much as you can, even if you're no longer thirsty. Basrans have gotten used to a certain degree of comfort, and they don't want to let it go." It's not an answer that would satisfy Sheik Baghdali, of course — but then again, for Basrans like him, it's always easier to sit in the dark in an un-air conditioned room and curse America."

Soon, so long and good riddance to that particular problem. America will never be a care-taker for lazy ingrates, and that goes double for at home.

An Appeal to the President

2005-08-02T18:45:00.000-07:00

Wretchard: "I wonder if you have it the other way around. We are getting as much war, and the kind of war, that our political system will allow. Why guard the Syrian border when we are at peace with Damascus? Even in the months immediately after the fall of Baghdad, the Marines, who took over from the Army in Qusabayah found they were in the middle of a 'secret war' with Syria."

Only the President can deliver the necessary context. The American people need to understand, and it needs to happen now.

What's the Frequency, Kenneth?

2005-08-02T18:40:00.000-07:00

Wretchard: "The need to make a case, especially when that case must be made to perfection, was part of the long run-up to OIF. And the case now stands, like a kind of surreal monument, to the day the thinking stopped. In a way, the case became a casus belli in itself."

In information theory, lossy compression is a real problem, where compressing data and then decompressing it retrieves information that may be completely different in meaning. The hope is always to be "close enough" to the original to pass the fidelity criterion.

There is always a limit as to how much you can compress data and still retain original meaning. What is that limit with the information we are dealing with? A speech? An article? A year's worth of research?

I agree that any process that sets out to convince the public of our need would be interesting. Perhaps here is where we can most fully understand the betrayal of the modern media, in its abdication of its responsibility to keep the public up-to-date. It makes the job of persuasion near impossible.

But he has to try, and it needs to begin.

Response to Cedarford's Pentagon Complaint

2005-08-02T15:53:00.000-07:00

Cedarford,

I think you are right in calling out the Pentagon, in a way, but Iraqi problems are too heavy to hang around just our necks.

We telegraphed the Iraq war for an entire year. Saddam was, and Al'Qaeda and the Baathists are, a thinking enemy, and they are working against us actively and dynamically. Not that I am saying your opinion is superficial, but something else you must take into account is the fact that the terrorist attacks are targetted specifically to bring about the reactions we see in the media everyday. They are a performance for the American media consumer, and the coverage skews their real effect.

I believe an unintended consequence of the Al'Qaeda and Baathist atrocities will be the creation of an Iraqi national narrative: the immense heat of the fire will forge a more solid foundation than we ever could have done ourselves. Put another way, our mistakes and Al'Qaeda's depravity may give us a victory that otherwise would have been forever out of our reach.

That is a best case scenario, but it is possible. I am confident in Iraq's future. It is the rest of the war that I am concerned about.

Wherefore Restraint?

2005-08-02T15:19:00.000-07:00

rwe: "The only solution I have come up with is massive camps in remote desert areas in which we would incarcerate as many people as would be required to solve the problem. If that is 95% of the Sunni population of Iraq, then so be it."

I've thought about it long and hard, and I have no good answers. The Leftist dodge of more troops on the ground and "no plan" rings true in some parts, but not in the way they mean it. Our biggest strategic mistake was going to the UN for a year, giving Saddam and Al'Qaeda time to plan the insurgency.

More troops on the border I can see, and I have to think it would have helped. But more troops in the cities would have been madness. Giant "reeducation camps" make sense to me, but in the end I think Iraq is going to have to work out its own problems in that respect.

The restraint I referred to is our response to the pressure of the anti-war camps. The banshee shriek from the Left when the US exercised her might clouded the good judgment of the Administration, and at a time when momentum was clearly on our side. The case against Syria should be made publically, forcefully, and often, and if Assad doesn't change his ways, swift punitive action should be visited upon his head. Let the Syrians worry about their next regime. All I care about is the decapitation of a government so willfully fighting against us. You can bet the next Syrian administration would walk a little lighter around us.

But, on the other hand, perhaps we are building up Iraq's army and collecting incontrovertible data so that Iraq will make the case for retribution.

All I know is that lately we have used the velvet glove but have forgotten to include the iron fist. As Wretchard says, it seems like we are hoping time is on our side.

Response to Truepeers

2005-08-02T11:02:00.000-07:00

truepeers: Your argument is eloquent, but I remain unconvinced that Christianity itself was a precondition for the type of generation you speak of, at least as a rule that governs reality. It may be so that in our universe that is what happened, but is it what had to happen to reach a similar place of intellectual progress? (Anthropic Principle Alert)

Perhaps this question will elucidate why I am skeptical:

Do you think the propensities that you ascribe to Christianity are inherent in the faith, or simply inherent in humanity in general, when men are given access to a large amount of disparate information? I.E. Is not the ability to create new patterns out of varieties of data just a natural effect of having a higher order consciousness and the freedom to use it?

I ask this because the values of secular liberalism have many origins, some of which predate Christianity.

The Dawn of Man

2005-08-02T09:43:00.000-07:00

From an article recommended by KevinB:

Freud believed that education and establishing the dictatorship of reason would be the only solution to the cruel and immoral behavior that characterizes human history. Our best hope for the future, he proclaims, is that intellect the scientific spirit, reason may in process of time establish a dictatorship in the mental life of man. In a letter to Albert Einstein, who had written to Freud asking what could be done to protect mankind from war, Freud responds: The ideal condition of things would of course be a community of men who had subordinated their instinctual life to the dictatorship of reason.

The article goes on to discuss the tragedies of the 20th century and the abominations of "reason" that swept the globe and did unspeakable evil.

I think we can safely say that reason itself is not the source of morality. (And this destroys the functionalist analysis of ethical game theory, where morality is chosen rationally instead of developing irrationally. But I adhere to evolutionary game theory, anyways).

(Speculation Ahead)

But we know it came from somewhere because we know it exists, and we know it exists because we can see the effects of its causal gravity all around us.

My hunch is that morality is in its first instance visual. Empathy, projection, whatever you want to call it, I think the human ability of extrapolation is the source of morality.

When a person sees another slaughtered, for instance, that visual experience is not isolated. The realtime data is filtered through that person's mental posture, and one of the thoughts that emerge is what it must be like to have that happen. This projection is built off of the watcher's prior experience of pain and anguish, and transmuted onto the other person's visible horror at what is happening to him.

In the book "Wider than the Sky", which is about consciousness, the author talks about levels of conscious development. The first level is simply receiving and acting on data without storing it, the next is storing and comparing in real time (reactionary), the third is storing and comparing reflectively (the genesis of the self).

If a small animal is walking through the jungle and hears a growl, and right after that growl a tiger appears, the next time the animal hears a growl it will not have to wait for the appearance of the tiger to react as if the tiger had already appeared. This is the reactionary level, where the memory cannot be accessed until the same circumstances that created the memory occur once more to unleash it. It is the most primitive level of learning, but you can see how it adds to survivability.

The ability to actively access memory in reflection, which is the higher consciousness of human beings, is the next level. After a certain period of development and use of this higher consciousness, a being's aggregate of memories creates the impression for him of being a 'sensation receiving unit' that extends linearly backwards, and this impression becomes the idea of the self. This is why it takes a child until 5 or 6 to realize that he is an interacting unit in a system of other interacting units.

This also allows for extrapolation, which is the basis of imagination and invention. When new information comes in, not only does it filter through old experiences, reflection can create new correlations that may or may not really exist. Likewise, the juxtaposition of a pattern from one experienced system to another, like in Hume's example of the gradation of color. If you experience one color's gradation, e.g. light to dark blue, you do not have to experience light to dark red to get an idea of it.

So, if you are watching someone getting slaughtered and no other emotions are predominant (like hate, which acts to dull your reflective capacity), your brain can analyze the situation and extrapolate that action onto yourself, which creates the emotional phenomenon of empathy. You cringe in these situations because you are mentally recreating that episode with yourself as the victim.

Enough of these emotional bonds and actions amongst like-minded individuals soon will be coordinated, and it is here we enter the Hobbesian realm of "flight from fear" leading to society. The visual experience of such episodes supplies you with something to be fearful of, and creates acceptance of novel arrangements. These arrangement are taught to the next generation by example, and society builds as life goes on. Society is built by education, and memory. Memory and the empathy it engenders is the genesis of the Golden Rule.

