Roundup: Historians' Take
This is where we place excerpts by historians writing about the news. On occasion this page also includes political scientists, economists, and law professors who write about history. We may from time to time even include English profs.
Mark Naison: Lawrence Summer's Resignation an Affirmation of Harvard's Preeminence
Jonathan Zimmerman: Fear of Insulting Muslims No Sign of Respect
Daniel Pipes: "Moslem States Represent a Potential Threat to World Peace"
Andrew Meyer: A "Deep Historical" and Pangeographic View of the Cartoon Fracas
Fouad Ajami: The ballot is not infallible, but it has broken the Arab pact with tyranny.
Thomas J. Sugrue: Now Detroit Has to Face Its Real Self Again
Ira Chernus: Praise the Lord and Pass the Petition
Source: TomDispatch.com (2-28-06)
[Ira Chernus is Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder. He is the author of American Nonviolence: The History of an Idea and later this year will publish Monster to Destroy: The Neoconservative War on Terror and Sin. He can be reached at chernus@colorado.edu.]
If you are waiting for a religious left to emerge to offset the power of the religious right, it may already be in your own neighborhood at a local church or synagogue. I stumbled across a branch of the religious left quite by accident recently, in Texas of all places, though the folks I met would say I was guided to them by the Lord.
On a weekend in mid-February, nearly 200 Evangelical Lutherans from all over the country came to Fort Worth for the Congregation-Based Organizing Strategy Summit or CBOSS. They talked, planned, and prayed about community organizing. They shared stories about what they had already accomplished through faith and hard political work.
They had demanded action from public officials and corporate leaders in their communities, and they were proud of their victories. Among the local triumphs some of them claimed were: affordable housing for thousands of families; guaranteed access to health insurance for all children; treatment centers instead of prisons for criminals; a new community center where a meth house used to be; free day-care centers; water and sewer lines for 150,000 rural poor who had none before; laws requiring public contractors to pay a living wage; surveillance cameras in police cars -- to watch the police themselves.
The list of victories went on and on. In every case devout Christians, often allied with secular activists, had put enough pressure on public officials to turn empty promises into real results. These Christians did it all because they felt called by the Lord to do His work, to create justice in the world -- and because they've learned the rigorous, disciplined organizing techniques pioneered by Saul Alinsky, who created the Industrial Areas Foundation in the 1940s, and Ernesto Cortez, who then sparked Alinsky-style organizations from the barrios of Texas to the valleys of Los Angeles.
The Christians I met at CBOSS pray endlessly to Jesus, but their savior is no meek and mild turner of the other cheek. He is the Great Organizer. He agitates, builds political tension, and goes toe-to-toe with any authority who abuses power to oppress people. He is the model of a fighter for justice who won't ever quit until the wrongs of the world are righted. This Jesus has political values as radical as -- maybe more radical than -- yours. He offers his followers eternal life in heaven. But first He demands that they work to create justice on Earth every day by practicing the arts of tough political love that He taught so long ago.
They call their political work "faith-based community organizing," or sometimes "congregation-based organizing" to avoid confusion with George Bush's "faith-based initiative," which is a very different thing. In Bush's approach, religion is supposed to take the sin out of the sinner. That, congregation-based community organizers will tell you, is a case of blaming the victim. The problem lies not in the supposed sins of the poor, oppressed, and marginalized. The real sin is an oppressive economic and political system that deprives people of rights, resources, and hope.
That sinful system flourishes -- as they reminded themselves many times over in the CBOSS meeting -- because the powerless let the powerful get away with it. When the powerless heed the divine call to organize, they can exert enough political power to force sinners to mend their ways, and so to mend neighborhoods, schools, and social institutions that their greed has destroyed.
I happened to meet only representatives of the Lutherans, but progressive Christians, it turns out, are everywhere. The Lutherans organize in interfaith coalitions with Catholics, other Protestants -- and increasingly Jews and Unitarians. In some locales, Muslims, Buddhists, and other faith communities are joining in, too. They also work hand-in-hand with non-religious, non-believing activists -- even out-and-out atheists. If you are involved in any kind of campaign for justice, these are people you want on your side. They will probably support most of the same causes you do. In fact, they may already be working for many of them.
To be perfectly frank, all their God-and-Jesus talk may make you nervous. A whole weekend of it made a non-Christian like me kind of twitchy. If your knowledge of Christian activism comes mainly through television and radio, you probably hear words like "congregation-based" and "faith-based" and think "conservative" or even "fanatic." If you hear "baptized" and "resurrection," the words "Bush" and "right-wing" undoubtedly come quickly to mind. No wonder Christians make us nervous.
I went to CBOSS as an outsider, accompanying my partner, the director of Interfaith Funders, a national consortium of faith-based and secular grant-makers who support faith-based community organizing. (Their website is a great resource for learning more about the nature of this community.) But at the closing session, when they called for evaluation and feedback, I decided to join in.
I asked the Lutherans to understand how hard it is for secular activists like me to hear their talk. I said they should cut us some slack when we seem anti-Christian to them, or mistakenly lump all activist Christians together as "the religious right." I urged them to overlook our trepidation and work with us for common political goals. They gave me a rousing cheer. The spiritual godfather of their movement, Rev. John Heinemeier, a minister who transformed whole neighborhoods in the Bronx and Boston, came over to shake my hand and tell me how much they need to hear that message.
But we need to hear their message, too. There is nothing inherently conservative in Christian language. It can point in any political direction, even the most radical. After all, it's the language of Martin Luther King, Dorothy Day, and the Berrigan brothers. If all that stuff about "the power and glory of Christ" and "all praise to the Lord" makes for knots in your stomach, or even a gag in your throat, let it be. Put it in the same class as those aching feet after a long day of leafletting or your aching head from an all-night organizing meeting. It's just a price to be paid to get our political work done.
We'll pay a much bigger price if we let the Christians' God-and-Jesus talk keep us from making alliances with people like those at CBOSS. If we want to make social change, the faith-based are the people to work with. Their organizing techniques are among the most sophisticated I've seen. They've built at least 180 ongoing organizations in cities and towns across the country, often linked in huge networks like PICO, the Gamaliel Foundation, the DART Center, and the Industrial Areas Foundation. By some estimates, they involve nearly 6,000 congregations, with a total membership of some two million or more.
We're not talking about single-issue coalitions that win a victory and then dissolve. These are religious denominations that have been around for centuries. And they plan to stay around for centuries more. They can tap into powerful national organizations with immense resources. Most important, they have an almost inexhaustible energy. They get it from all that praying and singing and talking about God. So the next time you hear someone praise Jesus, stop and ask them about issues like health care, a living wage, affordable housing, and police brutality. You may be surprised to find an invaluable ally for your own activism.
True, there may be some issues dear to your heart that you and some of these Christian organizers don't see eye to eye on. Their views on social issues like abortion and gay rights span the spectrum from radical to conservative. But faith-based organizers have learned a vital lesson from Saul Alinsky, one all of us should absorb: To build a broad political base, have no permanent enemies and no permanent allies. Work with anyone who shares your current goal. If there are some subjects that might create tensions, just don't talk about them, at least until the goal is won.
At the victory party, you may discover that your Christian allies have turned into friends. You may find that now, over a beer, they are ready to listen to your views on subjects once too tense to talk about. But watch out. They'll be praising the Lord for turning the world toward justice. And their enthusiasm is infectious. You might be astonished to hear yourself praising the Lord, too.
This article first appeared on www.tomdispatch.com, a weblog of the Nation Institute, which offers a steady flow of alternate sources, news and opinion from Tom Engelhardt, a long time editor in publishing, the author of The End of Victory Culture, and a fellow of the Nation Institute.
Daniel Pipes: Civil War in Iraq?
Source: NY Sun (2-28-06)
[Mr. Pipes is the director of the Middle East Forum. His website address is http://www.danielpipes.org. Click here for his HNN blog.]
The bombing on February 22 of the Askariya shrine in Samarra, Iraq, was a tragedy, but it was not an American or a coalition tragedy.
The destruction of the Golden Dome, built in 1905 and one of the holiest shrines of Shiite Islam, represents an escalation of the Sunni assault on the Shiites, a purposeful outrage intended to provoke an emotional backlash. It signals not Sunni weakness but the determination of elements in Iraq's long-ruling community to reassert its dominance. Iraq's president, Jalal Talabani, has rightly warned, "The fire of sedition, when it breaks out, can burn everything in its path and spare no one." One shudders at the possible carnage ahead.
That said, Iraq's plight is neither a coalition responsibility nor a particular danger to the West.
When Washington and its allies toppled the hideous regime of Saddam Hussein, which endangered the outside world by beginning two wars of expansion, by building a WMD arsenal, and by aspiring to control the trade in oil and gas, they bestowed a historic benefit on Iraqis, a population that had been wantonly oppressed by the Stalinist dictator.
Unsurprisingly, his regime quickly fell to outside attack, proving to be the "cakewalk" that many analysts, including myself, had expected. That six-week victory remains a glory of American foreign policy and of the coalition forces. It also represents a personal achievement for President Bush, who made the key decisions.
But the president decided that this mission was not enough. Dazzled by the examples of post-World War II Germany and Japan – whose transformations in retrospect increasingly appear to have been one-time achievements – he committed troops in the pursuit of creating a "free and democratic Iraq." This noble aim was inspired by the best of America's idealism.
But nobility of purpose did not suffice for rehabilitating Iraq, as I predicted already in April 2003. Iraqis, a predominantly Muslim population newly liberated from their totalitarian dungeon, were disinclined to follow the American example; for their part, the American people lacked a deep interest in the welfare of Iraq. This combination of forces guarantees the coalition cannot impose its will on 26 million Iraqis.
It also implies the need for a lowering of coalition goals. I cheer the goal of a "free and democratic Iraq," but the time has come to acknowledge that the coalition's achievement will be limited to destroying tyranny, not sponsoring its replacement. There is nothing ignoble about this limited achievement, which remains a landmark of international sanitation. It would be especially unfortunate if aiming too high spoils that attainment and thereby renders future interventions less likely. The benefits of eliminating Saddam's rule must not be forgotten in the distress of not creating a successful new Iraq.
Fixing Iraq is neither the coalition's responsibility nor its burden. The damage done by Saddam will take many years to repair. Americans, Britons, and others cannot be tasked with resolving Sunni-Shiite differences, an abiding Iraqi problem that only Iraqis themselves can address.
The eruption of civil war in Iraq would have many implications for the West. It would likely:
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Invite Syrian and Iranian participation, hastening the possibility of an American confrontation with those two states, with which tensions are already high.
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Terminate the dream of Iraq serving as a model for other Middle Eastern countries, thus delaying the push toward elections. This will have the effect of keeping Islamists from being legitimated by the popular vote, as Hamas was just a month ago.
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Reduce coalition casualties in Iraq. As noted by the Philadelphia Inquirer, "Rather than killing American soldiers, the insurgents and foreign fighters are more focused on creating civil strife that could destabilize Iraq's political process and possibly lead to outright ethnic and religious war."
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Reduce Western casualties outside Iraq. A professor at the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School, Vali Nasr, notes: "Just when it looked as if Muslims across the region were putting aside their differences to unite in protest against the Danish cartoons, the attack showed that Islamic sectarianism remains the greatest challenge to peace." Put differently, when Sunni terrorists target Shiites and vice-versa, non-Muslims are less likely to be hurt.
Civil war in Iraq, in short, would be a humanitarian tragedy but not a strategic one.
This article is reprinted with permission by Daniel Pipes. This article first appeared in the New York Sun.
Jonathan Zimmerman: Take a pass on Beijing Games
Source: Philadelphia Inquirer (2-27-06)
[Jonathan Zimmerman teaches history at New York University and lives in Narberth. He is the author of "Whose America? Culture Wars in the Public Schools" (Harvard University Press).]
A fascist, dictatorial regime plans to host the Olympic Games. Critics call for a boycott, but the Games come off as planned. And on the field of world opinion, the hosts score an enormous victory.
Berlin in 1936? No, Beijing in 2008.
Now that the Winter Olympics are over, all eyes will soon turn to the Summer Olympics. And that's just what the Chinese want. Like the Germans before them, they will use the Olympics to showcase their booming economy-and to hide their repressive behavior.
But the rest of us don't have to help. Lest we repeat the errors of 1936, the United States should lead a boycott of the 2008 Olympics. Anything less will give the Chinese the same kind of propaganda boost that the Nazis enjoyed.
If you don't believe me, go rent Leni Riefenstahl's prize-winning documentary Olympia. Released on Adolf Hitler birthday in 1938, two years after the Berlin Olympics, the film shows the Games-and the Germans-in all of their glory. The enormous main stadium, expanded to fit 110,000 spectators. The brand-new Olympic Village, boasting 100 different buildings and 387 dining halls. The brilliant pageantry of the Olympische Jugend ("Olympic Youth"), who wowed audiences with their festive dances.
Hitler himself was no great fan of sport, fearing that athletic competition would elevate the lone individual over the all-powerful state. But he recognized the enormous potential of the Olympics to burnish Germany's international standing, which needed all the help it could get. As early as 1933, for example, a New York Times editorial suggested that the Nazis' "race doctrine" contradicted the spirit of peace, equality, and fair play at the heart of the Olympics.
So Hitler issued strict orders: no racism at this Olympics. Defenders of the decision to hold the Games in Berlin often point to African-American track champion Jesse Owens, whose four gold medals supposedly undermined Nazi racial ideology. According to one well-worn myth, a deflated Hitler refused to shake hands with Owens after the runner had destroyed the Third Reich's pretensions of "Aryan" superiority.
But the truth is almost exactly the opposite. Rather than challenging Nazi racism, the triumphs of Owens and other black athletes allowed the Germans to hide it. "The racial point of view should not in any form be a part of the discussion of the athletic results," the Ministry of Propaganda warned.
"Special care should be exercised not to offend Negro athletes." Indeed, the ministry reprimanded one newspaper after it took a pot-shot at America's "black auxiliaries." Hitler himself refused to pare footage of Owens and other black stars from Riefenstahl's film, rejecting suggestions that the documentary was too "positive" towards African-Americans.
Fast-forward to Beijing in 2008, when we can expect China's dictators to disguise their own cruelties in a colorful haze of artistic and technological wizardry. To be fair, the Chinese leaders have never demonstrated the genocidal mentality or the global ambitions of Nazi Germany. And nominally, of course, China remains a "Communist" nation. But make no mistake: it's a fascist one....