As an aside, this is as good an explanation as any why Autistic kids never discover C.S. Lewis's natural morality. Autism is a sensory integration disorder. Memory and memetic correlations are severely atrophied, which leaves more power for primitive activities like counting, but does not leave room for higher consciousness and reflection. Autistics do not have the brain efficiency of a normal person, where "mundane" information is not processed. Because of this, the Autistic person feels himself continuously in a new situation, room, environment, etc. If the shadow on the floor changes, he can feel like he's in a new room entirely because the information has changed, if but a little. In many ways he is purely reactionary. One of the things he loses by this is empathy, and morality.

On the Assertion that I am Obsessed with Diminishing Christianity

2005-08-02T09:21:00.000-07:00

The role of Christianity, to be properly understood, must be separated into several different levels. I am neither obsessed with diminishing its role on one level nor obsessed with exaggerating its role on another.

Christianity's moral precepts are superior insofar as they prescribe certain behaviors and proscribe others. Christ the moral philosopher is unparalleled as a benign force in human interaction, and all of mankind can thank Christian doctrine for the ultimate increase in decency and humanity that we see in the world.

But Christianity as an explanatory thesis just doesn't do it for me. Here is where I mentally diminish its role, not out of desire or ill-will, but out of skepticism. There is nothing in the Book that gives me the breadth and depth of understanding as does, say, quantum mechanics on the nature of the universe.

Nevertheless, at the bottom of reality there is still a nothingness, truepeer's indomitable mystery that cannot be explained away, so I remain open, even hopeful, that such mystery is truly our God, the first mover and the benign force behind it all. If so, there is still hope that death is more than it seems to be.

But that is all besides the point. Christianity is not about God the first mover, but God the protector, God the active player, God the omnipotent, and until a change is brought forth, either externally or internally, so that my skepticism is washed away by incontrovertible fact, I will continue to disregard Genesis and Luke as anything more than what they are: beneficial allegories.

Ontology: Short Version

2005-08-01T14:49:00.000-07:00

It is easier for me to say what I don't believe in than what I do, but I will try.

When I think about existence, I think about it using different tools at different levels. From the sub-particle region on up to the atom I look to particle and quantum physics. From there on up to the macrocosm I look to physics, chemistry, biology, etc. When I think about the mind, I think in terms of neuroscience, but also in terms of evolution and memetics. When I think about thoughts, I think in terms of Hume's impressions and ideas, but also in terms, again, of neuroscience, and these form, for me, the foundation of psychology. When I think about the transmutation of thoughts, I think about linguistics and systems of representation, evolution, experience, etc. As you go up to societies, ethics, morality, and history, I use system theory, evolution, and linquistics first but then in many cases revert to all the other disciplines I have mentioned. (As an aside, this means I do not believe morality has any meaning below, or above, the level of human interaction. To speak of the morality of the bacterium is to speak jibberish.)

I think of mathematics, the ultimate descriptive system, when I ponder the Universe, though we may never evolve the language to properly represent it.

Basically, I'm an Anthropic principle kind of guy. When the answer's always "Because", you learn to stop asking "Why?" The world exists as it does because it exists as it does, and it is up to us to build systems of representation that will filter and distill as much needed knowledge out of the massive amounts of data as we can to survive.

Philosophers like Heidegger end up boring me, in framing ideas like "disclosure of being in which the being of beings is unconcealed." This effort at an intellectual walking of the dog gave us Clinton's "the meaning of is." It is completely worthless as explanation and description, and does more harm than good by convincing arrogant initiates that they need to tear down our illusions and rebuild the temple. (so I'm not a phenomenologist, existentialist, deconstructionist, etc.)

Ultimately my knowledge is not expert in any of these subjects (not enough time). Yet I find it useful to be moderately fluent in the languages of each area, for the sets of knowledge that you find there are aggregated around what I am looking for.

But I look forward to reading Truepeer's site material.

A Response to Wretchard's Metropolis

2005-08-01T08:34:00.000-07:00

Wretchard,

I enter this subject...cautiously...because I do not mean to pervert what you say, or ruffle any feathers of the faithful.

You write: "Totalitarianism is ultimately founded on an idea; the exact reverse of the notion that all men are endowed by their Creator with unalienable rights."

The Aquinas 'natural law' argument is indeed a formidable one. The idea of a teleological universe and a divine law, has, I will admit, done absolute wonders for the spread of decency throughout the scope of human endeavors. A debate, as you know, between Hobbsian 'natural law as a rational flight from fear' and Aquinas' 'natural law as an incident of divine truth,' has been going on for centuries in the West, most notably in the Anglo-Saxon philosophical sphere, with Bentham's twist leading to utilitarianism and legal positivism. I will not enter this debate right now.

I am interested in your distinction between totalitarianism as an idea, and Aquinas' 'natural law' as a divine notion (if this is truly what you have said). But first, a caveat.

I do not want my function as a commenter to be the arrogant philosophy police, especially as I make no claims to expertise or exactitude. Philosophy, however, is a subject that interests me, and I truly believe vast consequences can flow from simple principles, once taken in and embraced. In many ways our conceptual universe can be understood in chaos theory, since its shape is imminently dependant on initial conditions.

It may be, and I claim no certainty either way, that the intellectual posture of our founding fathers--their embrace of Aquinas, Locke, Smith, Bacon, Acton, and Whiggism in general--is truly the best and only one to take, if one is to maximize decency, humanity, and happiness. The posture that looks to the divine for inspiration and guidance, in other words, may be the only one that has the right effect regardless of its factual truth. Perhaps mankind needs the idea of God more than it needs the truth, whatever that is. In fact, an empiricist would look on the success of such ideals and faiths as a posteriori evidence of its fitness.

Hayek warned about fiddling at the bottom without having something in mind to replace what you remove, and I agree. The examples of the 20th century are unambiguous in their warnings of that kind of danger.

And yet, I still pause, because it may be that fiddling at the bottom by moral and social theorists is the least of our worries. The empiricist and mechanist mindset, whether we would have it or not, is sweeping across the moral lattice of Western Civilization through the forward march of science. More and more generations have this mindset 'impressed' from an early age, and the language of Aquinas, Smith, and Jefferson becomes more and more foreign to a youth steeped in experiences that seem to be incompatible.

I am not searching for new 'oughts', for in a way I myself do not believe in them as a priori propositional truths. But I do believe in effects, and I refuse to disregard the evidence all around me of the fundamental decency of your divine notion. If it is the only way, and Western Civ. can only survive by a revival of 'natural law', then so be it and let's get started. But the language barrier, I'm afraid, will continue to grow if we refuse to engage Western Civilizational 'founding doctrine' on the level of ideas. In other words, we may have to advocate 'natural law' from a standpoint of empiricism.

Totalitarianism was a gross perversion of ideas by a cabal of power-worshipping intellectuals, and it was defeated by the spirit of Western morality and decency. It was perhaps our greatest victory. And yet, I am seriously worried that the determinism of 'natural law', while it has served us so well and guided our actions even in the darkest of nights, may leave us helpless against the new threat that even refuses to acknowledge its existence.

More and more Western children choose to follow the norms of Smith and the morality of Christ while rejecting the reasoning of each as it applies to first principles. This adherence to an ethic is due to intellectual inertia, the comfort of belonging, and a lack of intriquing alternatives. What happens when the entropy kicks in? What happens when we look down and discover that there's nothing there?

Bullish on Neocon Strategy

2005-07-30T15:01:00.000-07:00

Cutler: I agree with particular solutions for particular problems, but I am rather bullish on Neoconservatism as a mindset.

The fundamental tenet of neocon-ism is that stability itself is not a good strategic objective if it is not coupled with the implementation at the state level of internal mechanisms of progress. Ad hoc dictatorships are never permanent solutions, only temporary fixes in a time of trouble. During the Cold War, many things were justified that can't be today, etc. etc.

What we cannot do is accept short-term solutions that lead to long-term problems. The reverse, accepting short-term problems for long-term solutions, is something we can now entertain because of the current circumstances of the world: our immense power, public support, no counterbalancing superpower, communicaton tech., etc.

Reuel Marc Gerecht wrote a short book, The Islamic Paradox (available online at aei.org), where he argues that the process put in place in Iran by the fall of Shah and the implementation of Islamism actually creates a firmer foundation for a long-term reconciliation with that country and its people. There are no people in that region that are as pro-US as the Iranians. And it is precisely because the Iranians have experienced the bad reality of something that looked good on paper that Islamism, if Iran does go democratic, will be so delegitimized.

The mindset, then, is not the problem. It is the implementation where we must be judicious. Places with real high short-term costs will have to be handled with kid-gloves (Pakistan, maybe Saudi). But overall, I think the strategy is a winner.

The Muslim Mind is on Fire

2005-07-30T14:32:00.000-07:00

Youssef M. Ibrahim writes:

DUBAI -- The world of Islam is on fire. Indeed, the Muslim mind is on fire. Above all, the West is now ready to take both of them on.

The latest reliable report confirms that on average 33 Iraqis die every day, executed by Iraqis and foreign jihadis and suicide bombers, not by US or British soldiers. In fact, fewer than ever US or British soldiers are dying since the invasion more than two years ago. Instead, we now watch on television hundreds of innocent Iraqis lying without limbs, bleeding in the streets dead or wounded for life. If this is jihad someone got his religious education completely upside down.

Palestine is on fire, too, with Palestinian armed groups fighting one another - Hamas against Fatah and all against the Palestinian Authority. All have rendered Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas impotent and have diminished the world's respect and sympathy for Palestinian sufferings.

A couple of weeks ago London was on fire as Pakistani and other Muslims with British citizenship blew up tube stations in the name of Islam. Al Qaeda in Europe or one of its franchises proclaimed proudly the killing of 54 and wounding 700 innocent citizens was done to "avenge Islam" and Muslims.

Madrid was on fire, too, last year, when Muslim jihadis blew up train stations killing 160 people and wounding a few thousands.

The excuse in all the above cases was the war in Iraq, but let us not forget that in September 2001, long before Iraq, Osama Bin Laden proudly announced that he ordered the killing of some 3,000 in the United States, in the name of avenging Islam. Let us not forget that the killing began a long time before the invasion of Iraq.

Indeed, jihadis have been killing for a decade in the name of Islam. They killed innocent tourists and natives in Morocco and Egypt, in Africa, in Indonesia and in Yemen, all done in the name of Islam by Muslims who say that they are better than all other Muslims. They killed in India, in Thailand and are now talking of killing in Germany and Denmark and so on. There were attacks with bombs that killed scores inside Shia and Sunni mosques, inside churches and inside synagogues in Turkey and Tunisia, with Muslim preachers saying that it is okay to kill Jews and Christians - the so called infidels.

Above all, it is the Muslim mind that is on fire.

The Muslim fundamentalist who attacked the Dutch film director Theo Van Gogh in the Netherlands, stabbed him more than 23 times then cut his throat. He recently proudly proclaimed at his trial: "I did it because my religion - Islam - dictated it and I would do it again if were free." Which preacher told this guy this is Islam? That preacher should be in jail with him.

Do the cowardly jihadis who recruit suicide bombers really think that they will force the US Army and British troops out of Iraq by killing hundreds of innocent Iraqis? US troops now have bases and operate in Iraq but also from Kuwait, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Oman.

The only accomplishment of jihadis is that now they have aroused the great "Western Tiger". There was a time when the United States and Europe welcomed Arab and Muslim immigrants, visitors and students, with open arms. London even allowed all dissidents escaping their countries to preach against those countries under the guise of political refugees.

Well, that is all over now. Time has become for the big Western vengeance.

Visas for Arab and Muslim young men will be impossible to get for the United States and Western Europe. Those working there will be expelled if they are illegal, and harassed even if their papers are in order.

Airlines will have to right to refuse boarding to passengers if their names even resemble names on a prohibited list on all flights heading to Europe and the United States.

What is more important to remember is this: When the West did unite after World War II to beat communism, the long Cold War began without pity. They took no prisoners. They all stood together, from the United States to Norway, from Britain to Spain, from Belgium to Switzerland. And they did bring down the biggest empire. Communism collapsed.

I fear those naïve Muslims who think that they are beating the West have now achieved their worst crime of all. The West is now going to war against not only Muslims, but also, sadly, Islam as a religion.

In this new cold and hot war, car bombs and suicide bombers here and there will be no match for the arsenal that those Westerners are putting together - an arsenal of laws, intelligence pooling, surveillance by satellites, armies of special forces and indeed, allies inside the Arab world who are tired of having their lives disrupted by demented so-called jihadis or those bearded preachers who, under the guise of preaching, do little to teach and much to ignite the fire, those who know little about Islam and nothing about humanity.

Exit Strategy (Or How I Came to Love the Bomb)

2005-07-30T10:11:00.000-07:00

An example of an ethic that is currently being falsified: multiculturalism. This idea is being mugged by what happens when you universalize tolerance; the ethic soon negates itself by tolerating intolerance, exposing the path of multiculturalism for what it is: an exit strategy.

The multi-cultis are experiencing a crisis right now, so look for them to revert to the previous norms.

Beyond Exploitation

2005-07-30T09:49:00.000-07:00

heraclitus: "The title of the book was "BEYOND Good and Evil", hence it behooves one to purge moral imperatives from the idea of a 'failed state'."

Yes, I agree that is what he said. Hence, when I wrote:

"Simply, what he was saying is that the terms 'good' and 'evil', since they could evolve, were actually meaningless, and needed to be discarded for a new paradigm of creativity and will to power."

He wanted to discard (to go beyond) moral imperatives and the language of good and evil, and I am saying he was right in his analysis and wrong in his prescriptions, that it was folly to recommend a replacement (exploitation, will to power, etc.) that, as a survival value, is prisoner of a statistical curve. In other words, Nietszche's new conceptual paradigm is only occasionally 'good'; other times it could be positively 'evil'. There are times when the exploitation paradigm dries up as a survival value (how you treat your children, for instance); therefore, since it can not be universally incorporated as a guide to individual behavior, why use it as the bedrock foundation of a mental universe? My thought once I absorbed the descriptive analysis of Nietzsche's geneology, was not to discard the moral universe, but to bring it down to earth. If virtue can be different for different societies, and societies are complex systems that emerge organically from the properties of human beings and their interaction, and if the properties of human beings are accredited to a selection process of evolution, then it stood to reason that at both the biological and the memetic levels a process of evolution was present and at work all the way down.

So I use 'good' and 'evil' as substitutive symbols, a conceptual shorthand, to define the apparent forces behind all of evolution: the drive to further life, and the drive to take it away (broad categories that often blend). It has nothing to do with moral imperatives as abstractions (Forms, Essences, Categorical Imperatives, etc.), nor does it have anything to do with doctrinal or emotional sensibilities. I was, and am, trying to create a workable paradigm by using these ancient words, whose meanings have mutated and adapted continuously for 10,000 years. Because of the confusion, I pegged the definitions to the most obvious point: That Which Affirms Life (good), and That Which Destroys Life (evil). And 'life' means the individual all the way up to the ecosystem of human interaction, one level's survival value being interdependent on all the others.

So, when you write: "A State in form is an organism which through exploitation of the macrocosm achieves a condition of growth, in decline, it is an object of exploitation." You imply my point. In this system (which in reality is more complex) the overall 'good' would be the actions that encourage the continued power and growth of the state while discouraging exploitation and ultimate cannabilization. For all states that participated in this closed system, the definition of good would be exactly the same for each player, exploit (good) or be exploited (bad), and cannabalization would be evil (when you are no longer in the game).

But if you start with exploitation as the founding principle of a system, soon it will evolve, if more than one player continues to play, into a multiplayer game of competition, and we can turn to game theory for guidance on emergent rules or ethics (functionalism).

Read Edna Ullmann-Margalit's "The Emergence of Norms" in which she argues that moral norms enable agents to cooperate and coordinate their actions in situations where the pursuit of self-interest prevents this.