Mark Naison: Lawrence Summer's Resignation an Affirmation of Harvard's Preeminence
The resignation of Harvard President Lawrence Summer has been widely denounced as a victory for leftist faculty members who totally are out of touch with the worldview and beliefs of most people in theUnited States .
There is some truth to that accusation. But it is precisely because Harvard faculty are out of touch with the thinking of most Americans that Harvard will remain the nation's pre eminent research university and continue to attract talented scholars from all over the world.
At this time in American History, being out of touch with the American people is hardly the kiss of death for a major academic institution. Is it a terrible thing to support scientific innovation, create space for the examination of unfamiliar political and religious traditions, defend freedom of expression, and challenge bigotry against women and gays and immigrants? None of those would win Harvard's faculty many friends on Fox Five News or in the South Dakota State Legislature
What makes great universities great is precisely their immunity to the political fashions of the day. If the price of this is senior faculty demanding deference from university administrators and refusing to look at students as customers whose every whim must be served, then that is a price worth playing. Someone in this society should be immune from the pressures that leads people to defer to the demands of the marketplace or the commands of those who possess economic and political power. And who better to do this then tenured faculty in an institution which was founded 150 years before the ratification of the US Constitution.
No faculty member with an ounce of pride or self respect will allow a university president to tell him or her what courses to teach, how to evaluate students, or what subjects are worthy of study. Lawrence Summer crossed that line with people far more distinguished than he and he paid the price.
Dr Summers presumed that his power over budgets and appointments, which are determinative in politics and business, would have the power to persuade faculty to support his policies But the exact opposite proved to be true. The more he tried to use the power of the purse to influence decisions, the more he was resented for challenging the code of collegiality which talented scholars cling to as the last bastion of resistance to America,s dominant culture of acquisitiveness and greed.
So criticize Harvard,s faculty all you want for being arrogant, elitist and un- American
For better or worse, that,s what makes them outstanding in their respective fields of study
Keith David Watenpaugh: The coming civil war in Iraq
Source: Salt Lake Tribune (2-24-06)
[Keith David Watenpaugh is an author and the George S. and Dolores Doré Eccles Distinguished Fellow in Democracy and Diversity at the Tanner Humanities Institute, University of Utah. In July he will join the faculty of the University of California, Davis, as associate professor of Modern Islamic Studies.]
The coming civil war in Iraq Keith David Watenpaugh Salt Lake Tribune When I was in Baghdad just a few weeks after the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, I was witness to the ugly sight of unrestrained looting. Gangs of men with crowbars and pick-up trucks had stripped bare state buildings, Baath Party headquarters and even university libraries and classrooms.
But in the midst of the mayhem, neighborhood Sunni mosques, ornate Sufi mausolea, blue- tiled Shiite shrines and Armenian churches with their conical domes remained untouched.
Even the vulgar mega-mosques that Saddam had started to build in a vain hope to append to his regime some measure of Islamic legitimacy were left alone.
These sacred spaces remained off-limits in the way secular ones did not because they were living symbols at the moral center of the Iraqi national community - a place that the corrupt and brutal Baathist state could never legitimately fill.
While Iraq has begun to recover from the looting, it will not be able to pull back from the brink of civil war following the destruction of much of the Golden Mosque in Samarra. While this is not the first attack on a religious site in Iraq, it will certainly prove to be the most consequential as it confirms the loss of that common moral center.
The attack, blamed on Sunni insurgents, destroyed an Ottoman-era golden dome and much of the rest of the complex, which is, in fact, a shrine to two 9th century descendents of the Prophet Muhammad, Imam Hadi al-Askari and his son Hassan. And though the other shrines in the Iraqi cities of Najaf and Karbala are much more important to Shiites worldwide, this mosque in Samarra, as well as the grand al-Qadhimayn mosque in northern Baghdad, sit at the very center of the Iraqi Arab Shiite identity.
To Iraq's Shiites they are national symbols and religious emblems, playing much the same role the Cathedral of Notre Dame does for France's Catholics.
In part, this is because of the living nature these places have had in the lives of Iraq's Shiites.
At these shrines, Islamic high culture mixes fluidly with folkways and local traditions. They are not somber spaces of silent solemnity, but rather where on warm nights families gather together, bring picnics and set out blankets and children play raucously in the presence of the baraka - the blessings - conveyed by being near the imams interred inside. During the centuries of Sunni dominance of what became Iraq, they were places where Shiites could practice their faith in the way they saw fit, educate their children and experience a modicum of safety and repose.
But with this attack, senior leaders in the Shiite establishment, in particular Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, will find it more difficult if not impossible to disband their militias or restrain their followers and political allies calling for Sunni blood. The more they ignore those calls the more irrelevant they will become to the politics of Iraq.
The subterranean conflict that pits uniformed Shiite death squads against Sunni insurgents with civilians in the middle will now come into the open.
The virulent sectarianism that this attack represents and the vicious reprisals that have already begun - Sunni mosques have been burned and at the time of this writing 138 people have been killed, including seven American soldiers - will mark 2/22, 2006, as the day the Iraqi Civil War began.
The descent into sectarianism, for which the Iraqis and the U.S. both bear a great deal of responsibility, was avoidable and is the most shameful legacy of our presence in Iraq.
Robert "KC" Johnson: The Perils of Academic Unions
Source: Inside Higher Education (2-24-06)
[KC Johnson is a professor of history at Brooklyn College and the CUNY Graduate Center.]
New York City’s academic community has experienced more than a semester of labor turbulence. In September, after a summer of eschewing all formal contract negotiations, the City University of New York’s faculty union, the Professional Staff Congress, convened a mass meeting to rally support for a strike. Six weeks later, New York University graduate students walked off the job, demanding recognition of a graduate student union, the GSOC.
These strategies do not seem to have paid dividends. The PSC’s plan fizzled amidst widespread faculty ambivalence about (or even opposition to) defying New York State law, which prohibits strikes by public employee unions; a settlement on terms well short of the union’s “non-negotiable” demands appears imminent. At NYU, President John Sexton recently stated that striking graduate students would not receive 2006 teaching assignments; some of those who started off on picket lines have returned to their jobs. In retrospect, PSC and GSOC leaders probably erred in their hard-line rhetoric and actions. But the two organizations also illustrate — if in an exaggerated fashion — some of the pitfalls associated with academic unionization.
Supporters of the PSC and GSOC attribute the unions’ difficulties to broader political, societal, and economic forces. The union movement has found George W. Bush an implacable foe. Organized labor is divided — as seen in the departure of SEIU and related unions from the AFL-CIO — and has struggled to organize new workers. Pressures from globalization have rendered obsolete the types of union contracts common in the 1950s or early 1960s.
Yet the nature of the university — a non-profit institution in which an overwhelmingly pro-labor faculty shares the task of campus governance — buffers academic unions from many of these national trends. It is for this reason, as supporters have noted, that academic unions have functioned at many public universities without significant controversy, if not for the overall educational good.
Campus organizations, however, also suffer from problems rare in the labor movement nationally. Since few academics enter the profession to become labor activists, those who gravitate toward union service are more likely to fall on the fringes of a professoriate that already is ideologically one-sided. They therefore become particularly susceptible to what Emory University’s Mark Bauerlein has termed the academy’s “ groupthink,” adopting extreme positions that weaken their standing with legislators, alumni, or parents.
Bauerlein contends that one aspect of groupthink occurs when “the members of a group reach a consensus and rarely encounter those who dispute it, [so] they tend to believe that everybody thinks the same way.” The GSOC has discovered how this “false consensus effect” can inadvertently alienate constituencies critical to the union’s success. For instance, the New York Sun reported that as part of its campaign to move classes off campus, the GSOC paid to hold classes in — of all places — the U.S. Communist Party’s headquarters. (It is doubtful that this move will help convince any neutral trustees that the union’s views represent a mainstream perspective.) Meanwhile, a pro-strike group of more than 200 professors, Faculty Democracy, threatened to withhold undergraduates’ fall-term grades unless Sexton assigned the strikers to spring-term teaching positions, from which they could then continue to refuse to work. (It seems unlikely that parents of NYU seniors will sympathize with the faculty’s casual willingness to disadvantage their children’s candidacies for admission to professional schools.)...
At NYU, Sexton deserves credit for putting the integrity of his institution first. And at CUNY, key members of the Board of Trustees have courageously resisted the outlandish demands and frequently bullying tactics of their labor foes. The records of the GSOC and PSC offer textbook examples of how groupthink and the corporate model embraced by academic unions can contradict the basic goals of higher education.
Stephanie Coontz: 'Traditional' marriage has changed a lot
Source: Seattle P-I (2-23-06)
[Stephanie Coontz teaches history and family studies at The Evergreen State College and is the author of "Marriage, A History: How Love Conquered Marriage" (Viking Penguin).]
Pundits and politicians love to pontificate about strengthening traditional marriage. But as someone who has studied marriage forms and family life for more than three decades, I wonder how many of them have the faintest idea of what they're talking about.
I suppose they mean the "traditional" marriage of one man and one woman.
But through most of human history and in most cultures the most widely accepted tradition of marriage has been polygamy -- one man and multiple women. We're not just talking about exotic island cultures or lost tribes in the African jungle. Polygamy is the family form most often mentioned in the first five books of the Old Testament.
In some societies, traditional marriage meant one woman wedded to several men. In others, a woman could take another woman as a "female husband." In China and the Sudan, when two sets of parents wanted to forge closer family ties and no live spouse was available, one set sometimes married off a child to the "ghost" of a dead son or daughter of the other family. Among the Bella Coola and Kwakiutl native societies of the Pacific Northwest, two families who wished to become in-laws but didn't have two sets of marriageable children available for a match might even draw up a marriage contract between a son or daughter and a dog belonging to the desired in-laws. Most traditional marriages were concerned with property and wealth, not love or sex.
But what about the sanctity of marriage in the Christian tradition? It is true that Jesus, contradicting Moses, forbade his followers to divorce. But Jesus was not very keen on having them marry in the first place, holding that it was better to abandon worldly ties and dedicate oneself to building the faith. "If any man come to me, and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple" (Luke, 14). The Apostle Paul thought that getting married was better than burning in hell for unmarried fornication, but that the truly good thing was to remain a virgin and devote oneself to spreading God's word.
For the first 16 centuries of its existence, the Catholic Church held that marriage was inherently tainted by what Pope Gregory the Great deemed the degrading "carnal pleasure" that took place under its auspices. In the church's hierarchy of worthy females, the virgin ranked highest, the widow second and the wife a distant third.
Nor did the early church establish elaborate rules about what made a marriage legitimate. One pope proposed that a marriage ought to take place in church to be valid. But his bishops pointed out that such a change would immediately render most of Europe's children illegitimate. So the church decided that a man and woman were married if they had exchanged "words of consent," even if they had done so out by the haystack, without any witnesses or involvement by a priest.
Not until 1215 did the Catholic Church make marriage a sacrament, and not until 1563 did it begin to enforce rules mandating that certain ceremonies had to be performed to make a marriage legitimate.
Sixteenth-century Protestant reformers had a much more positive attitude toward the blessedness of marriage than Catholics. But Protestant clerics were stricter than Catholics in enforcing the tradition that marriage should be governed by considerations of patriarchal authority and property rather than free choice based on love. In many Protestant regions, authorities forbade impoverished individuals from marrying at all. And Protestant officials often stepped in to dissolve marriages that had been made without parental consent, even if both parties were adults and children had already been born to their union.
It is also not "traditional" to insist that the state should have the final say over what constitutes a valid marriage. In the Roman tradition, which served as the basis for Western European law, the only difference between marriage and unmarried cohabitation was if the partners thought of themselves as married. It wasn't until 1754 that the English state required a license for a marriage to be valid. And even after that, "self-marriage" and "self-divorce" remained commonplace, especially in the early decades of the United States. In 1833, Pennsylvania's chief justice warned that a strict legal interpretation of rules governing marriage validity would render "the vast majority" of births in that state illegitimate....
Joshua Brown: Who Could Have Foreseen This? (Illustration)
Francis Fukuyama: After Neoconservatism
Source: NYT Magazine (2-19-06)
As we approach the third anniversary of the onset of the Iraq war, it seems very unlikely that history will judge either the intervention itself or the ideas animating it kindly. By invading Iraq, the Bush administration created a self-fulfilling prophecy: Iraq has now replaced Afghanistan as a magnet, a training ground and an operational base for jihadist terrorists, with plenty of American targets to shoot at. The United States still has a chance of creating a Shiite-dominated democratic Iraq, but the new government will be very weak for years to come; the resulting power vacuum will invite outside influence from all of Iraq's neighbors, including Iran. There are clear benefits to the Iraqi people from the removal of Saddam Hussein's dictatorship, and perhaps some positive spillover effects in Lebanon and Syria. But it is very hard to see how these developments in themselves justify the blood and treasure that the United States has spent on the project to this point.
The so-called Bush Doctrine that set the framework for the administration's first term is now in shambles. The doctrine (elaborated, among other places, in the 2002 National Security Strategy of the United States) argued that, in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks, America would have to launch periodic preventive wars to defend itself against rogue states and terrorists with weapons of mass destruction; that it would do this alone, if necessary; and that it would work to democratize the greater Middle East as a long-term solution to the terrorist problem. But successful pre-emption depends on the ability to predict the future accurately and on good intelligence, which was not forthcoming, while America's perceived unilateralism has isolated it as never before. It is not surprising that in its second term, the administration has been distancing itself from these policies and is in the process of rewriting the National Security Strategy document....
How did the neoconservatives end up overreaching to such an extent that they risk undermining their own goals? The Bush administration's first-term foreign policy did not flow ineluctably from the views of earlier generations of people who considered themselves neoconservatives, since those views were themselves complex and subject to differing interpretations. Four common principles or threads ran through much of this thought up through the end of the cold war: a concern with democracy, human rights and, more generally, the internal politics of states; a belief that American power can be used for moral purposes; a skepticism about the ability of international law and institutions to solve serious security problems; and finally, a view that ambitious social engineering often leads to unexpected consequences and thereby undermines its own ends.
The problem was that two of these principles were in potential collision. The skeptical stance toward ambitious social engineering — which in earlier years had been applied mostly to domestic policies like affirmative action, busing and welfare — suggested a cautious approach toward remaking the world and an awareness that ambitious initiatives always have unanticipated consequences. The belief in the potential moral uses of American power, on the other hand, implied that American activism could reshape the structure of global politics. By the time of the Iraq war, the belief in the transformational uses of power had prevailed over the doubts about social engineering.
In retrospect, things did not have to develop this way. The roots of neoconservatism lie in a remarkable group of largely Jewish intellectuals who attended City College of New York (C.C.N.Y.) in the mid- to late 1930's and early 1940's, a group that included Irving Kristol, Daniel Bell, Irving Howe, Nathan Glazer and, a bit later, Daniel Patrick Moynihan. The story of this group has been told in a number of places, most notably in a documentary film by Joseph Dorman called "Arguing the World." The most important inheritance from the C.C.N.Y. group was an idealistic belief in social progress and the universality of rights, coupled with intense anti-Communism.
It is not an accident that many in the C.C.N.Y. group started out as Trotskyites. Leon Trotsky was, of course, himself a Communist, but his supporters came to understand better than most people the utter cynicism and brutality of the Stalinist regime. The anti-Communist left, in contrast to the traditional American right, sympathized with the social and economic aims of Communism, but in the course of the 1930's and 1940's came to realize that "real existing socialism" had become a monstrosity of unintended consequences that completely undermined the idealistic goals it espoused. While not all of the C.C.N.Y. thinkers became neoconservatives, the danger of good intentions carried to extremes was a theme that would underlie the life work of many members of this group.
If there was a single overarching theme to the domestic social policy critiques issued by those who wrote for the neoconservative journal The Public Interest, founded by Irving Kristol, Nathan Glazer and Daniel Bell in 1965, it was the limits of social engineering. Writers like Glazer, Moynihan and, later, Glenn Loury argued that ambitious efforts to seek social justice often left societies worse off than before because they either required massive state intervention that disrupted pre-existing social relations (for example, forced busing) or else produced unanticipated consequences (like an increase in single-parent families as a result of welfare). A major theme running through James Q. Wilson's extensive writings on crime was the idea that you could not lower crime rates by trying to solve deep underlying problems like poverty and racism; effective policies needed to focus on shorter-term measures that went after symptoms of social distress (like subway graffiti or panhandling) rather than root causes.
How, then, did a group with such a pedigree come to decide that the "root cause" of terrorism lay in the Middle East's lack of democracy, that the United States had both the wisdom and the ability to fix this problem and that democracy would come quickly and painlessly to Iraq? Neoconservatives would not have taken this turn but for the peculiar way that the cold war ended....
Daniel Pipes: Those Danish Cartoons and Me
Source: NY Sun (2-21-06)
[Mr. Pipes is the director of the Middle East Forum. His website address is http://www.danielpipes.org. Click here for his HNN blog.]
Did you know that I had a hand in the Danish cartoons of Muhammad?
No? Well, neither did I until I found this out in early February on a conspiracist Web site. To clear the record, I'll start with the facts, then outline the conspiracy theory.
What actually happened: Flemming Rose, cultural editor of a Danish newspaper, Jyllands-Posten, sent me an e-mail on September 29, 2004, introducing himself and requesting an in-person interview during his American trip. I agreed and Mr. Rose came to my Philadelphia office on October 25, when he spent about half an hour asking me questions. His article on me, "Truslen fra islamismen" (or "The Threat of Islamism)," appeared on October 29. It is a standard journalistic piece in which Mr. Rose provided some biographical information about me and had me explain my views on radical Islam.
After that meeting, I had no further contact with Mr. Rose. To be more precise: We have since then not met, talked, or written to each other. I learned only from the press of his decision, nearly a year after our meeting, to commission and publish the cartoons.
That's the boring reality – a routine interview and nothing else. The more exciting conspiracy theory began when a fringe antisemitic writer named Christopher Bollyn published an analysis on February 3 announcing that "Rose traveled to Philadelphia in October 2004 to visit Daniel Pipes. … Rose then penned a positive article about Pipes."
Two days later, Mr. Bollyn transmogrified this fact into an elaborate conspiracy theory: "The anti-Muslim cartoon scandal is clearly turning out to be a key event in the Zionist Neo-Cons' ‘clash of civilizations,' the artificially constructed struggle to pit the so-called Christian West against the Islamic states and peoples. We know that Flemming Rose is a colleague and fellow of the Zionist Neo-Con Daniel Pipes. He has visited Pipes in Philadelphia and written a friendly biographical article."
Note Mr. Bollyn's three assumptions in this account: that Mr. Rose is my "colleague and fellow," that he and I together intentionally provoked Muslims, and that we are part of a wider conspiracy to worsen Christian-Muslim relations.
Such wild assumptions are standard fare for Mr. Bollyn. Concerning September 11, 2001, for example, he thinks President Bush and press tycoon Rupert Murdoch knew the plans in advance, that the Mossad had a key role in that day's events, that United Airlines flight 175 was not flown into the southern World Trade Center tower, and that the towers were destroyed either by an Israeli-American laser beam weapon or massive underground explosions.
Mr. Bollyn's theory connecting me to a clash of civilizations gained momentum within days. Leftist and Islamist writers variously described Mr. Rose as my "close associate," "disciple," and "protégé" and the Internet buzzed with rumors of my part in a "Neocon conspiracy." Even mainstream elements then picked up these ideas. A leading Arabic newspaper, Al-Hayat, speculated on February 10 about the "mutual admiration society" between Mr. Rose and myself. The PLO representative in Washington, Afif Safieh, told CNN's Wolf Blitzer on February 12 that Flemming Rose "is a fan and an admirer" of mine.
The mass-circulation Belgian weekly Knack then called me "the ideologue of the NeoCons" (which will come as news to William Kristol) and accused Mr. Rose, me, and others of instigating an "intentional NeoCon provocation."
I watched the spread of this fantastical account with bemusement and apprehension. As the author of two books and many articles on conspiracy theories, I have intensively studied these misguided attempts to understand reality. This time, I had the dubious privilege of doing so on the inside looking out. In response, I recalled two recommendations from my 1992 CIA-commissioned report suggesting ways for the American government to handle conspiracy theories.
Deny the validity of conspiracy theories: Following my own advice, I placed a correction on my website, discussed the topic on Al-Jazeera television, and am addressing the matter here.
Anticipate malign interpretations: In today's vicious and vulgar political discourse, public figures must anticipate that their actions, however minor and innocent, might randomly be plucked out of obscurity and framed as part of some grand design. One cannot prevent this but the damage can be minimized by keeping careful documentation (e-mails, audio recordings, photographs) and producing them to refute distortions.
This article is reprinted with permission by Daniel Pipes. This article first appeared in the New York Sun.
Tom Engelhardt: War of the Quailhawks
Source: TomDispatch.com (2-21-06)
[Tom Engelhardt, who runs the Nation Institute's Tomdispatch.com ("a regular antidote to the mainstream media"), is the co-founder of the American Empire Project and the author of The End of Victory Culture, a history of American triumphalism in the Cold War. His novel, The Last Days of Publishing, has recently come out in paperback.]
Over a week ago, Vice President Cheney managed to put a couple of hundred pellets of buckshot into his 78 year-old friend and Texas Republican Party builder, Harry Whittington. As the event turned into a national joke, edged with anger, and a late night spectacle, it was natural that the subject of Iraq would arise. After all, given the sorry state of affairs in that country, the thought that the Bush administration (like the Vice President in Texas) shot first and looked only later came quite naturally to mind; but there are other ways in which Dick Cheney's strange encounter of a quail kind on the 50,000 acre Armstrong ranch in Texas might help put the invasion of Iraq in a new light.
Let's start with the quail on what the New York Times calls that "game rich property." (How could it be otherwise when so much of the "game" is raised and released there?) Fragile looking little birds, usually with ET-like plumes dangling off their tiny heads, they hang out in flocks -- coveys, to be exact -- and, unlike the Republicans who bag them at the Armstrong ranch, aren't high fliers. Now, hunting is generally a highly ritualized activity, no small part of which should be consumed with finding your prey or waiting (sometimes fruitlessly) for it to appear -- but this doesn't apply to the fair-weather version of fowl hunting the Vice President tends to practice, as he did to a storm of criticism in December 2003 at a private game club in Pennsylvania. There, "more than 500 farm-raised ring-necked pheasants were released for the vice-president and companions. Cheney shot 70 of the birds, plus some mallard ducks and had them plucked and vacuum-packed before returning to work in Washington." A companion that day, Texas Senator John Cornyn described it as more "Tyson's" than hunt -- that is, a slaughter.
Due to the accident at the Armstrong ranch, a Mecca for top Republicans including the President ("rivaling Hyannisport, Kennebunkport, and the Hamptons as a setting where important relationships [among the corporate and power elite] have been nurtured"), we know a good deal about what this kind of hunting entails. The ritual seems to be that you spend your time with high-toned, well-connected friends (in Cheney's case, Party-builder Whittington, ranch owner and lobbyist Katherine Armstrong, a Bush-Cheney "Pioneer," which means she raised $100,000 for the last presidential campaign, and ambassador to Switzerland and Liechtenstein Pamela Pitzer Willeford, old Bush family friend and a somewhat more modest contributor to Republican campaigns); you're served a catered lunch (sweetbreads, "charbroiled nilgai, an Asian antelope... raised and shot on the Armstrong spread," and jicama salad); you kick back with a beer or two, "freshen up" back at the ranch house, climb into a jeep or SUV, drive across the fields to the spot where you already know the birds will be located -- and you know because you're on a ranch that raises just these birds for you to kill and has two groups of "outriders on horseback" and "about a dozen American pointers and Labrador retrievers" already locating them for you. Some of the hunters remain in the vehicles; others step out for the "hunt." Eventually, the dogs flush the quail. They panic and fly -- not very high or very far -- and you blast away with your fancy gun (in Cheney's case, an Italian 28-gauge Perazzi shotgun). In fishing terms, imagine that someone put a bluefish on your hook just before you dropped your line over the side.
The Cheney threesome had already bagged some 40 of the 45 quail allowed by 5:30. They were following their final covey when the accident occurred. Normally, according to Richard Serrano of the Los Angeles Times, hired crews would then be "paid to clean the dead birds and pack them in dry ice for the flight back to Washington." This experience, we're told, gives the Vice President his major release in life. In hunting terms, if you don't happen to shoot your friend instead of a quail, you might even think about calling this experience a "cakewalk" -- the term that some neocons used when describing what an invasion of Iraq might be like.
Let's also remember that among the earliest images to come out of George Bush's mouth after the 9/11 attacks -- along with his Wild West, vigilante-style, Osama "wanted, dead or alive" pronouncement -- were those of the hunt. He said repeatedly that we would "hunt down" the terrorists, that we were going to "smoke them out." And soon enough, the Vice President himself was out there (along with other top officials), vigorously and repeatedly connecting Saddam Hussein to the 9/11 killers, while pumping up his imminent threat to America, and next thing you know, in March 2003, the "hunt" switched to Iraq -- and, of course, we invaded.
Fighting a War against Sheep, Turkey, Fish, and Deer
Here's the thing: Don't imagine for a second that there's anything idle or far-fetched about connecting the shooting at the Armstrong ranch to the invasion of Iraq: Militarily speaking, top Bush administration officials considered a war against Saddam's Iraq the equivalent of the sort of farm-raised "hunt" that Cheney (and, among others, Vice-Presidential pal and "cabal" partner Donald Rumsfeld) have engaged in for years.
Let's recall the basics here. In 1991, after Saddam had sent his army into Kuwait (possibly believing that the U.S. had given him the green light to do so), George H.W. Bush formed a large coalition of nations and launched Operation Desert Storm against Saddam's forces at a time when they were assumed to be reasonably formidable. In the brief conflict that followed, however, the American military (with its coalition of largely paying, rather than fighting, allies in tow) proved that assessment blindingly wrong by obliterating significant portions of the Iraqi military, while losing hardly a soldier in battle.
Desert Storm was, in truth, less a war than a mass execution (as, historically, colonial wars often were). If Vietnam was America's first "living-room war," this was the first screen war at the front. Cameras shooting through the night-vision gun sights of Apache AH-64 attack helicopters, for instance, caught graphic scenes of confused and helpless Iraqi soldiers being blown to bits by unseen attackers. "The Iraqi soldiers looked like ghostly sheep flushed from a pen -- bewildered and terrified, jarred from sleep and fleeing their bunkers under a hellish fire," wrote the Los Angeles Times' John Balzar, who viewed the film with officers of the 18th Airborne Corps at a briefing tent on the Saudi border. Most of the killing took place this way, from the air or long distance (with the exception of a moment when American troops in bulldozers ploughed-in Iraqi trenches at the Kuwaiti border, burying Iraqi conscripts alive).
The final act of this "war" involved an out-and-out slaughter of Iraqi troops (and the wholesale destruction of their vehicles) as they fled Kuwait City on what came to be known as "the highway of death." American pilots over that highway famously referred to the battle as "a turkey shoot" or as "shooting fish in a barrel," though (had they been rich enough) they might, even then, have said, "Like quail at the Armstrong ranch." Later, Desert Storm Commander Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf would complain that the President had cut off the "turkey shoot" and ended the war too quickly.
The comparisons of Iraqi enemies to various prey animals certainly indicated that the military had its share of hunters and fishermen, but these were also classic denigrating images of battle in which the enemy loses his humanity altogether, becoming in flight nothing more than a hunted animal. (This language remains a commonplace of American-style war. Just the other day, Knight Ridder reporter Tom Lasseter, laying out the dicey security situation in the Iraqi city of Samarra, described the aftermath of an ambush of an American patrol by Iraqi guerrillas, two of whom were killed, this way: "Five other soldiers from the 101st Airborne Division scrambled down [from their Humvee], pulled two of the insurgents' bodies from the reeds and dragged them through the mud. 'Strap those motherf-----s to the hood like a deer,' said Staff Sgt. James Robinson, 25, of Hughes, Ark. The soldiers heaved the two bodies onto the hood… and tied them down with a cord. The dead insurgents' legs and arms flapped in the air as the Humvee rumbled along. Iraqi families stood in front of the surrounding houses. They watched the corpses ride by and glared at the American soldiers.")
The Easiest Mark
Back in 1991, Saddam held some of his best units out of battle -- he would use them later to put down a Shiite uprising -- and the Bush administration of that moment, less hubristically inclined, decided to stop well short of taking Baghdad, leaving the dictator in power. Between February 1991 and March 2003, it was hardly a secret, however, that the state of Iraq's military health had declined further. By 2002, in fact, the top officials of the younger Bush's administration and key neocons, who had for years been promoting a war to destroy Saddam's Iraq, knew perfectly well that the country was in dreadful shape.