These system properties (ethics) emerge as organizing or governing principles out of the self-preservation imperative of the players. Insofar as these organizational principles further the life of each player individually, and the life of the system as a whole, they can be described as 'good'. If it comes to pass that they do not, if these ethics are falsified by reality, they will be dropped and new rules will take their place.

Thomas Kuhn describes this phenomena as the evolution of a paradigm: Emergence, Normality, Crisis, Revolution. 'Good' in 627 AD hits a crisis in 1490 AD, and a new paradigm emerges.

So, using everything we know about systems theory, game theory, evolutionary theory, moral theory, anthropology, biology, and history, it seems to me we can move beyond the simple explanatory thesis of 'exploitation.'

Why I am a (small 'l') liberal

2005-07-29T17:00:00.000-07:00

Hayek writes:

To live and work successfully with others requires more than faithfulness to one's concrete aims. It requires an intellectual commitment to a type of order in which, even on issues which to one are fundamental, others are allowed to pursue different ends.

In the last resort, the conservative position rests on the belief that in any society there are recognizably superior persons whose inherited standards and values and position ought to be protected and who should have a greater influence on public affairs than others. The liberal, of course, does not deny that there are some superior people - he is not an egalitarian - bet he denies that anyone has authority to decide who these superior people are. While the conservative inclines to defend a particular established hierarchy and wishes authority to protect the status of those whom he values, the liberal feels that no respect for established values can justify the resort to privilege or monopoly or any other coercive power of the state in order to shelter such people against the forces of economic change. Though he is fully aware of the important role that cultural and intellectual elites have played in the evolution of civilization, he also believes that these elites have to prove themselves by their capacity to maintain their position under the same rules that apply to all others.

That the conservative opposition to too much government control is not a matter of principle but is concerned with the particular aims of government is clearly shown in the economic sphere. Conservatives usually oppose collectivist and directivist measures in the industrial field, and here the liberals will often find allies in them. But at the same time conservatives are usually protectionists and have frequently supported socialist measures in agriculture. Indeed, though the restrictions which exist today in industry and commerce are mainly the result of socialist views, the equally important restrictions in agriculture were usually introduced by conservatives at an even earlier date. And in their efforts to discredit free enterprise many conservative leaders have vied with the socialists.

I have already referred to the differences between conservatism and liberalism in the purely intellectual field, but I must return to them because the characteristic conservative attitude here not only is a serious weakness of conservatism but tends to harm any cause which allies itself with it. Conservatives feel instinctively that it is new ideas more than anything else that cause change. But, from its point of view rightly, conservatism fears new ideas because it has no distinctive principles of its own to oppose them; and, by its distrust of theory and its lack of imagination concerning anything except that which experience has already proved, it deprives itself of the weapons needed in the struggle of ideas. Unlike liberalism, with its fundamental belief in the long-range power of ideas, conservatism is bound by the stock of ideas inherited at a given time. And since it does not really believe in the power of argument, its last resort is generally a claim to superior wisdom, based on some self-arrogated superior quality.

The difference shows itself most clearly in the different attitudes of the two traditions to the advance of knowledge. Though the liberal certainly does not regard all change as progress, he does regard the advance of knowledge as one of the chief aims of human effort and expects from it the gradual solution of such problems and difficulties as we can hope to solve. Without preferring the new merely because it is new, the liberal is aware that it is of the essence of human achievement that it produces something new; and he is prepared to come to terms with new knowledge, whether he likes its immediate effects or not.

Personally, I find that the most objectionable feature of the conservative attitude is its propensity to reject well-substantiated new knowledge because it dislikes some of the consequences which seem to follow from it - or, to put it bluntly, its obscurantism. I will not deny that scientists as much as others are given to fads and fashions and that we have much reason to be cautious in accepting the conclusions that they draw from their latest theories. But the reasons for our reluctance must themselves be rational and must be kept separate from our regret that the new theories upset our cherished beliefs. I can have little patience with those who oppose, for instance, the theory of evolution or what are called "mechanistic" explanations of the phenomena of life because of certain moral consequences which at first seem to follow from these theories, and still less with those who regard it as irrelevant or impious to ask certain questions at all. By refusing to face the facts, the conservative only weakens his own position. Frequently the conclusions which rationalist presumption draws from new scientific insights do not at all follow from them. But only by actively taking part in the elaboration of the consequences of new discoveries do we learn whether or not they fit into our world picture and, if so, how. Should our moral beliefs really prove to be dependent on factual assumptions shown to be incorrect, it would hardly be moral to defend them by refusing to acknowledge facts.

What I have said should suffice to explain why I do not regard myself as a conservative. Many people will feel, however, that the position which emerges is hardly what they used to call "liberal." I must, therefore, now face the question of whether this name is today the appropriate name for the party of liberty. I have already indicated that, though I have all my life described myself as a liberal, I have done so recently with increasing misgivings - not only because in the United States this term constantly gives rise to misunderstandings, but also because I have become more and more aware of the great gulf that exists between my position and the rationalistic Continental liberalism or even the English liberalism of the utilitarians.

If liberalism still meant what it meant to an English historian who in 1827 could speak of the revolution of 1688 as "the triumph of those principles which in the language of the present day are denominated liberal or constitutional" [13] or if one could still, with Lord Acton, speak of Burke, Macaulay, and Gladstone as the three greatest liberals, or if one could still, with Harold Laske, regard Tocqueville and Lord Acton as "the essential liberals of the nineteenth century,"[14] I should indeed be only too proud to describe myself by that name. But, much as I am tempted to call their liberalism true liberalism, I must recognize that the majority of Continental liberals stood for ideas to which these men were strongly opposed, and that they were led more by a desire to impose upon the world a preconceived rational pattern than to provide opportunity for free growth. The same is largely true of what has called itself Liberalism in England at least since the time of Lloyd George.

It is thus necessary to recognize that what I have called "liberalism" has little to do with any political movement that goes under that name today. It is also questionable whether the historical associations which that name carries today are conducive to the success of any movement. Whether in these circumstances one ought to make an effort to rescue the term from what one feels is its misuse is a question on which opinions may well differ. I myself feel more and more that to use it without long explanations causes too much confusion and that as a label it has become more of a ballast than a source of strength.

In the United States, where it has become almost impossible to use "liberal" in the sense in which I have used it, the term "libertarian" has been used instead. It may be the answer; but for my part I find it singularly unattractive. For my taste it carries too much the flavor of a manufactured term and of a substitute. What I should want is a word which describes the party of life, the party that favors free growth and spontaneous evolution. But I have racked my brain unsuccessfully to find a descriptive term which commends itself.

I also have racked my brain. The term anti-idiotarian carries much of the substance, but none of the spirit, of classical liberalism. I guess we liberals are just going to have to fight the good fight and reclaim our lost definition, and our heritage.

Don't Believe Your Lying Eyes

2005-07-29T13:09:00.000-07:00

Mansour El-Kikhia wrote an article today called Arabs Shouldn't Have to Apologize.

There are some things he says which are true, some things that are misleading, and some things that are plain false. The gist is that Islam has nothing to do with terrorism; instead, it is American policy we can blame. He begins:

I am fed up with the ceaseless requests by columnists, religious personalities and other American public figures for Arabs and Muslims to apologize for terrorist acts committed by thugs and murderers in the name of Islam.

He focuses on Cal Thomas in particular, but I am sure he could have used any number of names as the target for his anger and disgust, as this is not a rare or isolated meme. Even Tom Friedman broached the subject.

Now, I do not think it is either smart or necessary to ask Muslims to individually apologize for acts they did not commit. As Lincoln said in his Temperance speech, nobody likes a scold. However, if the problem is located in these communities, and it is, it seems only prudent to warn the locals, and raise the alarm. Now, onto his attack on Cal Thomas:

He represents a despicable and ignorant attitude that, unfortunately, a sizable segment of America has come to share. There is nothing American Muslims can do to satisfy this group short of packing up and leaving the United States.

But there is something they can do. They can teach their young men that violence, in response to grievances a world away, is not something that will be condoned. They can teach them to be Americans first, Muslims second, and Arabs third.