Iraq was undoubtedly targeted for a number of reasons: The administration had energy on the brain. Cheney, among others, was looking at the globe and its energy flows in the largest of geopolitical ways. Access to and use of bases in "holy" Saudi Arabia was already in question, and Iraq, with untold, untapped oil reserves, was an obvious alternate basing spot, sitting as it did right in the heart of what the neocons were then calling the planet's "arc of instability." (Think: oil lands). There was also a Bush-family grudge match with Saddam to attend to. But perhaps most important of all, Saddam's Iraq looked like such an easy mark.
It was the most obvious regime-change target of convenience in a region administration officials were eager to dominate and it had just the sort of cruel ruler you loved to hate. (Hardly less hated Axis of Evil member Iran was far more formidable. Sclerotic Syria, trapped between a future American Iraq and Israel, would be easy prey once Saddam was gone and his country occupied.) And let's not forget that the neocons were already in full dreaming mode when it came to rolling up the Middle East and refashioning it in our image -- the image of (as in those heady days they and their supporters in the press never failed to remind us) a global Pax Americana. No vast coalition of forces would be required for Iraq; nor, they believed, would any sizeable commitment of American troops be necessary -- a distinct benefit, given Donald Rumsfeld's ever more high-tech, ever more stripped-down and Halliburtonized forces.
Saddam's Iraq, they were quite sure, would go down like any punch-drunk pug put in the ring with the world's heavyweight champ. It would take no time at all. With a little luck, the first "shock and awe" display might even "decapitate" the regime and do the trick. So, off they headed across the desert in their imperial SUV. Iraq would be but the first stop on a long day's safari into night. They would roll the Iraqi military up. They would bag some Iraqi quail and leave the rest of the game-rich ranch to Ahmed Chalabi, their Scheherazade who had already told them 1001 Arabian tales. In fact, one of their first acts, while the invasion was still underway, was to fly Chalabi and hundreds of his lightly armed supporters ("vanguard elements of what a high-ranking Pentagon officer said would form the basis of a new Iraqi army") to a camp on the outskirts of Nasiriyah ahead of any other Iraqi exiles or American occupation authorities.
They were fully prepared to enjoy the flower-strewn path that grateful (Shiite) natives would ready for them. Then they would begin to build those preplanned military bases and quickly turn their attention elsewhere in a cowed neighborhood. It would be, if no one minds mixing a few metaphors, a "slam dunk."
A Cakewalk Invasion
Richard Serrano of the LA Times reports that our Vice President likes to say: "I take my hunting seriously, in part because I think [my wife] Lynne expects me to bring dinner home once in a while." This is part of the fiction of the eat-African-antelope and blow-‘em-away crowd. Cheney also likes to speak of the birds shot down at places like the Armstrong ranch as "wild quail."
In a similar fashion, he and other administration officials built up the "threat" of Saddam Hussein in 2002 -- and that was no easy task. By then, Saddam had a fifth-rate military, hopelessly out of the league of the globe's sole "hyperpower." This was why it became so crucial for the dictator's nonexistent nuclear program -- and nobody believed then that he had a serious one underway, no less a bomb in the offing -- to gain such attention; for Condoleezza Rice to put mushroom clouds over American cities; for the President, Vice President, and CIA Director George Tenet to claim that (nonexistent) Iraqi unmanned aerial vehicles might actually be capable of spraying chemical and biological weapons over our East coast; for those devilish sixteen words on African yellowcake to creep into the President's 2003 State of the Union Address, for al-Qaeda (which had struck hard at the U.S. in a way Saddam couldn't) to be closely tied to the Iraqi regime; and for the Vice President and pals to lean so heavily on the CIA to keep its mouth shut, while they cherry-picked what tidbits of mis- and disinformation were useful to them.
After all, the Bush administration needed a genuine hunt, if not a war, worthy of the name. No tame quail allowed. Okay, there was one real danger. Who knew if the dictator still had some degraded, left-over chemical weapons in his possession? Nonetheless, they expected their second war against Saddam to be as easy as shooting fish in a barrel. After all, like the rest of the Iraqi infrastructure, under the pressure of a decade of sanctions and years of low-level U.S. and British air attacks (officially referred to as "defending the no-fly zones"), Saddam's 1990-style air defenses had largely been destroyed; his military, its weaponry old, was thoroughly degraded; and much of his air force still sat on Iranian runways (where he had flown the planes as American Gulf War I approached). If 1991 was a "turkey shoot," 2003 was going to be the quail shoot of all times, though the term popularized for it was actually "cakewalk."
Early in 2002, Kenneth Adelman, a Washington mover and shaker, who had worked in the Reagan administration, had been active in the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), and was a member of the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board, popularized that term in an op-ed in the Washington Post (Cakewalk in Iraq) in which he dubbed Saddam "the number one threat against American security and civilization" and publicly called for the President to take him down, something PNAC had been lobbying for since the 1990s. He couldn't have been blunter about the thinking of those who then held such influence in the Bush administration (and the Iraqi exiles who were reassuring them that they would be the liberators of all time). He wrote:
"I believe demolishing Hussein's military power and liberating Iraq would be a cakewalk. Let me give simple, responsible reasons: (1) It was a cakewalk last time; (2) they've become much weaker; (3) we've become much stronger; and (4) now we're playing for keeps… Saddam's army is one-third its size then, in both manpower and number of divisions. It still relies on obsolete Soviet tanks, which military analyst Eliot Cohen calls ‘death traps.' The Iraqi air force, never much, is half its former size. Iraqi forces have received scant spare parts and no weapons upgrades. They have undertaken little operational training since Desert Storm. Meanwhile, American power is much fiercer."
So, cakewalk reentered the modern lexicon, thanks to Adelman, and it was a curious but oddly appropriate image to have chosen. After all, the original cakewalk was a slave dance that came off the plantations and is described in The Reader's Companion to American History this way: "In its characteristic high-kneed strut walk, it was meant to parody the solemn decorum of the white masters as they promenaded, two by two, in the formal marches that opened their balls." It later became part of minstrelsy and then an all-American dance craze. And how appropriate the image was. After all, our second war in the Gulf was to be as highly choreographed as Cheney's "wild" hunt on the game-rich Armstrong ranch -- in other words, it was to be a high-stepping parody of a war.
Comedy Central
The military largely agreed with this assessment of Iraqi military power. When General Eric Shinseki famously testified before Congress, what worried him wasn't the invasion-to-come, but the occupation to follow. That was why he emphasized that "several hundred thousand" troops that would be needed -- not to take Iraq, but to hold it. The neocons, Rumsfeld, and the Vice President, in a way that's so completely human, had come to believe some of their own fictions meant to manipulate others (or those of the Iraqi exiles who had their ear) and so were convinced that Shinseki was a fool and that no such force levels would be needed.
Their priorities were clear indeed. Send in troops to guard the oil ministry in Baghdad as well as the oilfields; dole out an open-ended contract to Halliburton to protect those fields in case Saddam's men set them alight (as they had in 1991), and then let -- as our Secretary of Defense so famously put it -- stuff happen.
So they shocked and awed Baghdad, blasted Iraq, let its cities (and cultural patrimony) be looted, let the Iraqi military dissolve (and good riddance), handed out contracts to their corporate pals, sent the dismantlers in, set Halliburton's KBR to building bases, and looked elsewhere for some more of that game-rich action.
And let's remember as well that, at the time, it wasn't Dave Letterman or Jay Leno making all the jokes; it was, not surprisingly, top officials of this administration. Secretary of State Donald Rumsfeld in his post-invasion press conferences gained a certain renown as the Pentagon's equivalent of a stand-up comic. Like our warrior President, he was clearly having the time of his life. He had the press in stitches for months. Even when things started to go wrong, when, for instance, no one could find Saddam's threatening weapons of mass destruction and his unmanned aerial vehicles turned out to be constructed of toothpicks, the President's response as late as March 2004 was a comedy routine. He gave it at the Radio and Television Correspondents Association Dinner, to much laughter and applause from the assembled journalists and media execs. Photos were shown of the President looking under Oval Office furniture for the missing WMD while he said, "Those weapons of mass destruction have got to be somewhere."
Of course, all of this turned out to be the administration's collective version of shooting Harry Whittington in the face. If the Vice President's recent quail hunt has been farce (though not, obviously to Whittington), in Iraq the equivalent was pure tragedy. Here in the U.S., Cheney's story proved to be -- as all Bush administration stories are -- riddled with ludicrous holes and anomalies (including that beer -- imported for sure -- that suddenly popped up to replace the Dr. Peppers in the initial descriptions of lunch that day). In Iraq, of course, you had the vast list of lies, manipulations, false stories, discrepancies, and disinformation that made up the American side of the ongoing war.
Here, you had the unexpected, farcical uprising of a long-frustrated and sidelined Washington press corps not over secret prisons, or torture, or NSA spying, or the most recent revelations that the Vice President and others had cooked the books before the invasion of Iraq, but over the fact that they were not informed about the shooting of Whittington. In Iraq, there was nothing farcical about the unexpected, largely Sunni insurgency that has bedeviled this administration since soon after major combat operations supposedly ended in early May 2003.
George, Dick, and the rest of them are remarkably consistent in their modus operandi. Whether on a quail farm, in the White House, or in Iraq, they pump themselves up as hunters or warriors, while the catering goes on and the "outriders" flush the birds for them. They create fictional worlds, impose them on the rest of us, and, at least to some degree, come to believe in them themselves – and they take ultimate responsibility for nothing whatsoever. They are, in short, the quailhawks and, in the larger drama, we, I fear, are Whittington.
This article first appeared on www.tomdispatch.com, a weblog of the Nation Institute, which offers a steady flow of alternate sources, news and opinion from Tom Engelhardt, a long time editor in publishing, the author of The End of Victory Culture, and a fellow of the Nation Institute.
Juan Cole: Bringing the United Nations Back In to Iraq
Source: Juan Cole's Blog (Informed Comment) (2-21-06)
There will be anti-War protests in the coming month, as the 3-year anniversary of the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq approaches.
I think it is time to demand a timetable for US withdrawal from Iraq. I suspect a majority of Iraqi parliamentarians want that. The Sunni Arabs demand it. The Sadrists demand it. It is time. Saying that the guerrillas would take advantage of a timetable, given the carnage we saw on Monday (see below) is frankly silly. They are taking advantage of the current situation. We have to create a new situation, with which they might be happier so that they stop blowing things up. Staying this course is untenable.
But that step will not necessarily resolve the crisis.
I think the peace movement has a real opportunity here to make a push for much heavier United Nations involvement in Iraq. I say, let's make up placards calling on Kofi Annan to get involved, and calling on Bush to let the UN come in in a big way, with proper protection.
Here are the advantages:
1. The United Nations has political legitimacy in the Middle East. American unilateralism does not. The guerrillas would be humiliated to deal with Bush, who crushed them and marginalized them. They would be more likely to treat with the UN.
2. Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani has demanded greater UN involvement, and he has enormous authority with the Shiite majority.
3. No country is going to send troops to Iraq under a United States military command. There has to be a United Nations peace-enforcing command. Once that exists, it might become an umbrella for Arab League troops, e.g. Cheney was told as much when he was in Cairo, according to the Arabic press.
I.e., by keeping out the UN, the Bush administration is guaranteeing that it is mainly American (and British) blood and treasure that is spilt in Iraq for years to come.
4. If the United Nations could be mobilized to help Iraq through the coming years of instability and help shepherd it to independence from the US and UK, it would help to strengthen international, multilateral organizations generally and contribute to an institutionalization of international law.
5. The permanent members of the UN Security Council, as well as all UN member states, have a keen interest in the fate of Iraq and the Gulf. They should be encouraged to deploy some of their treasure (and probably some blood) for the common benefit of Iraqis and the world.
6. The peace movement will be more credible if it has a program other than simple US withdrawal from Iraq. The US public is aware that an Iraq in flames at the head of the oil-rich Gulf could have a horrible impact on the US itself. A demand that the Iraq situation be internationalized is a responsible way of getting the US out, getting Iraq out of Bush's incompetent hands, and helping Iraqis mov e forward.
7. Bush invaded Iraq in part in order to destroy the United Nations. Forcing him to bring it in to Iraq would be a blow against American unilateralism and rightwing American aggression for decades to come.
Gary Leupp: Those Danish Muhammad Cartoons
Source: dissidentvoice.org (2-20-06)
[Gary Leupp is a Professor of History, and Adjunct Professor of Comparative Religion, at Tufts University and author of numerous works on Japanese history. He can be reached at: gleupp@granite.tufts.edu.]
I visited Denmark as a child and have fond memories of Copenhagen’s immaculate streets, bright sunlight, and touristy Viking-icon ambiance. I remember, too, visiting the Tuborg brewery and consuming a little too much free soda. I had to urinate into a bottle in the back seat of the car, pouring it out onto the spotless street when my dad came to a stoplight. Even as I defiled their public space, I had good feelings about the Danes and Scandinavians in general. Having 1/4 Swedish and 3/8 Norwegian ancestry, I already felt great pride that “my people” (or some of my people since my other roots are Swiss, German, English, and Scottish) had once won terrorized the world as they roamed it aboard their dragon-ships.
I loved the ships. The Viking longship displayed in museums remains the proudest Scandinavian achievement and symbol. In such vessels, men from tiny, under-populated, stubbornly pagan kingdoms set out from their fjords to panic and plunder hapless Christendom from Britain to Constantinople. But they weren’t all bad. Roving the seas and the Russian river routes, they established new kingdoms from Ireland to Kiev. Scandinavians ruled in Normandy, whence their Franco-Nordic descendents conquered England, and even Sicily. They settled Iceland, Greenland, and for a time some sites in what’s now Nova Scotia, five centuries before Columbus arrived in the New World. Gotta feel proud of these guys.
The Vikings were maritime Mongols, for good and for bad. To be sure they were, like the Asian nomads, efficiently brutal. But they were open-minded, cosmopolitan traders as well -- explorers, craftsmen, learners and borrowers. The Mongols were tamed by Buddhism and Islam. The Northmen (last of the Europeans) succumbed to Christianity, although with some reluctance, incorporating into it some elements of the old religion of Odin and Thor. You don’t find much intolerance in Nordic religious history. In Sicily the Normans applied a policy of religious tolerance towards Christians, Muslims and Jews. The Scandinavians sat out the Crusades in the Holy Land, but the Danes and Swedes did some crusading in the twelfth and thirteenth century, mostly against Baltic pagans such as the Estonians for economic advantages rather than religious reasons. Long after the Viking Age, Scandinavians remained pragmatic in their approach to religious issues. When the Lutheran movement offered the opportunity for a break with Rome, the Scandinavian kings embraced it in the sixteenth century.
Scandinavia has produced religiously obsessed writers and thinkers (most notably the Dane Søren Kierkegaard, whose Attack on Christendom in 1855 pitted existential religious authenticity against orthodox conformism) and pioneering scholars in non-western religious traditions. The Dane Victor Fausbøll was the first westerner to publish the well-known Buddhist text the Dhammapada in translation and in Pali in that same year 1855. Scandinavia has also long been known for irreverence and paganistic hedonism. (For a time Sweden led the world in porn production. Denmark boasts one of the highest incidences of cirrhosis of the liver in the word.) Scandinavia, true to its heritage, remains resistant to religion; it leads the world in its percentage of agnostics and atheists.
Far be it for Scandinavians to want to impose their mix of melancholy, dry humor, schizophrenic sexuality and skin-deep religiosity on other peoples. After the medieval eruption of Viking conquests, never directed from a central headquarters, the Northmen did what other Europeans did -- they established colonies. Let’s leave out the Danish conquest of Britain, the reign of King Canute over England, Denmark and Norway in the eleventh century, and the thirteenth century conquest of Estonia. Let’s leave out the conquest of the Shetland Islands, the Orkney Islands, and the Faroe Islands, and the settlement of uninhabited Iceland and lightly populated Greenland all by the thirteenth century. When the rest of Europe started amassing colonies after the (re)discovery of America by white people, of course the maritime nations of the north expected to get their share.
Denmark was the central Scandinavian power in the seventeenth century. For a brief time it competed with the other predatory powers to establish colonies in South Asia, the Caribbean, and Africa. In every venue it lost out. Its East India Company held Tranquebar from 1620 to 1845, but sold this and other Indian properties to imperial Britain. Properties in the Nicobar Islands went to Britain in 1869. The Danish West Indies (acquired directly or purchased from France) were sold to the U.S. in 1917; we know them as the “U.S. Virgin Islands.” The Danes also had some forts in what is now Ghana, but sold them to the British in 1850. Today Denmark, and Scandinavia as a whole, retains only Greenland with its small, mostly Inuit population, as a reminder of the colonizing past. The economic empire that remains is built on iron, steel, shipbuilding, furniture -- Legos and pastry, windmills and fine beer. It allows for a good life; according to the CIA Factbook, “Because of high GDP per capita, welfare benefits, a low Gini index, and political stability, the Danish people enjoy living standards topped by no other nation.” Its affluence and reputation for tolerance has attracted political exiles from Third World countries, including revolutionaries of different stripes.
Until recently Denmark enjoyed a reputation for tolerance and respect for human rights. Many Danes sheltered Jews during the Nazi occupation (1940-45), helping 6,500 of the total 7,000 Danish Jews to escape to neutral Sweden. When an Iraqi Kurdish exile accused fellow exile Gen. Nizar al-Khazraji of responsibility for the Halabja Massacre of 1988, the Danish prosecutor Birgitte Vestberg indicted him and placed him under house arrest. (Khazraji escaped the country, possibly with CIA assistance, in 2002.) To be sure Denmark is a NATO country, an imperialist country in the Leninist sense, and has sent troops to support U.S. objectives in Afghanistan, Iraq and Kosovo. A rightwing party, the Danish People’s Party, has been able to force the government to implement some strong anti-immigration policies.
Still, as imperialist countries go, Denmark’s not a particularly reactionary one. It hosts a Peruvian exile community that promotes support for the Maoist movement in Peru; the Maoist Study Circle led a march of 12,000 in protest of Bush’s Copenhagen visit last July. The Danish fashion firm Fighters and Lovers recently announced it would be selling T-shirts with the initials of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), donating five euros for each T-shirt it sells to these organizations. This would not seem a country of chauvinist bigots.
But recently the fairy tale kingdom has become the target of rage, its nationals (along with other Scandinavians) marked for attack. Its troops in Afghanistan and Iraq must live in fear that those they’ve been told they have been sent to help find them fair game in a war superseding the mundane conflicts in their countries -- a war to defend the honor of the Prophet. Who could have predicted a few months ago that little Denmark would come to be seen as an enemy of Islam, that Danish embassies would come under siege throughout the Muslim world, that the Iranian government would re-dub Danish pastries “roses of the Prophet Mohammed,” that the Danish Prime Minister would declare the controversy the country’s “worst foreign crisis” since World War II? The fury of course results from the decision of the editor of the right-wing (once explicitly pro-Nazi) Jyllands-Posten newspaper to run cartoon depictions of the Prophet Muhammad. Circumstances suggest this was a deliberate provocation by editors generally hostile to Muslims. For example, the paper’s cultural editor, Flemming Rose, cordially interviewed prominent U.S. neocon Islamophobe Daniel Pipes in the fall of 2004. Pipes is a well-known Islamophobe, the founder and director of the Middle East Forum, a think tank whose priorities include “fighting radical Islam (rather than terrorism), convincing the Palestinians that Israel is permanent, reducing funds going to the Middle East for energy purchases, slowing down the democratization process, and more robustly asserting U.S. interests vis-à-vis Saudi Arabia.”
The forum initiated Campus Watch, whose mission is to blacklist and intimidate academics deemed too sympathetic to Arabs. A colleague of David Horowitz, he regularly contributes to the latter’s online FrontPageMag.com. Small wonder President Bush (through one of his recess appointments, over Senate opposition) appointed this neocon fanatic to the “U.S. Institute for Peace” in 2003, causing the Arab American Institute to protest. “For decades,” wrote AAI head James Zogby, “Daniel Pipes has displayed a bizarre obsession with all things Arab and Muslim. Now, it appears that his years of hatred and bigotry have paid off with a presidential appointment. One shudders to think how he will abuse this position to tear at the fabric of our nation.”
The newspaper interview, appearing under the title, “The Threat of Islam,” was conducted in Pipes’ office in Philadelphia. Rose had apparently traveled there specifically to conduct it. In it, Pipes articulates the MEF’s line that the problem is Islamism, not terrorism, and expresses amazement “that Europe is not more alarmed about the challenge that Islam poses, considering plummeting birth rates and a weakened perception of its own history and culture.” Just what the Danish People’s Party wants to hear! There are about 200,000 Muslims in Denmark, a country of 5.4 million citizens, but given their intolerance plus their birthrate, hey, it’s angst time, time to take firm measures based on alarm!
This same Flemming Rose elected to solicit cartoons of Muhammad a year later. He was essentially exploiting a news story carried in another newspaper, the more mainstream Politiken, about the well-meaning effort of a non-Muslim Danish journalist to author a book about Islam for children. The story describes his difficulty in finding an illustrator, due to artists’ fears that they might be attacked for involvement in such a work. The Jyllands-Posten played this up as evidence that “some Muslims . . . demand a special position, insisting on special consideration of their own religious feelings. It is incompatible with contemporary democracy and freedom of speech, where you must be ready to put up with insults, mockery and ridicule. It is certainly not always attractive and nice to look at, and it does not mean that religious feelings should be made fun of at any price, but that is of minor importance in the present context . . . That is why Morgenavisen Jyllands-Posten has invited members of the Danish editorial cartoonists union to draw Muhammad as they see him.”
Islam, of course, forbids the artistic depiction of the prophet. I don’t know whether the writer had intended to feature images of Muhammad in his book, or to tell the story of Islam without doing so. In any case, by inviting cartoonists to specifically violate that religious proscription, the Danish paper wasn’t merely tweaking its nose at “religious feelings” of minor importance. Indeed, the Jyllands-Posten had spurned cartoons satirizing Christianity in 2003 on the grounds that they might “provoke an outcry.” Does it not follow that the intention here was precisely that -- to provoke an outcry?
There is a predictable explosive dialectic here. The provocation results in protests; the protests become news stories; editors, either wishing to provide background or inclined to fan the flames, replicate the offending caricatures; the story incubates over several months until it’s known in the streets of Muslim capitals, and embassies start to burn. And the Daniel Pipes of the world preach “I told you so” about the intolerance of Islam.
I have the feeling that had the cartoons appeared five years ago, solicited on whatever pretext Mr. Rose might have conjured up at the time, the uproar would have been smaller. But that was before the attacks on Afghanistan and Iraq, and an array of abominable images assaulting the world’s conscience. Images of bloodied children, victims of American bombs, honestly broadcast by al-Jazeera. Images of naked Muslim men in American detention smeared with feces, draped in women’s underwear, obliged to simulate sex acts for the camera. That was before the perfectly plausible stories of U.S. forces desecrating the Quran in front of their prisoners. That was before the Bush administration pronounced its fatwas against the governments of Syria and Iran, before it anointed Ariel Sharon “a man of peace,” before it announced its refusal to deal with a Palestinian leadership emerging the way the U.S. has officially recommended for the benighted states of the Islamic world: through a democratic election. That was before the U.S. and its western allies announced they would not allow Iran to do what international law allows it to do: enrich uranium.
There is a widespread perception in the Muslim world that the “War on Terror” is in fact a mere euphemism for a modern Crusade against Islam. Almost all the targets -- nations, persons, movements -- are in some sense Muslim, whether secular or religious, Shiite or Sunni, Arab or Persian or Pashtun. Most (including the Syrian and Iranian governments, Hizbollah, Hamas, Yassir Arafat isolated and vilified by the Bush administration before his death) have had no intimate connection to al-Qaeda. But in targeting them, Washington knows it can exploit anti-Muslim fear and ignorance among Americans and (it hopes) Europeans including the Danes.
Pipes, in the interview cited above, stressed that the U.S. should work with “moderate Muslims” against the “Islamists”. Of course they all say that. They can’t say, “Islam’s the enemy” because they need to work with Muslim puppets, and they can’t declare war on one fifth of humankind and hope to win. (They know that the Christian fundamentalists will do these things for them anyway, and endorse whatever attacks on Muslim targets they undertake.) But the Jyllands Posten’s decision to not only depict the prophet, but to show him as a terrorist with a bomb in his turban, seems intended to unite all Muslims already provoked by outrages enough, to the breaking point. It seems designed to produce more images of fanaticism -- that can be proffered as evidence that there really is a “clash of civilizations” here.
See what we’re up against, fellow westerners? See the intolerance that challenges our way of life? Look at these crazies, torching an embassy, just on account of some line drawings? See why we have to stay the course in confronting the Islamic terrorists? See why we’d be stupid not to be alarmed? That’s the message. To the extent that this ongoing episode encourages that sort of fear, it suits the purposes of what Martin Luther King once called “the biggest purveyor of violence in the world today.”
“The truth,” Hegel once said, “is the whole.” Viewed myopically, this affair involves the freedom of speech including the freedom to satirize or denigrate figures whom some people revere. I do that all the time. I’m all for such freedom. Long live irreverent humor -- the humor of Voltaire, of Diderot, of Monty Python (Life of Brian), the cartoon characters Beavis and Butthead and the denizens of South Park! Humor is a powerful tool in lessening the grip of irrational, unscientific beliefs. One can respect people’s faiths is the ways that matter most without signing away one’s right to make light of their teachers and prophets.
But that’s not the issue. The big picture here is that a ruling-class organ in an advanced industrial country deeply involved in the U.S. attack on the Muslim world chose to hurt and incite that world, and that the inevitable response to the provocation is now a big news story skewed deliberately to further demonize that world. Progressive forces with no special sympathy for Islam (such as the Committee of the Revolutionary Internationalist Movement, representing the Maoists of Nepal among others, which has agitated against Islam and religion in general) have denounced the provocative cartoons on that basis. “Maoists”, according to a RIM statement, “are against these cartoons not for religious reasons but because they are an expression both of the domination of much of the earth’s people by the rulers of a handful of imperialist powers and of the oppression their system is based on. By exposing and opposing these Nazi-like incitements to religious hatred from a revolutionary viewpoint, we can strengthen the unity of the world’s people against these rulers and build understanding freed from the shackles of any religion.”
In the works of Hans Christian Andersen (1805-75) there is a little story called “The Jewish Girl” (Jødepigen) composed in 1856. Not surprisingly it upholds the Christian faith, but treats Judaism with respect and contains one of the few references to Islam found in Andersen’s corpus. Sarah, a Jewish girl is placed into a public school where by prior agreement she receives an exemption from the Christian religion class. But rather than stand out, she sits through the class, exposed to the Christian scriptures although forbidden by her late mother’s will to convert. Yet so great is her interest in the gospel taught, her instructor demands of her father that she either be allowed to read the New Testament and convert, or withdraw her from the school. Reluctantly her father in deference to her late mother’s intentions takes her out of the school and places her in service. There, asked to read the New Testament to her elderly employer, she dies of exhaustion before opening the book, although intuitively realizing in her final moments the truth of the Christian faith. She is buried outside the wall of Copenhagen’s Christian cemetery. “But”, Andersen concludes, “God’s sun, which shines upon the graves of the Christians, shines as well upon that of the Jewish girl; and the hymns which are sung beside the Christian graves sound also beside her grave outside the wall.” It’s a mixed message, to be sure: Andersen’s Christianity is the truly revealed religion, but God cares about Jews too.
Within this narrative there’s embedded a story the Jewish girl hears during her lessons about a Hungarian Crusader once captured by a Muslim Turk. He’s forced into slavery, mistreated by the pasha, but redeemed by his wealthy family allowed to return home. Later the Crusader rejoins the campaign, setting out again to do battle with Islam, and this time he captures his former tormentor. Rather than requiting mistreatment with the same he offers his captive freedom. “The teachings of Christ tell us to forgive our enemies and love our fellow men. God is love! Go in peace to your home and loved ones, and be gentle and good to all who suffer.”
The Muslim, in this fanciful story penned long after the real crusades, then requests to be taught “the faith which is so full of such love and mercy; it is great and divine! In that faith let me die; let me die a Christian!” Just as Kierkegaard was penning his “attack on Christendom” and Fausbøll his scholarly researches on comparative religion, Andersen was expressing what was then the limit of Danish tolerance for Muslims. The Muslim could become good by changing what he was. Perhaps Denmark is fixed, a century and a half later, at that level of consciousness. In any case, there’s “something rotten” in any country where rational religious indifference coexists with irrational religious provocation. Having missed the medieval wars of the Cross, Denmark’s found itself waging one, thanks to some stupid images published by crusading fools.
Jonathan Zimmerman: Fear of Insulting Muslims No Sign of Respect
Source: San Francisco Chronicle (2-19-06)
[Jonathan Zimmerman teaches history and education at New York University. He is the author of "Whose America? Culture Wars in the Public Schools" (Harvard University Press, 2002).]
The Great Cartoon Controversy just won't go away. Last week, rioters in Pakistan set fire to a Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurant, two cellular phone companies and a bus terminal -- all to protest a series of Danish cartoons satirizing the Prophet Muhammad. For good measure, they also burned the Danish flag and chanted "Death to Denmark."