Arab and Muslim Americans are responsible for neither the twin towers nor the London subway bombings, and as Americans they should never accept responsibility for actions they did not instigate, commit or condone.

This is a narrowly true statement, it was not Arab-Americans or Muslim-Americans that perpetrated 9/11. The terrorists were foreigners, no Americans were involved.

But nobody is implying that responsibility rests in these American communities; it is a straw man set up by Mansour so he can justify his later remarks. Yet the fact they these groups remain hyphenated, that they think of themselves as Arab- and Muslim-Americans, causes many of us Infidel-Americans to worry that the latter part of the hyphenation could be dropped, if push comes to shove. I can only believe that Mansour would rather not have to divulge his primary allegiances, which is why he abhors the question.

Furthermore, in spite of the fact they are constantly condemned for one thing or another, they — like other Americans — are victims of these murderers.

This statement is anachronistic in light of the British-born terrorists that hit London on July 7. If you can have British-Muslim-Terrorists and British-Muslim-Victims, why is it inconceivable that you could have the same in America? But then Mansour delivers a whopper:

It is rejection of U.S. and British policies in the Middle East, not Islam, that has promoted terrorism against America. And for the benefits of those who do not know, 95 percent of Middle Easterners are Muslims. Hence, it is only natural that those opposing the United States and Britain in the region would be Muslims. In India, they would have been Hindu; in Latin America or Northern Ireland, they would have been Catholic.

So, instead of Islam being a rather huge animating principle, Mansour treats it as no more than an irrelevant characteristic, like having dark hair. He accuses us of making the pedestrian error of assuming causation from simple, and insignificant, correlation. Nothing to see here, move on through.

And there are so many other things wrong in this paragraph. For one, terrorism is not simply a "rejection of policy." If that were the case, then Hollywood would be the terrorist capital of the world. By reducing terrorism to "policy rejection", he is playing a dangerous game of historical determinism and removing any moral culpability from the terrorists. To say "terrorism is inevitable because of such and such a policy" is a short step away from saying "those poor terrorists, they have a point."

To claim "American policy in the Middle East" causes terrorism is a grossly truncated and inadequate statement. The complete truth is that the perceived Infidel American policy in the Muslim Middle East is used by Osama in Fatwas and by Imams in Mosques as a tool, a pretext, to agitate the young and vulnerable Muslim faithful into action. Mansour needs to relearn his history if he thinks that there is anything exceptional about American Middle East policy this past century; it is not any worse, and in many cases much more benign, than what has passed for "Arab government" or occupational powers during the past 1400 years. The "policy complaint" registered by the aggrieved, then, is not a substantive objection; these men are not freedom fighters hoping to stop American support for dictatorships. If they were, the Iraq War would not have been such a clarion call to action. The grievance is not any particular policy in the Middle East, is that we have one at all; it is a religious complaint that our unclean feet should ever traverse the holy lands of Islam.

The terrorist paradigm gets its animating strength from the specific Islamic dichotomies of Muslims and Infidels, Dar al'Islam and Dar al'Harb; the Koran itself creates the framework these young men use to justify their horrendous attacks. The grievance of "infidel troops on holy soil" is specifically an Islamic grievances, no other religion is so centered on land, its acquisition, and its defence. Why else would Pakistanis, Saudis, Syrians, Moroccans, etc. all have the same grievance? The occupation of "Islamic land", and the grievances of Muslims all over the world, is used to motivate the young Muslim men that Mansour assures us are much different, and totally immune, over here. The Koran explicitly calls for action in defense of Muslims and their land. Should we not ask for an interpretative stance from the Muslims on our soil?

In the end, Mansour's assertions collapse on first contact with reality. This is from Osama's 1996 Declaration of War. The same Osama that created Al'Qaeda, that motivated the British-born Muslim men to slaughter their own countrymen. Luckily for us, Osama is not as shy about the religious overtones of terrorism as Mansour is.

It should not be hidden from you that the people of Islam had suffered from aggression, iniquity and injustice imposed on them by the Zionist-Crusaders alliance and their collaborators; to the extent that the Muslims blood became the cheapest and their wealth as loot in the hands of the enemies. Their blood was spilled in Palestine and Iraq. The horrifying pictures of the massacre of Qana, in Lebanon are still fresh in our memory. Massacres in Tajakestan, Burma, Cashmere, Assam, Philippine, Fatani, Ogadin, Somalia, Erithria, Chechnia and in Bosnia-Herzegovina took place, massacres that send shivers in the body and shake the conscience.

The latest and the greatest of these aggressions, incurred by the Muslims since the death of the Prophet (ALLAH'S BLESSING AND SALUTATIONS ON HIM) is the occupation of the land of the two Holy Places -the foundation of the house of Islam, the place of the revelation, the source of the message and the place of the noble Ka'ba, the Qiblah of all Muslims- by the armies of the American Crusaders and their allies. (We bemoan this and can only say: "No power and power acquiring except through Allah").

As stated by the people of knowledge, it is not a secret that to use man made law instead of the Shari'a and to support the infidels against the Muslims is one of the ten "voiders" that would strip a person from his Islamic status (turn a Muslim into a Mushrik, non believer status). The All Mighty said: {and whoever did not judge by what Allah revealed, those are the unbelievers} (Al-Ma'ida; 5:44), and {but no! by your Lord! they do not believe (in reality) until they make you a judge of that which has become a matter of disagreement among them, and then do not find the slightest misgiving in their hearts as to what you have decided and submit with entire submission} (An-Nissa; 4:65).

The right answer is to follow what have been decided by the people of knowledge, as was said by Ibn Taymiyyah (Allah's mercy upon him): "people of Islam should join forces and support each other to get rid of the main "Kufr" who is controlling the countries of the Islamic world, even to bear the lesser damage to get rid of the major one, that is the great Kufr".

I say: Since the sons of the land of the two Holy Places feel and strongly believe that fighting (Jihad) against the Kuffar in every part of the world, is absolutely essential; then they would be even more enthusiastic, more powerful and larger in number upon fighting on their own land- the place of their births- defending the greatest of their sanctities, the noble Ka'ba (the Qiblah of all Muslims). They know that the Muslims of the world will assist and help them to victory. To liberate their sanctities is the greatest of issues concerning all Muslims; It is the duty of every Muslims in this world.

Muslims need to choose whether they will follow Bin Ladenism or Modernism, and Mansour is not helping by blurring the issue.

To Gibson's Sister

2005-07-29T11:42:00.000-07:00

I just read your brother's comment below, and it came to my attention that you are currently in Iraq.

There is not much I can offer accept my thanks, and my prayers. Just know that, even if the story is not told in the papers of today, your courage and sacrifice will ring true through all the proud and protected generations to follow. This time of blood and toil will be remembered as one of America's finest hours. You are, and will be, honored.

When the oldest cask is opened,
And the largest lamp is lit;
When the chestnuts glow in the embers,
And the kid turns on the spit;
When young and old in circle
Around the firebrands close;
When the girls are weaving baskets,
And the lads are shaping bows;

When the goodman mends his armour,
And trims his helmet’s plume;
When the goodwife’s shuttle merrily
Goes flashing through the loom;
With weeping and with laughter
Still is the story told,
How well Horatius kept the bridge
In the brave days of old.

Steyn on the Columbia Disaster

2005-07-29T11:19:00.000-07:00

Posted in Full (from steynonline.com):

This week the United States got back in the space shuttle business. This is what I wrote about the last shuttle, in The Sunday Telegraph of February 2nd 2003:

The last early-morning Texan TV viewers saw was a beautiful shot of the Columbia streaking across a clear blue sky over Dallas, caught by the cameras at WFAA-TV. These are the marvels of the age -- not only the extraordinary technology that enables man to return from a trip to space, but the ordinary everyday technology that lets a cameraman from a local TV station capture the scene as it's happening overhead at 12,000 miles per hour. It's not just that most countries can't do the former, they can't manage the latter, either: Everything about the moment sums up the remarkable pre-eminence of America.