Yet most American newspapers still haven't published the cartoons, lest they insult Muslim sensibilities. That's exactly backward. The impulse to protect Muslims from insult reflects what I call racist multiculturalism: In the guise of defending a given group, it caricatures and demeans them.
Start with the widely accepted idea that the cartoons will offend any Muslim who sees them. How do we know that? After all, the billion or so Muslims in the world include an enormous array of nationalities, ethnicities and ideologies. Saying that the cartoons insult Muslims -- and leaving it at that -- collapses all of these distinctions.
Even more, our newspapers have often published images that appear to offend or malign other religions. Remember the 1989 imbroglio over the photograph of a crucifix submerged in urine? Shot by the American photographer Andres Serrano -- and underwritten by a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts -- the photo sparked outrage around the country, from Christian churches and radio programs to the halls of Congress. But most major newspapers published the image, reasoning -- correctly -- that readers should be allowed to judge it on their own.
OK, you might respond, but Muslims are different. They take this blasphemy stuff really seriously. When they see it, they can't control themselves. So they burn, destroy and kill.
That's hogwash. And it's racist hogwash, to boot. Many Muslim clerics around the world have condemned the recent spasm of violence, which runs counter to Muhammad's own teachings about human dignity and forgiveness. Only a subset of Muslims have rioted over the cartoons. And if you hold these thugs to a lower moral standard than other people, well, you just don't think too highly of Muslims.
Remember, American newspapers have faced down thugs before. During the civil-rights era, reporters from the North received frequent threats from Southern white supremacists. Like the rioters in the Middle East today, these bigots claimed that newspapers were insulting their way of life. The newspapers should cease and desist, the racists said, or else.
"We wouldn't be having all this nigger trouble if your Northern newsmen didn't come down here and stir them up," a Mississippi businessman told the New York Times' Claude Sitton in 1964. Sitton was investigating the disappearance of three civil-rights workers, who would soon be found dead. But unless he left town, Sitton was told, he'd be killed as well.
Most of the time, news organizations stood up to these threats. Now and again, however, they capitulated. As Taylor Branch recounts in "At Canaan's Edge" (Simon & Schuster, 2006), CBS television interrupted its coverage of a 1965 civil-rights rally after white viewers complained about it. The problem? Cameras had shown Mary Travers -- of the folk trio Peter, Paul and Mary -- giving Harry Belafonte a peck on the cheek. A white woman kissing a black man! On national television! That was too offensive for sensitive white audiences -- especially in the South -- to handle. You see, white Southerners are different... .
Daniel Pipes: How the Cartoon Protests Harm Muslims
Source: NY Sun (2-14-06)
[Mr. Pipes is the director of the Middle East Forum. His website address is http://www.danielpipes.org. Click here for his HNN blog.]
What are the long-term consequences of the Muhammad cartoon furor? I predict it is helping bring on not a clash of civilizations but their mutual pulling apart. This separation, which has been building for years, has dreadful implications.
Signs of disengagement are all around.
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Trade: Boycotts now exist in both directions. Even as the U.S. government sanctions Iranian products, Iran's president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad says his government will "revise and cancel economic contracts" with countries where newspapers published the cartoons. Several Muslim countries have suspended trade with Denmark, while Muslim-owned stores in Canada have removed Danish products. The Pakistani medical association even announced a boycott of medicines from five European countries.
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Consumer items: Muslims are increasingly replacing Western consumer items with their own. They purchase the extremely modest Fulla and Razanne dolls rather than the busty Barbie. In France, Beurger King provides halal food, competing with Burger King, just as Mecca Cola takes the place of Coke and Pepsi. Al-Jazeera is starting an English-language channel to go up against CNN and the BBC.
A Fulla doll (L), and Razane dolls (R).
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Financial investments: As a result of freezes on funds and the designation of terrorist entities, Muslims have moved large amounts of capital out of the West and invested these either in their own countries or in other places around the world, such as East Asia. Middle Eastern oil exporters before 9/11 annually put as much as $25 billion into American investments; since then, the amount is about $1 billion a year.
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Emigration: 9/11 caused a significant increase in obstacles to Muslims traveling to the West, so fewer Muslim business executives, students, hospital patients, conference goers, and workers are reaching there.
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Tourism: Islamist atrocities such as the murder of 60 Japanese, German, and Swiss tourists in Luxor in 1997 or the abduction of 32 German and other travelers in the Sahara in 2003 had already led some Westerners to avoid discretionary travel in the Muslim world. Cartoon-related violence has prompted a Danish advisory warning citizens against travel to fourteen Muslim countries. Scandinavian tourist companies have cancelled many tours to North Africa.
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Foreign aid: Muslim aggression against aid workers in Indonesia, Lebanon, Pakistan, and the Palestinian Authority have led to the partial or complete withdrawal of European missions. In Chechnya, the Danish aid mission was expelled and the Iraqi transport ministry has rejected any future offers of Danish reconstruction money.
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Embassies: From the seizure of the American embassy in Tehran in 1979 to the multiple attacks on Danish and other European embassies this month, the assault on Western diplomatic missions in Muslim countries is causing them to take on the features of armed fortresses, to be removed from the center of towns to the peripheries, and in some cases to be closed down.
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Westerners providing services: Zayed University in Dubai fired an American professor, Claudi Keepoz, for distributing the Muhammad cartoons to her students. Rampaging Palestinian Arabs caused the foreign observers staffing the Temporary International Presence in Hebron, or TIPH, to flee Hebron.
These developments suggest what the prime minister of Malaysia, Abdullah Ahmad Badawi, has called a "huge chasm" between the Muslim world and the West. Or, in the more bellicose wording of the influential Sunni imam Youssef al-Qaradawi, "We must tell Europeans, we can live without you. But you cannot live without us."
Should the chasm widen, with its concomitant lessening of human interaction, commercial relations, and diplomatic engagement, the Muslim world will likely fall further behind than it already has. As I wrote in 2000, "Whatever index one employs, Muslims can be found clustering toward the bottom – whether measured in terms of their military prowess, political stability, economic development, corruption, human rights, health, longevity, or literacy."
Disengagement will only worsen the Muslim predicament. Reduced contact with the world's most modern, powerful, and advanced countries would likely cause Muslims to do even worse in those indexes and lapse deeper into a condition characterized by self-pity, jealousy, resentment, anger, and aggression.
Especially when contrasted with Muslim successes in pre-modern times, these traumatic circumstances help explain the crisis in identity that often causes Muslims to seek solace in radical Islam. For everyone's sake, it is important that Muslims begin more successfully to negotiate their path to modernity, not to isolation.
This article is reprinted with permission by Daniel Pipes. This article first appeared in the New York Sun.
Tom Engelhardt: A Permanent Basis for Withdrawal?
Source: TomDispatch.com (2-14-06)
We're in a new period in the war in Iraq -- one that brings to mind the Nixonian era of "Vietnamization": A President presiding over an increasingly unpopular war that won't end; an election bearing down; the need to placate a restive American public; and an army under so much strain that it seems to be running off the rails. So it's not surprising that the media is now reporting on administration plans for, or "speculation" about, or "signs of," or "hints" of "major draw-downs" or withdrawals of American troops. The figure regularly cited these days is less than 100,000 troops in Iraq by the end of 2006. With about 136,000 American troops there now, that figure would represent just over one-quarter of all in-country U.S. forces, which means, of course, that the term "major" certainly rests in the eye of the beholder.
In addition, these withdrawals are -- we know this thanks to a Seymour Hersh piece, Up in the Air, in the December 5th New Yorker -- to be accompanied, as in South Vietnam in the Nixon era, by an unleashing of the U.S. Air Force. The added air power is meant to compensate for any lost punch on the ground (and will undoubtedly lead to more "collateral damage" -- that is, Iraqi deaths).
It is important to note that all promises of drawdowns or withdrawals are invariably linked to the dubious proposition that the Bush administration can "stand up" an effective Iraqi army and police force (think "Vietnamization" again), capable of circumscribing the Sunni insurgency and so allowing American troops to pull back to bases outside major urban areas, as well as to Kuwait and points as far west as the United States. Further, all administration or military withdrawal promises prove to be well hedged with caveats and obvious loopholes, phrases like "if all goes according to plan and security improves..." or "it also depends on the ability of the Iraqis to..."
Since guerrilla attacks have actually been on the rise and the delivery of the basic amenities of modern civilization (electrical power, potable water, gas for cars, functional sewage systems, working traffic lights, and so on) on the decline, since the very establishment of a government inside the heavily fortified Green Zone has proved immensely difficult, and since U.S. reconstruction funds (those that haven't already disappeared down one clogged drain or another) are drying up, such partial withdrawals may prove more complicated to pull off than imagined. It's clear, nonetheless, that "withdrawal" is on the propaganda agenda of an administration heading into mid-term elections with an increasingly skittish Republican Party in tow and congressional candidates worried about defending the President's mission-unaccomplished war of choice. Under the circumstances, we can expect more hints of, followed by promises of, followed by announcements of "major" withdrawals, possibly including news in the fall election season of even more "massive" withdrawals slated for the end of 2006 or early 2007, all hedged with conditional clauses and "only ifs" -- withdrawal promises that, once the election is over, this administration would undoubtedly feel under no particular obligation to fulfill.
Assuming, then, a near year to come of withdrawal buzz, speculation, and even a media blitz of withdrawal announcements, the question is: How can anybody tell if the Bush administration is actually withdrawing from Iraq or not? Sometimes, when trying to cut through a veritable fog of misinformation and disinformation, it helps to focus on something concrete. In the case of Iraq, nothing could be more concrete -- though less generally discussed in our media -- than the set of enormous bases the Pentagon has long been building in that country. Quite literally multi-billions of dollars have gone into them. In a prestigious engineering magazine in late 2003, Lt. Col. David Holt, the Army engineer "tasked with facilities development" in Iraq, was already speaking proudly of several billion dollars being sunk into base construction ("the numbers are staggering"). Since then, the base-building has been massive and ongoing.
In a country in such startling disarray, these bases, with some of the most expensive and advanced communications systems on the planet, are like vast spaceships that have landed from another solar system. Representing a staggering investment of resources, effort, and geostrategic dreaming, they are the unlikeliest places for the Bush administration to hand over willingly to even the friendliest of Iraqi governments.
If, as just about every expert agrees, Bush-style reconstruction has failed dismally in Iraq, thanks to thievery, knavery, and sheer incompetence, and is now essentially ending, it has been a raging success in Iraq's "Little America." For the first time, we have actual descriptions of a couple of the "super-bases" built in Iraq in the last two and a half years and, despite being written by reporters under Pentagon information restrictions, they are sobering. Thomas Ricks of the Washington Post paid a visit to Balad Air Base, the largest American base in the country, 68 kilometers north of Baghdad and "smack in the middle of the most hostile part of Iraq." In a piece entitled Biggest Base in Iraq Has Small-Town Feel, Ricks paints a striking portrait:
The base is sizeable enough to have its own "neighborhoods" including "KBR-land" (in honor of the Halliburton subsidiary that has done most of the base-construction work in Iraq); "CJSOTF" ("home to a special operations unit," the Combined Joint Special Operations Task Force, surrounded by "especially high walls," and so secretive that even the base Army public affairs chief has never been inside); and a junkyard for bombed out Army Humvees. There is as well a Subway, a Pizza Hut, a Popeye's, "an ersatz Starbucks," a 24-hour Burger King, two post exchanges where TVs, iPods, and the like can be purchased, four mess halls, a hospital, a strictly enforced on-base speed limit of 10 MPH, a huge airstrip, 250 aircraft (helicopters and predator drones included), air-traffic pile-ups of a sort you would see over Chicago's O'Hare airport, and "a miniature golf course, which mimics a battlefield with its baby sandbags, little Jersey barriers, strands of concertina wire and, down at the end of the course, what appears to be a tiny detainee cage."
Ricks reports that the 20,000 troops stationed at Balad live in "air-conditioned containers" which will, in the future -- and yes, for those building these bases, there still is a future -- be wired "to bring the troops Internet, cable television and overseas telephone access." He points out as well that, of the troops at Balad, "only several hundred have jobs that take them off base. Most Americans posted here never interact with an Iraqi."
Recently, Oliver Poole, a British reporter, visited another of the American "super-bases," the still-under-construction al-Asad Airbase (Football and pizza point to US staying for long haul). He observes, of "the biggest Marine camp in western Anbar province," that "this stretch of desert increasingly resembles a slice of US suburbia." In addition to the requisite Subway and pizza outlets, there is a football field, a Hertz rent-a-car office, a swimming pool, and a movie theater showing the latest flicks. Al-Asad is so large -- such bases may cover 15-20 square miles -- that it has two bus routes and, if not traffic lights, at least red stop signs at all intersections.
There are at least four such "super-bases" in Iraq, none of which have anything to do with "withdrawal" from that country. Quite the contrary, these bases are being constructed as little American islands of eternal order in an anarchic sea. Whatever top administration officials and military commanders say -- and they always deny that we seek "permanent" bases in Iraq -– facts-on-the-ground speak with another voice entirely. These bases practically scream "permanency."
Unfortunately, there's a problem here. American reporters adhere to a simple rule: The words "permanent," "bases," and "Iraq" should never be placed in the same sentence, not even in the same paragraph; in fact, not even in the same news report. While a LexisNexis search of the last 90 days of press coverage of Iraq produced a number of examples of the use of those three words in the British press, the only U.S. examples that could be found occurred when 80% of Iraqis (obviously somewhat unhinged by their difficult lives) insisted in a poll that the United States might indeed desire to establish bases and remain permanently in their country; or when "no" or "not" was added to the mix via any American official denial. (It's strange, isn't it, that such bases, imposing as they are, generally only exist in our papers in the negative.) Three examples will do:
The Secretary of Defense: ""During a visit with U.S. troops in Fallujah on Christmas Day, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said ‘at the moment there are no plans for permanent bases' in Iraq. ‘It is a subject that has not even been discussed with the Iraqi government.'"
Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmett, the Central Command deputy commander for planning and strategy in Iraq: "We already have handed over significant chunks of territory to the Iraqis. Those are not simply plans to do so; they are being executed right now. It is not only our plan but our policy that we do not intend to have any permanent bases in Iraq."
Karen Hughes on the Charlie Rose Show: "CHARLIE ROSE: …they think we are still there for the oil, or they think the United States wants permanent bases. Does the United States want permanent bases in Iraq? KAREN HUGHES: We want nothing more than to bring our men and women in uniform home. As soon as possible, but not before they finish the job. CHARLIE ROSE: And do not want to keep bases there? KAREN HUGHES: No, we want to bring our people home as soon as possible."
Still, for a period, the Pentagon practiced something closer to truth in advertising than did our major papers. At least, they called the big bases in Iraq "enduring camps," a label which had a certain charm and reeked of permanency. (Later, they were later relabeled, far less romantically, "contingency operating bases.")
One of the enduring mysteries of this war is that reporting on our bases in Iraq has been almost nonexistent these last years, especially given an administration so weighted toward military solutions to global problems; especially given the heft of some of the bases; especially given the fact that the Pentagon was mothballing our bases in Saudi Arabia and saw these as long-term substitutes; especially given the fact that the neocons and other top administration officials were so focused on controlling the so-called arc of instability (basically, the energy heartlands of the planet) at whose center was Iraq; and especially given the fact that Pentagon pre-war planning for such "enduring camps" was, briefly, a front-page story in a major newspaper.
A little history may be in order here:
On April 19, 2003, soon after Baghdad fell to American troops, reporters Thom Shanker and Eric Schmitt wrote a front-page piece for the New York Times indicating that the Pentagon was planning to "maintain" four bases in Iraq for the long haul, though "there will probably never be an announcement of permanent stationing of troops." Rather than speak of "permanent bases," the military preferred then to speak coyly of "permanent access" to Iraq. The bases, however, fit snugly with other Pentagon plans, already on the drawing boards. For instance, Saddam's 400,000 man military was to be replaced by only a 40,000 man, lightly armed military without significant armor or an air force. (In an otherwise heavily armed region, this insured that any Iraqi government would be almost totally reliant on the American military and that the U.S. Air Force would, by default, be the Iraqi Air Force for years to come.) While much space in our papers has, of late, been devoted to the administration's lack of postwar planning, next to no interest has been shown in the planning that did take place.
At a press conference a few days after the Shanker and Schmitt piece appeared, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld insisted that the U.S. was "unlikely to seek any permanent or ‘long-term' bases in Iraq" -- and that was that. The Times' piece was essentially sent down the memory hole. While scads of bases were being built -- including four huge ones whose geographic placement correlated fairly strikingly with the four mentioned in the Times article -- reports about U.S. bases in Iraq, or any Pentagon planning in relation to them, largely disappeared from the American media. (With rare exceptions, you could only find discussions of "permanent bases" in these last years at Internet sites like Tomdispatch or Global Security.org.)
In May 2005, however, Bradley Graham of the Washington Post reported that we had 106 bases, ranging from mega to micro in Iraq. Most of these were to be given back to the Iraqi military, now being "stood up" as a far larger force than originally imagined by Pentagon planners, leaving the U.S. with, Graham reported, just the number of bases -- 4 -- that the Times first mentioned over two years earlier, including Balad Air Base and the base Poole visited in western Anbar Province. This reduction was presented not as a fulfillment of original Pentagon thinking, but as a "withdrawal plan." (A modest number of these bases have since been turned over to the Iraqis, including one in Tikrit transferred to Iraqi military units which, according to Poole, promptly stripped it to the bone.)
The future of a fifth base -- the enormous Camp Victory at Baghdad International Airport -- remains, as far as we know, "unresolved"; and there is a sixth possible "permanent super-base" being built in that country, though never presented as such. The Bush administration is sinking between $600 million and $1 billion in construction funds into a new U.S. embassy. It is to arise in Baghdad's Green Zone on a plot of land along the Tigris River that is reportedly two-thirds the area of the National Mall in Washington, DC. The plans for this "embassy" are almost mythic in nature. A high-tech complex, it is to have "15ft blast walls and ground-to-air missiles" for protection as well as bunkers to guard against air attacks. It will, according to Chris Hughes, security correspondent for the British Daily Mirror, include "as many as 300 houses for consular and military officials" and a "large-scale barracks" for Marines. The "compound" will be a cluster of at least 21 buildings, assumedly nearly self-sufficient, including "a gym, swimming pool, barber and beauty shops, a food court and a commissary. Water, electricity and sewage treatment plants will all be independent from Baghdad's city utilities." It is being billed as "more secure than the Pentagon" (not, perhaps, the most reassuring tagline in the post-9/11 world). If not quite a city-state, on completion it will resemble an embassy-state. In essence, inside Baghdad's Green Zone, we will be building another more heavily fortified little Green Zone.
Even Tony Blair's Brits, part of our unraveling, ever-shrinking "coalition of the willing" in Iraq, are reported by Brian Brady of the Scotsman (Revealed: secret plan to keep UK troops permanently in Iraq) to be bargaining for a tiny permanent base -- sorry a base "for years to come" -- near Basra in southern Iraq, thus mimicking American "withdrawal" strategy on the micro-scale that befits a junior partner.
As Juan Cole has pointed out at his Informed Comment blog, the Pentagon can plan for "endurance" in Iraq forever and a day, while top Bush officials and neocons, some now in exile, can continue to dream of a permanent set of bases in the deserts of Iraq that would control the energy heartlands of the planet. None of that will, however, make such bases any more "permanent" than their enormous Vietnam-era predecessors at places like Danang and Cam Rahn Bay proved to be -- not certainly if the Shiites decide they want us gone or Ayatollah Sistani (as Cole points out) were to issue a fatwa against such bases.
Nonetheless, the thought of permanency matters. Since the invasion of Saddam's Iraq, those bases -- call them what you will -- have been at the heart of the Bush administration's "reconstruction" of the country. To this day, those Little Americas, with their KBR-lands, their Pizza Huts, their stop signs, and their miniature golf courses remain at the secret heart of Bush administration "reconstruction" policy. As long as KBR keeps building them, making their facilities ever more enduring (and ever more valuable), there can be no genuine "withdrawal" from Iraq, nor even an intention of doing so. Right now, despite the recent visits of a couple of reporters, those super-bases remain enswathed in a kind of policy silence. The Bush administration does not discuss them (other than to deny their permanency from time to time). No presidential speeches deal with them. No plans for them are debated in Congress. The opposition Democrats generally ignore them and the press -- with the exception of the odd columnist -- won't even put the words "base," "permanent," and "Iraq" in the same paragraph.
It may be hard to do, given the skimpy coverage, but keep your eyes directed at our "super-bases." Until the administration blinks on them, there will be no withdrawal from Iraq.
Joshua Brown: Cheney Shoots Friend (Illustration)
Source: Life During Wartime (2-14-06)
Daniel Pipes: "Moslem States Represent a Potential Threat to World Peace"
Source: Frontpagemag.com (2-13-06)
[Mr. Pipes is the director of the Middle East Forum. His website address is http://www.danielpipes.org. Click here for his HNN blog.]
How did the U.S. government perceive Islam as a political force in the old days? For an answer, I propose a look at a "confidential" 76-page study (declassified in 1979) published sixty years ago tomorrow by the Military Intelligence Service of the U.S. War Department.
The 1946 report, which I have posted online in pdf format (warning: it is a large document that may be slow to load), is the inaugural issue of a series of weekly reports titled simply Intelligence Review. This series presents "current intelligence reflecting the outstanding developments of military interest in the fields of politics, economics, sociology, the technical sciences, and, of course, military affairs." Chapter headings in this first issue include: "Transition of Major Powers to Peacetime Military Systems," "Manchuria: Soviet or Chinese Sphere?" and "Wheat: Key to the World's Food Supply."
Of particular interest is an 11-page chapter that deals with "Islam: A Threat to World Stability." It opens with some bleak observations:
With few exceptions, the states [in the Muslim world] are marked by poverty, ignorance, and stagnation. It is full of discontent and frustration, yet alive with consciousness of its inferiority and with determination to achieve some kind of betterment.
Two basic urges meet head-on in this area, and conflict is inherent in this collision of interests. These urges reveal themselves in the daily news accounts of killings and terrorism, of pressure groups in opposition, and of raw nationalism and naked expansionism masquerading as diplomatic maneuvers.
The report then explains these two urges and rightly begins by focusing on the long shadow of the premodern period.
The first of these urges originates within the Moslems' own sphere. The Moslems remember the power with which once they not only ruled their own domains but also overpowered half of Europe, yet they are painfully aware of their present economic, cultural and military impoverishment. Thus a terrific internal pressure is building up in their collective thinking. The Moslems intend, by any means possible, to regain political independence and to reap the profits of their own resources. … The area, in short, has an inferiority complex, and its activities are thus as unpredictable as those of any individual so motivated.
Looking at Muslims in psychological terms is characteristic of that era, when social scientists frequently viewed politics through the prism of individual behavior. (For a famous example of such an analysis, see Ruth Benedict's 1946 study, The Chrysanthemum and the Sword: Patterns of Japanese Culture, which argued that the Japanese national character is formed in part by stringent toilet training techniques.)
The other fundamental urge originates externally. The world's great and near-great Powers cover the economic riches of the Moslem area and are also mindful of the strategic locations of some of the domains. Their actions are also difficult to predict, because each of these powers sees itself in the position of the customer who wants to do his shopping in a hurry because he happens to know the store is going to be robbed.
In an atmosphere so sated with the inflammable gases of distrust and ambition, the slightest spark could lead to an explosion which might implicate every country committed to the maintenance of world peace.
The introduction concludes with a justification for the present analysis: "An understanding of the Moslem world and of the stresses and forces operative within it is thus an essential part of the basic intelligence framework."
The chapter proceeds with a one-page sketch of Muslim history that includes this observation: "At the present time there are no strong Moslem states. The leadership of the Moslem world remains in the Middle East, particularly in Arabia." Given the backwardness of Arabia in 1946, this statement was either very ill-informed or very prescient.
The bulk of the chapter looks at forces that weaken or strengthen Muslim unity. The former include a lack of a common language, religious schisms, geographical separation, economic disparities, political rivalries, and what the report indelicately calls a "prostitution of leadership." This last is not so much an excoriation of Muslim kings, presidents, and emirs, but a review of how several non-Muslim powers, ending with the Soviet Union, have claimed to be the Protectors of Islam. The analysis includes the notable observation that "Moslems are properly suspicious of their leaders."
Forces that strengthen Muslim unity make up a second, shorter list: the pilgrimage to Mecca, classical Arabic, modern communications, and the Arab League. A mention of the hajj leads to one dramatically wrong prediction: "The scarcity of shipping during the war reduced the usual horde to about 20,000-30,000 per year. While the numbers will probably increase now, they are not likely to reach their former proportions." (In fact, the pilgrimage breaks new attendance records practically every year and now numbers three million pilgrims, many times more than ever was the case before 1946.)
The chapter on Islam concludes with an eye to the U.S. rivalry with the Soviet Union. Far from viewing Islam as a "bulwark against Communism," as later was the case, the Military Intelligence Service sees Muslims as easy prey for Moscow. It finds Muslim states "weak and torn by internal stresses" and deems their peoples "insufficiently educated to appraise propaganda or to understand the motives of those who promise a new Heaven and a new Earth." The analysis ends on a sober note:
Because of the strategic position of the Moslem world and the restlessness of its peoples, the Moslem states represent a potential threat to world peace. There cannot be permanent world stability, when one-seventh of the earth's population exists under the economic and social conditions that are imposed upon the Moslems.
This voice from the past prompts three observations. First, its blunt expression is remote from today's carefully worded government analyses (even classified ones) intended to offend no one. Second, the perception that the Muslim world (then making up one-seventh of the world's population, now about one-sixth) could impede world stability is deep and remarkable. Third, many of the themes wracking today's world could be discerned two generations ago – the frustration of Muslims, the sense of longing for an earlier era, the political volatility, the susceptibility to extremist ideologies, and the threat to world peace. This confirms, again, that 9/11 and attendant aggressions should not have been the shock they were.
Andrew Meyer: A "Deep Historical" and Pangeographic View of the Cartoon Fracas
Source: Madman of Chu Blog (2-12-06)
[Andrew Meyer earned a doctoral degree in Chinese history. He teaches at the City University of New York.]
The uproar over the Jyllands Posten "Muhammed cartoons" is the latest chapter in the tragic-comic deterioration of relations between "the Islamic world" and "the West." At this point questions about the right of Jyllands Posten to publish the cartoons and the nature of the response in the Islamic community have been discussed ad absurdum in the blogosphere and beyond. Having come to this party too late and having too little of profit (or Prophet) to say, I must restrict my comments to the "Western" reaction to this fracas. Violence and death threats are obviously a vile response to a series of cartoons, but little progress will be made by fighting intolerance with more intolerance. Though I sympathize with the civil-libertarian impulses behind a website like The Face of Muhammed,it does little to foster mutual understanding. Pronouncements like-
For 1400 years, Islam has waged war on all surrounding non-Muslim civilizations. During the course of history, Christianity was reformed, Europe colonized the world and set it free again, dictators lived, reigned and died, and totalitarian regimes emerged and vanished.
But Islam stayed, unreformed. And today, it imprisons more than 1 billion people, moderate and radical souls alike, in a huge gap of difference to the rest of us. Across political divides, across national boundaries, across various degrees of freedom, across race, people or religion, black or white, rich or poor; it stands out as our opposite. Only Muslim reformists seek to lessen the gap. And their voices are quickly silenced.
In modern times, waves of immigrants from Muslim countries have entered Europe. All European countries have been subject to islamization; the process of slowly incorporating Islamic values and Muslim customs into our way of life. Far East countries like India, Thailand, Indonesia and China are experiencing the Muslim Jihad. Israel lives with it. America feels it. Africa suffers from it, and is too weak from disease and poverty to resist.
It is suddenly coming to our attention that Islam is not, cannot, and will not be integrated or assimilated to the values of freedom and democracy. Islam is not only a religion; it is a totalitarian and expansionistic political ideology.
-harken back to hysterical 19th century rhetoric against the "Yellow Peril" or the "Elders of Zion." The idea that Europe and Christendom have evolved and changed while Islam has remained static is fundamentally ridiculous, as is the notion that while Islam "has waged war on all surrounding non-Muslim societies" Europe has only been so benign as to "coloniz[e] the world and set it free again." One would imagine that the Crusades had never happened and the British Raj was a giant tea party.