Four decades ago, the space program was the only romantic thing about an unromantic war -- the competition between two high-tech superpowers to put a man in space, and then on the moon. Now there's no one to compete with. For America's new enemies in a new war, "victory" means no more than American failure. You can't take down a spaceship at 200,000 feet with a shoulder-launched missile. Even the Americans would have difficulty blowing the shuttle out of the sky, though the missile defence system currently under development will be able to do it, despite the usual Euro-Canadian naysaying. Al-Qaeda can't do it, and nor can the French or anyone else. These days, American technology has to pace itself.

But you don't have to believe, as NASA fretted in the weeks before launch, that this shuttle could be a terrorist target to wonder at the freakily perfect symbolism of Saturday's tragedy: The Columbia's crew included the first Israeli astronaut, Colonel Ilan Ramon. Better yet, he was an Israeli who'd participated in the successful raid on the Iraqi reactor at Osirak, back in the Eighties in those dark days before the policing of Saddam's nuclear program was entrusted to Hans Blix. And, of course, the shuttle came down over Texas, home state of the President and in the European press the favoured shorthand for what they see as the swaggering cowboy braggadocio of the United States -- and, just to confirm it was the will of Allah, not merely in Texas but in the vicinity of the small town of Palestine, Texas. At creative writing classes, they'd tell you to make the symbolism more oblique, less clunkily literal.

You don't even have to be some Islamist death-cult loser in Ramallah to be dancing up and down in the street. Within an hour of the shuttle's loss, a CBC interviewer was asking her bemused expert whether the failure was due to American "arrogance," the same "arrogance" the Americans are currently demonstrating in the Middle East. The "expert" -- sci-fi writer Robert Sawyer -- said no, it wasn't "arrogance." When something happens in the middle of your broadcast and you tear up the running-order and scramble for guests and clips and background, things get said that might otherwise be more artfully veiled. But that's the point: Most of us when we're caught by something sudden and unexplained retreat to our tropes, and the gleeful rush to the cliche of American "arrogance" is revealing. An hour later this had apparently morphed into mysterious "space experts" who thought "over-confidence" arising from Iraqi war fever had led NASA to go ahead with the flight. World coverage of U.S. affairs is taking on the same stunted perspective as the old showbiz joke beloved of failed actors: It is not necessary that I succeed, only that my friends fail.

What happened Saturday is a personal tragedy and an historic disaster -- in 42 years of manned flight, NASA has never lost a crew during landing or the return in orbit. It's also a setback for Washington, which had plotted this week as a projection of American resolve: the State of the Union, Bush's meetings with Berlusconi and Blair, all working up to Colin Powell's presentation to the Security Council. Now, instead of steely determination, the TV screens will be filled with funerals, elegies, interviews with neighbours, mounds of flowers and teddy bears: It enables the networks to slip in to their preferred mode, of America as victim, weak and vulnerable, which is why ABC, CBS, NBC and CNN were so good in the immediate hours of September 11th and, for the most part, so bad in the months since.

You can't blame the news shows for their priorities: For most Americans, this will be the only attention they've paid to the space program since the last disaster -- the disintegration of the Challenger on take-off in 1986. Nothing in between has captured the public imagination -- pictures from Mars? Yawn. There's something very American about the presumption of success, about the way something unprecedented quickly becomes routine -- unless it all goes wrong. In 1986, President Reagan, eulogizing the dead, said that they had "slipped the surly bonds of Earth and touched the face of God," quoting the marvellous poem by John Magee, the son of an American father and British mother who couldn't wait for the U.S. to enter the Second World War and so signed up with the RCAF. (For Canadian readers, I should explain that RCAF stands for "Royal Canadian Air Force," but, not to worry, it was abolished and replaced by Canada Post.) President Bush, whom commentators have increasingly compared to Reagan in recent months, is not so comfortable with such highflown rhetoric; he's a more openly emotional man, and it will be the smaller human elements in the story that touch him -- men and women in their early forties, leaving behind young children. They were an American crew -- four men, one black; two women, one born in India. That last is the American Dream writ large across the stars: You can emigrate to the U.S. and become an astronaut within a decade.

Nonetheless, this will not be as traumatizing as the Challenger disaster. The yellow-ribbon era died with September 11th: Even if their TV networks haven't quite adjusted, Americans are tougher about these things; this is a country at war and one that understands how to absorb losses and setbacks. What happened happened most likely because the Columbia was just so damn old and rusty. If anything, it symbolizes not American "arrogance," but what happens when the great youthful innovating spirit of the country is allowed to atrophy: The entire space program is now dependent on a transit system from the 1970s. If President Bush really wanted to emphasize the gulf between his country and both the Islamist cave dwellers and "Old Europe," he'd announce a major renewal of the space project. A frontier is part of the American character.

Two weeks ago, when the shuttle was launched, the enterprising Internet commentator Charles Johnson posted an almost note-perfect parody of an Arab news report denouncing the presence of Colonel Ramon:

"This is surely but the first step towards complete and outright illegal Zionist occupation of space," said Arab League spokesman Abr Souffla ... Sheikh Yermani-Makr, appearing on Palestinian television, said, "It is not enough that the unbelievers have come on our land, but now they also take our heavens?"... In New York today, UN Secretary General Kofi Annan said that an Israeli presence in space is "unhelpful" and would only serve to further aggravate tensions between Israelis and Arabs. The sentiment was echoed from Madrid by EU representative Javier Solana, who said that what the Middle East needed was more negotiation, and "less cosmic adventurism."

A couple of days later, the Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz reprinted the story, having apparently taken it for real. In an odd way, the world's reactions are beyond parody now. No doubt in the big-time mosques the A-list imams really will regard what happened as the judgment of Allah on the American-Zionist plan to seize the heavens. PETA will denounce the loss of the rats and insects on board, victims of America's "arrogant" need to find cures for disease, etc. The rest of us will mourn the dead and urge NASA to get on with the next flight. That's the American way.

Cage Match, Final Round

2005-07-29T10:51:00.000-07:00

bennet: "The "End Of History" argued that capitalism and democracy created a superior system and that all other forms would convert."

Peacefully. That was the argument. The dominant ideology had been exposed and all the rest would now fall into line. Nothing more could compete.

But someone out in the audience has raised their hand, and we are back in the sparring cage. What we are seeing is that the very success of the Western paradigm has created its new opponent; 'failure' has organized against us in one last stand to cheat the rules of selection and plunder riches that for them have been unearned. Our Marxist pal Grievance has joined hands with our Islamic pal Caliphate, and these petulant children of failure are trying their damnedest to bring the temple down with them.

Given this, just how do you suppose democracy, capitalism, freedom, and private property have been defeated?

No, it is just the case that we are still fighting; it was not the end of history after all. I can see how a pacifist would call the very act of fighting losing, but if you are expecting to see the "essence of failure" defeat the "essence of success", then you should study your metaphysics.

Offering democracy is the nice and easy opening salvo, what Wretchard called fighting with our little finger. If that doesn't work, IMPOSING democracy and the rule of law will be all that's left. Ask the Japanese how pleasant that is.

To Avoid Chemotherapy

2005-07-29T08:56:00.000-07:00

dan: "Certain rogue barons out on the fringes have started to launch raids to test and stress our strength. How we distract the people from the basic glory that undoubtedly entails? These at least are the kind of people relative to their society that Nietzsche would have considered "healthy." They affirm the tribal pride--forcing their way by orthodox means into the position of traditional aristocrats--that we ultimately see as childish venality (because that is in fact what it is--this is the meaning of Nietzsche's word "developed"). So we first have to kill them, which is the only way to delegitimize them."

Earlier, I toyed with this theme on my blog:

"Nietzsche, in this case, was both correct and incorrect. He posited that 'good' and 'evil' were context-specific, that Master Morality, with virtues of strength, power, and conquering, could without contradiction claim certain things were good that Christian (Slave) Morality, with virtues of meekness, humility, and self-control, claimed were evil, and they could both be right within their particular contexts. Simply, what he was saying is that the terms 'good' and 'evil', since they could evolve, were actually meaningless, and needed to be discarded for a new paradigm of creativity and will to power.

However, is it the case that 'good' and 'evil' evolved, or is it simply that their application evolved? As the needs and evolutionary strategies of mankind changed, and as new systems emerged, cooperation and humility did indeed become the predominant survival techniques..."

"Good and Evil" is a universal language that all human societies understand, though sometimes the specific meanings are lost in translation between disparate groups. These terms prescribe behaviors that will be beneficial for the tribe or society, and they proscribe behaviors that will be deleterious to these units. It is the same everywhere.

Your comment made me think. If each culture's definitions of good and bad behavior are co-dependant, which they are, what are they co-dependant on? Specifically, what do these "values" act and interact with, how did they grow, and can they be changed?

They certainly act and interact within the culture itself, so one answer, if we are to help their culture 'evolve', is a change from within. This seems to be the most difficult for us, since as outsiders we will have difficulty assimilating our ideas into the flow of local logic, and, as you mentioned, the institutions for cultural interaction have atrophied in the Arab world. It is not impossible, it just takes the most time and learning, and we may not have much time. Iraq, in this respect, is our first effort at an internal shift.

But there are also outside forces that affect the internal survival values of "good and evil". These external forces can be thought of as the environment in which the tribal or cultural values strive and compete. If we look back in history, there are many examples of this, British Colonialism being but one, where the tribal preconceptions continuously bounced off the British values, which were backed by power, causing the tribal preconceptions to evolve over time.

So, we must become the environment in which these tribal preconceptions interact and compete. "Carriers" of an ideology that cannot assimilate, those who carry the doctrine of murder, will have to die. It will take years and years of power projection and resolve. I am not sure we will be able to do it...

As Churchill said:

"[H]ow the structures and habits of democratic states, unless they are welded into larger organisms, lack thoses elements of persistance and conviction which alone can give security to humble masses; how, even in matters of self-preservation, no policy is pursued for ten or fifteen years at a time. We shall see how the counsels of prudence and restraint may become the prime agents of mortal danger; how the middle course adopted from desires for safety and a quiet life may be found to lead directly to the bull's-eye of disaster. We shall see how absolute is the need of a broad path of international action pursued by many states in common across the years, irrespective of the ebb and flow of national politics."

A new cancer treatment is being tested, where nanotech drug delivery systems carry a precise amount of silver particles to surround a tumor. Once the silver is in place, the patient simply lies down in a "tanning bed" that sends infrared waves through the body. The silver particles collect and reflect these waves off the self-contained mirror system until the tumor simply dissolves from the extreme heat in the 'kill zone.' The rest of the body doesn't even feel it.

The world of today is populated with tumors, and we need a precise delivery system designed specifically for each problem area. If we are unable to find it, the cancers will metastasize, and the only option left will be a large and imprecise dose of chemotherapy.

The extreme solution weakens the body, sometimes to the point of death, recovery is difficult and painful, and there aren't even any guarantees that the cancer is gone.

It is something we should strive to avoid.

Failed State: An Effort at Definition

2005-07-28T19:36:00.000-07:00

I believe you can trace it some of it back to Europe and the ideological and political virus of "eidodynamic" revolution:

"Isolated expressions of eidodynamic assumptions can be traced far back into history, Walsby finding them in ancient Greek and Chinese writings, {1} but they can hardly be said to have motivated political activities before the appearance of the Diggers and other egalitarian protesters of 17th century England. In the French Revolution Babeuf and followers, with their communistic Utopia, claim a place among the eidodynamics, but the main movement has to be ascribed to the ideology of precision. Not until the 19th century did the reformers and revolutionaries come to form enduring parties and movements.

These have not been able to realise their own idea of themselves; claiming to represent the interests of the great body of the people against a dominant and exploitative few, and therefore expecting to receive overwhelming numerical support, they have remained in the minority. They have known war and peace, boom and slump, the virtual disappearance of empires and ruling monarchs, the growth of political democracy, general education, widespread literacy and mass communications; one of them has been able to grasp control of governmental power in two of the largest states and a number of smaller ones. Each of these conditions has been proclaimed, before the event, the one thing needed to bring the great body of the people to accept socialism (or communism or anarchism) but none of them have produced this effect. The features and tendencies these groups oppose - private ownership, togetherness, economic competition, institutional religion, hierarchy, authority, low valuation of theory, respect for success in life, willingness to defend the national group - these continue to be the values by which society mainly operates."

In complex systems like human society, organizational success must emerge organically from the properties and interactions of the previous level. Failure to take into account the material you are working with is a fast route to failure; imposing a revolutionary (eidodynamic) paradigm from the top, an ideology based on false premises and contradictory to the properties of the existing system, will inevitably lead to the collapse of the system itself, and to our failed states.

In fractal geometry one of the first things you notice is how properties are self-similar and recursive, all the way to the bottom. Societies, if they are to have structural fitness, must also have self-similar levels and recursive properties. At the bottom of society lies the individual, then the family, then village, etc. The culture and customs that grow organically at these low levels are as important to the "state" as a cornerstone to a foundation; the low levels are determinative of of the nation's properties and fitness.

Some ideologies are never fit enough on a local level to have a new level "emerge", i.e. a nation built around those principles. Some paradigms are fit enough to go global.

Imposing a nation-state on unfit local paradigm's is one reason for state failure. Imposing unfit and eidodynamic paradigms on an otherwise fit nation-state is another.

When you look at the over-all ecology, the global system of interaction and competition, it becomes apparent why we must be like "swimming sharks", constantly moving. The world is constantly shifting, and if you sit back on your laurels and refuse to adapt, pretty soon your very successful paradigm at time 't', which was working with reality 'r', will be obsolete at time 'T' when you must work with reality 'R'.

Evolution. All these systems and all their levels have the self-similar property of participating in a selective system. The question each society must ask itself: can you compete?

If you cannot play by the organically-grown rules of world selection, then a priori you will fail.

Admission

2005-07-28T19:35:00.001-07:00

Of course, this implies that there is such a thing as an "objectively failed state".

If life really is chaotic and random, if success and failure really are creatures of perspective and not at real things, then everything I've said falls apart.

But I'm comfortable in my assumptions. There really is such a thing as "better", and we are it.

And the Wind-Up...

2005-07-28T19:35:00.000-07:00

stoutfellow: "Anyway, neither Dawkins nor Mandelbrot are gonna be much help in trying to prevent the coming Dark Age."

But they will be useful in describing it, yes?

The concept of a failed state implies the idea of a successful state, which in turn implies the presence of a competitive paradigm and selective process.

The Anthropic Principle states that everything that came before 'now' was necessary for us to be here, at this place. If you are an American, look around you at the prosperity, happiness, and wealth. These did not simply appear out of air, they were bought and paid for through the falsification process of our ideals.

Now let's suppose you are an Arab. All the poverty and failure around you also happened for a reason. Claiming that the West oppressed and manipulated your people is just another way of saying you were powerless to resist, which is another way of saying you lost the game. History is varied, and many causes can be determinative, but nothing can scrub away the fact that for the last 600 years your society has failed, miserably. After that long of a slump, you probably want to stop complaining about the pitching, and maybe change your swing.

The competitive value of any one state is co-dependant on the value and properties of all others, and all these are co-dependant on the properties of the system in which they interact. If the only way to compete globally is through resource aquisition (power) and world trade (production and wealth), it makes little sense to build a state paradigm on Greenpeace and the AFL-CIO. Now imagine how harmful it is to build a paradigm on something even more contradictory, and you will see why states fail the way they do.

When discussing a dynamic system where many different players can become dominant, the focal point and overall strategic objective for a state becomes the very act of competing and winning; if states lose sight of this imperative, like Europe has done, when they come out of their stupor they will find themselves much further back than they were before.

When a society chooses to structure its ideology in direct contra-distinction to reality, it will fail. And, much like in business, its resources will be cannabilized by a more fit player.

The Swamps of Sadness

2005-07-27T21:11:00.000-07:00

This picture just struck me. It is the Chateau Woods in 1917, WWI.

Posturing for Energy in Central Asia

2005-07-27T19:39:00.000-07:00

William F. Buckley's article of 2004 comes to mind:

"If one contemplates oil as simply an agent of energy, the idea becomes instantly clearer. Every advance by mankind against the material duress of life is most easily expressed in terms of energy spared. Electrical power is generated in part by running water and by nuclear energy. But mostly it is created by oil and gas. What is it that a people is willing to fight for? The security of home and hearth come first, and that is achieved mostly by weaponry; but weapons that seek to have their effects beyond the range of a cartridge of gunpowder do so, on battleships and airplanes, by the propellant force of oil.

If you are willing to die in order to protect your local hospital, then you must be willing to die for oil, because without oil, your hospital won't take you beyond a surgeon's scalpel, and a surgeon is helpless without illumination, which is provided (mostly) by oil.

To say that we must not fight for oil is utter cant. To fight for oil is to fight in order to maintain such sovereignty as we exercise over the natural world. Socialism plus electricity, Lenin said at the outset of the Soviet revolution, would usher in the ideal state. He was wrong about socialism but not about electricity. Electricity gives us whatever leverage we have over nature. To flit on airily about an unwillingness to fight for oil suggests an indifference to the alleviation of poverty at the next level after bread and water. Throw in, perhaps, the wheel. That too is an indispensable scaffolding of human power over nature. But then comes all the power not generated by the muscles of human beings and beasts of burden."

It is not to like or dislike. It is simply the nature of the beast.

The Bunker of the 21st Century

2005-07-27T18:35:00.000-07:00

In that same article, another thing stuck out:

"The future battlefield will be “everywhere”—from the human mind, to the electromagnetic spectrum, to cyberspace, to outer space—and everyone will be a potential combatant, including hackers, genetic engineers, and financiers. Warfare will no longer be the sole province of nation-states and soldiers and will not be resolved only with military means. Instead, “all means” will be used to fight these wars—including trade warfare, financial warfare, terrorism, ecological warfare, computer-network attack, media warfare, drug warfare, and psychological warfare. “Extreme means” need not always be used, but victory will go to those who best combine all the resources at their disposal without regard for boundaries, restrictions, rules, laws, or taboos."

To the list of combatants I would add the blogosphere, and Wretchard's earlier post on "spontaneous organization" and information hubs is relevant here.

One of the great assets of the blogosphere is its ability to offer conceptual frameworks, ideological prisms and mental shorthands through which we can better process and understand the massive data crunch that attends the modern world. Belmont Club is such a site.

In a previous time of danger and confusion, writers like Tom Paine and Alexander Hamilton built for their countrymen just these types of frameworks, and the effect was a buttressing of their resolve and a justification of their courage.

We are also in dangerous and confusing times. But with our attention and stamina, our knowledge will continue to expand, and our conceptual arsenal will continue to grow.

The bunkers of the 21st century will be ideological, and they will be built on-line.

The Global Python and the China Trap

2005-07-27T18:03:00.000-07:00

I was searching for information about our Central Asian strategic posture, and noticed something interesting.

"Most Chinese sources strongly criticized the use of force without United Nations sanction and rejected the ostensible rationales for Allied Force—to protect human rights and halt ethnic cleansing.4 They noted that these rationales could be used to justify intervention practically anywhere on Earth, since a great many countries have ethnic conflicts in progress, and intervening on behalf of separatists in Kosovo would only encourage separatists elsewhere. Moreover, they believed that these rationales were simply fig leaves used to cover larger American geopolitical purposes. The Chinese considered that these purposes included removing obstacles to NATO’s eastward expansion, reducing Russia’s sphere of influence, and using NATO as a tool for 'global hegemony.'

Some journalists contended that the next step in the “strategic conspiracy” is to expand NATO’s area of interest into Central Asia, the Middle East, and even the Asia-Pacific region.6 Another author considered that one goal of Allied Force was to “open up the Balkan corridor” to the military, political, and economic influence of the European Union, which would serve to secure a land/river route for the flow of oil and gas from the Caucasus and Central Asia to Western Europe.7 The author predicted that in the aftermath of the Balkan war, the United States would intensify its efforts to contain China. Containment would entail supporting India’s missile programs, encouraging separatists in Xinjiang and territorial disputes in the South China Sea, and strengthening the defenses of Taiwan and Japan.

Senior Col Yao Youzhi of the AMS argued that Eurasia plays a “decisive position in global geopolitical strategies.” He claimed that the United States views North America as its base, South America as its backyard, Africa as a “broken continent that cannot be lifted up,” and Eurasia as the “serious hidden danger to global dominance.” America plans to control Eurasia by keeping Russia weak, manipulating NATO, and containing China through military alliances with Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Australia, and New Zealand."

The dangers of Colonel Qiao Liang's Unrestricted Warfare are the unintended consequences that can attend any ill-thought over-steps. I have read since September 11, Colonel Liang and Wang Xiangsui have been treated as heroes in China for articulating the strategy of "terrorism, narcotics trafficking, drug smuggling, environmental degradation and computer viruses as methods to defeat America."

I bet the Chinese are not as sanguine anymore. In direct contra-distinction to Al'Qaeda's hopes and China's strategic analysis, the 9/11 attacks have focused and accelerated America's strategic posture. The Giant has awoken and discovered the world needs her attention.

Every single worry the Chinese had about Operation Allied Force have come to pass, via the GWOT. In the 90's, the Chinese thought we were a Python, using our great mass to suffocate all rivals. The present claustrophobia must be overwhelming.

Temperance and Caution

2005-07-27T08:56:00.000-07:00

A lesson for Iraq, and for the world we try to create:

"In the absence of convincing evidence to the contrary the reasonable expectation has to be that the established pattern will persist, earlier developments serving as the enduring bases on which the later ones rest, and this is confirmed by recent political experience; even where eidodynamic movements have been in control of the state for generations they are finding themselves obliged to accept the eidostatic as constituting the bulk and substance of society. As they do this, in Russia and China for example, so the horrors resulting from the attempt to impose exclusively eidodynamic principles recede into history.

Once we cease taking society for granted, or thinking of it as a gift from God or an arbitrary creation of the human will, once we begin to recognise it as one term in the universal evolutionary process, we find ourselves virtually obliged to accept that each new phase in its development incorporates the functional relationships marking the previous condition. To treat any major ideology by itself is to create an abstraction; any given stage in ideological development comprises not just an ideology and the expression of it but also its context, with the previous ideologies in the series playing significant parts."

Paradigm Shift

2005-07-27T08:55:00.000-07:00

Wikipedia def. emergence:

"An emergent behaviour or emergent property can appear when a number of simple entities (agents) operate in an environment, forming more complex behaviours as a collective. The property itself is often unpredictable and unprecedented, and represents a new level of the system's evolution."

Thomas Kuhn on Paradigm Shifts:
(from http://www.des.emory.edu/mfp/Kuhn.html)

"Failure of existing rules is the prelude to a search for new ones."

"Novelty emerges only with difficulty, manifested by resistance, against a background provided by expectation.

"All crises begin with the blurring of a paradigm and the consequent loosening of the rules; the awareness and acknowledgment that a crisis exists loosens theoretical stereotypes and provides the incremental data necessary for a fundamental paradigm shift."

"New paradigms arise with destructive changes in beliefs..."

Osama has changed the rules and provided a crisis; the question, then, is where are we going?

Chutes and Ladders

2005-07-26T10:25:00.000-07:00

Bennett: read Bush's words again.

Civil War will be a defeat. He says it explicitly when he says "if we do not win here."

However, the hope of success outweighs the cost of defeat. And this is where the Over-all Strategic Objective comes in.

I believe it was RWE that spoke of the strategy against the USSR, fighting them at every turn and competing at every game. Mixed in this analysis is the acceptance that sometimes you lose the battle, like we did in Vietnam. The point is to not lose the war.

Iraq is and always has been a battle in the greater Global War on (whatever). Abizaid's analysis that a United States victory would be the beginning of the end is true, which is why we had to try. In war you accept risks if the potential payoff is that large.

What you are reading here is the acceptance that we MAY NOT WIN, which is not the same as defining victory down. But it is still nothing more than a battle.

If you've ever played the game Chutes and Ladders, then you understand this strategy. September 11 was a chute that brought us almost to the bottom. As we were moving forward, a ladder to the top presented itself and we went for it. We may have missed, and the war may now take longer and have more twists and turns, but we are still in the game, and we will make it to the top.

So, if there is Civil War, the thing to do is accept defeat and move on. We still have plenty of rolls.