Only marginally better are more academic flights of ethnocentrism like this one by Theodore Dalrymple:
Anyone who lives in a city like mine and interests himself in the fate of the world cannot help wondering whether, deeper than this immediate cultural desperation, there is anything intrinsic to Islam—beyond the devout Muslim’s instinctive understanding that secularization, once it starts, is like an unstoppable chain reaction—that renders it unable to adapt itself comfortably to the modern world. Is there an essential element that condemns the Dar al-Islam to permanent backwardness with regard to the Dar al-Harb, a backwardness that is felt as a deep humiliation, and is exemplified, though not proved, by the fact that the whole of the Arab world, minus its oil, matters less to the rest of the world economically than the Nokia telephone company of Finland?
I think the answer is yes, and that the problem begins with Islam’s failure to make a distinction between church and state. Unlike Christianity, which had to spend its first centuries developing institutions clandestinely and so from the outset clearly had to separate church from state, Islam was from its inception both church and state, one and indivisible, with no possible distinction between temporal and religious authority. Muhammad’s power was seamlessly spiritual and secular (although the latter grew ultimately out of the former), and he bequeathed this model to his followers. Since he was, by Islamic definition, the last prophet of God upon earth, his was a political model whose perfection could not be challenged or questioned without the total abandonment of the pretensions of the entire religion.
This kind of pseudo-historical analysis falls flat on many fronts, foremost of which is the latent assumption that a comparison between Christianity and Islam can account for the sum total of the human experience. Many, many societies and cultural traditions did not develop a "distinction between church and state." China did very well without it until 1911, Judaism was no different than Islam in this regard (Moses provided the model of a prophet-king Dalrymple perceives in Muhammed).
Moreover, Dalrymple vastly overstates the positive light in which Christianity and "Western" society may rest after a genuine historical comparison to Islamic civilization. Dalrymple complains of a lack of seperation between church and state in Islam, but temporal and religious authority were much more distinct in the Islamic caliphate of medieval Spain than in the Christian kingdom of Ferdinand and Isabella which succeeded it. The caliphate saw a golden age of interfaith tolerance and flourishing humanistic culture, the Christian era brought forced conversion, expulsion, and the Inquisition.
Indeed, for most of the past millenium Islamic societies were far more open and tolerant of religious and intellectual diversity than those in the "West." Conversion under threat of death made sense within a Christian theology, as the flames of Hell awaited infidels sooner or later. By contrast Muslims were specifically forbidden to use such methods upon "People of the Book," a designation originally meant for Jews and Christians but ultimately extended to Zoroastrians and Hindus.
"Westerners" are prone to adopt an air of superiority because the forces that condition global modernity- industrialization, nationalism, market capitalism- first took root in Europe and the Americas. But a complacent feeling of superiority conveniently overlooks the facts that a)none of these "Western" achievements would have been possible absent much that was learned or acquired from Asian, African, Native American and Islamic civilizations; b)these forces have transformed the world at a terrible cost. The same societies that cultivated the "freedom of the press" so vaunted (and so abused) by Jyllands Posten also gave rise to the Atlantic Slave Trade, the Holocaust, two World Wars, the Soviet Gulag, the massacre at Srebenica, etc., etc., etc. It is difficult to find a crime committed by an Islamic society to match the worst offenses of "the West." The economic and technological conditions of Islamic societies may have changed more slowly than those of "the West," but at the same time their histories have been marked by less violence. Where is the Islamic Antietam or Verdun? "The Face of Muhammed" would label Islam a lumbering, changeless monolith, but can its author have forgotten that some of the worst totalitarianisms produced by "Western civilization" only fell 17 years ago?
Finally, all of the lamentations about poor, changeless Islam ignore the intense diversity of Islamic communities around the world today. The most egregious violence engendered by "Cartoongate" has transpired in the Arab world, but that community houses less than 1/4 of the world's Muslims. The largest Muslim communities in the world are in South and Southeast Asia (in Indonesia, Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, Malaysia...), and in those societies the response to the Jyllands Posten flap has been far less extreme. Do these responses manifest Islam's incompatibility with modernity? Of course not. The Jyllands Posten cartoons, all considerations of "religious taboos" aside, were genuinely offensive. The kind of anger on display in much of the Islamic world is not far from what a series of cartoons featuring hook-nosed, money-counting rabbis would occasion in the world Jewish community.
Reductionist analyses like those of "The Face of Muhammed" or Theodore Dalrymple recapitulate the same error of the original Jyllands Posten cartoons. To caricaturize Islam as regressive or incompatible with modernity is to play into the hands of those who would truly like to make it so. If Europeans and Americans keep sermonizing Muslims about their chronic inferiority, more and more of them, out of sheer exasperation, will turn to those like Osama bin Laden who will feed them equally ridiculous pabulum about Islamic superiority. To deny that some aspects or segments of the current Islamic community should change would obviously be wrong, but insisting that Islam itself precludes any community from ever changing is patently ridiculous. No one living in Ferdinad and Isabella's Spain could ever predict that that society would embrace the liberal ideals championed by Jyllands Posten. Declaring any culture or society absolutely incapable of change is to deny the humanity of its inhabitants, and dehumanizing others is the surest route to strife and sorrow.
Martin E. Marty: Bonhoeffer's Relevance Today
Source: Sightings, the newsletter of the Martin Marty Center at the University of Chicago Divinity School. (2-10-06)
"Bonhoeffer Was Wrong," screams a headline in the National Catholic Reporter, atop an article by Raymond A. Schroth, S.J. (January 27). For balance, then, should we also read "Schroth Is Right"? Dietrich Bonhoeffer, executed by Hitler and company one month before Germany surrendered, is the subject of a PBS documentary tonight. Watch it and think about "wrong" and "right." (For the record, the film, directed by Martin Doblmeier, is getting good advance reviews and much notice -- for example, almost a full page in the weekend USA Today.) Schroth is a humanities professor and informed writer of note on Catholic subjects.
Schroth asks, why notice Bonhoeffer now, apart from his 100th birthday anniversary this week? Why? Schroth: "Every day we read the news from Washington and Iraq -- both denials of and justifications for torture from the same administration," et cetera, "all without a peep from our so-called religious guides. We ask ourselves, who will speak for Christians? Bonhoeffer?" Schroth quotes Protestant theologian Stanley Hauerwas, who sides with Bonhoeffer, both of them believing that "the character of a society and state is to be judged by the willingness to have the Gospel preached truthfully and freely." Also, in the Jesuit America, David L. Martinson used Bonhoeffer's theory of truth to "criticize journalists who fail to report 'what is really going on' in Iraq" (January 2-9). Again, et cetera.
Schroth sees parallels between then and now: in the film "we can't help noticing that the Gestapo taps citizens' phone lines, tortures its prisoners, and slaps suspects into jail without lawyers or trials for years." Doblmeier produced this film before those practices reached front pages here, and so may have intended his work to deal with timeless issues. But Schroth's judgment is that Bonhoeffer is a pastor for our time "in courage, yes," but "in moral judgment, no." Why? Because the Sermon on the Mount leaves no wiggle room for political assassination, and Bonhoeffer, a pacifist, was killed for having been a part of the almost-successful plot to kill Hitler in 1944. Jesus and Immanuel Kant both forbid such plotting and killing. A bit casuistically, I thought -- but what do I know? -- Schroth says that such radical action may be all right "in civil disobedience," when "one protests an unjust law and takes public responsibility"; but "beware" of going "above, outside or around the law."
Was Bonhoeffer wrong? Is Schroth right? Had the plot been successful, had Hitler been killed and Nazi leadership thrown into chaos, there might well have been moves toward a German surrender. Many millions of Jews and others would have lived. But if one takes the Sermon on the Mount as Jesus' teaching and follows it literally -- which few do; I don't, or I'd be a pacifist, too -- one can't kill, as Bonhoeffer's group hoped to kill Hitler. And Bonhoeffer had four centuries of Lutheran theological gene-pooling behind him, with its accent on Paul in Romans 13, where "whoever resists [the 'higher powers'] shall receive damnation," so he had to be a traitor and take a theological risk. (Does anyone notice that, at the decisive moment, Luther resisted authority -- his 'Caesar' -- with a "here I stand?")
I am glad Bonhoeffer left the witness he did. But at a recent forum on the film, while I called the theologian a martyr, I had to call him a "guilty martyr" -- and thanked God for him, at his 100th birthday. "Is Marty Wrong?" Perhaps.
W. Clark Gilpin: Religion Scholars Challenge Patriot Act
Source: Sightings, the newsletter of the Martin Marty Center at the University of Chicago Divinity School. (2-10-06)
[W. Clark Gilpin is Margaret E. Burton Professor of the History of Christianity and Theology at the University of Chicago Divinity School.]
On Wednesday, January 25, the American Academy of Religion (AAR), the world's largest association of scholars of religion, joined a lawsuit that challenges a key provision of the USA Patriot Act. Citing the 2004 revocation of a travel visa for noted Swiss scholar of Islam Tariq Ramadan, the suit contends that an "ideological exclusion" provision of the Patriot Act is being used to impede the free circulation of scholars and scholarly debate that are integral to academic freedom. Commenting on the suit, AAR Executive Director Barbara DeConcini stated that "preventing foreign scholars like Professor Ramadan from visiting the U.S. limits not only the ability of scholars here to enhance their own knowledge, but also their ability to inform students, journalists, public policy makers, and other members of the public who rely on scholars' work to acquire a better understanding of critical current issues involving religion."
The American Civil Liberties Union filed the suit on behalf of the AAR and two other major associations of scholars and writers: the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) and PEN American Center. As quoted in the suit, the Patriot Act includes among the persons ineligible to receive visas those who have used their "position of prominence within any country to endorse or espouse terrorist activity, or to persuade others to support terrorist activity or a terrorist organization, in a way that the Secretary of State has determined undermines United States efforts to reduce or eliminate terrorist activities."
The plaintiffs contend not only that Professor Ramadan has been a consistent critic of terrorism but also that the ideological exclusion provision of the Patriot Act violates their own First Amendment rights to hear a full range of ideas. A press release from the AAUP quoted the reaction of its general secretary, Roger Bowen: "Fearing another's ideas enough to prohibit their expression is perplexing to scholars and troubling to citizens .... The freedom to teach and the freedom to learn are protected freedoms in this nation and the AAUP and its co-plaintiffs must insist that these two freedoms be respected. Now is the time when we should be listening to and learning from Muslim scholars, not trying to silence them."
The specific case of Tariq Ramadan came to the attention of American scholars of religion most forcefully in 2004, when he was offered a tenured faculty position as the Henry R. Luce Professor at the University of Notre Dame's Joan B. Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies. Although Ramadan was initially granted a visa in order to accept the faculty post, this visa was suddenly revoked only days before he and his family were to move to Indiana. Neither he nor the University of Notre Dame received any written explanation of this reversal, and, subsequently, Ramadan has been denied visas to speak at the professional conventions of the AAR and other scholarly organizations in the United States. Ramadan's many writings have focused on the relations of Islam to the West and to modernity, most recently in his book Western Muslims and the Future of Islam.
The study of religion is necessarily international in scope and actively engages scholars from other cultures and nations. At a moment in history when religion is perceived to have exceptionally volatile connections to international politics, it is not surprising that the scholarly exchange of ideas about religion may include political views the government disfavors. It is, however, precisely in such volatile circumstances that sustaining free academic deliberation about the relations among religion, culture, and politics becomes imperative.
Daniel Pipes: The Clash to End All Clashes?
Source: National Review Online (2-7-06)
Editors' Introduction: In belated response to a cartoon depicting the Prophet Mohammed published in a Danish paper and subsequently reprinted across Europe, scenes of outrage filed out of London, Beruit, and Damascus, among other cities this weekend. Flags and embassies burned. Placards (in London!) read: "Behead those who insult Islam."
In light of the anger unleashed, National Review Online asked some experts on Islam and/or the Mideast for their read on what's going on and what can/should be done. We asked each: "Is this a clash of civilizations we're watching? What can be done? By Muslims? By everyone else?"
Daniel Pipes's Introduction: Click here for responses by Mustafa Akyol, Zeyno Baran, Rachel Ehrenfeld, Mohamed Eljahmi, Basma Fakri, Farid Ghadry, Mansoor Ijaz, Judith Apter Klinghoffer, Clifford May, Ramin Parham, Nina Shea, and Bat Ye'or.
It certainly feels like a clash of civilizations. But it is not.
By way of demonstration, allow me to recall the similar Muslim-Western confrontation that took place in 1989 over the publication of Salman Rushdie's novel The Satanic Verses and the resulting death edict from Iran's Ayatollah Khomeini. It first appeared, as now, that the West aligned solidly against the edict and the Muslim world stood equally with it. As the dust settled, however, a far more nuanced situation became apparent.
Significant voices in the West expressed sympathy for Khomeini. Former president Jimmy Carter responded with a call for Americans to be "sensitive to the concern and anger" of Muslims. The director of the Near East Studies Center at UCLA, Georges Sabbagh, declared Khomeini "completely within his rights" to sentence Rushdie to death. Immanuel Jakobovits, chief rabbi of the United Kingdom, wrote that "the book should not have been published" and called for legislation to proscribe such "excesses in the freedom of expression."
In contrast, important Muslims opposed the edict. Erdal Inönü, leader of Turkey's opposition Social Democratic party, announced that "killing somebody for what he has written is simply murder." Naguib Mahfouz, Egypt's winner of the 1988 Nobel Prize in literature, called Khomeini a "terrorist." A Palestinian journalist in Israel, Abdullatif Younis, dubbed The Satanic Verses "a great service."
This same division already exists in the current crisis. Middle East-studies professors are denouncing the cartoons even as two Jordanian editors went to jail for reprinting them.
It is a tragic mistake to lump all Muslims with the forces of darkness. Moderate, enlightened, free-thinking Muslims do exist. Hounded in their own circles, they look to the West for succor and support. And, however weak they may presently be, they eventually will have a crucial role in modernizing the Muslim world.
Neve Gordon: Why Hamas Won
[Neve Gordon teaches politics at Ben-Gurion University and can be reached at nevegordon@gmail.com.]
Although it is still unclear what the future holds for Israelis and Palestinians, a few things can be said about the processes that enabled Hamas to win a landslide victory in the January 25 democratic elections and how the organization's triumph will likely affect the local political arena.
Founded in Gaza at the beginning of the first Intifada (December 1987) by Sheik Ahmad Yassin, Hamas is a direct extension of the Muslim Brotherhood. Although in the media Hamas tends to be identified with its military arm, Izzeddin al-Qassam, which is well known for its suicide attacks against Israeli targets, the organization's popularity in the Occupied Territories actually stems from its being seen as the voice of Palestinian dignity and the symbol of the defense of Palestinian rights at a time of unprecedented hardship, humiliation, and despair.
People who voted for Hamas emphasize not only the heroic acts of its combatants, but also its reputation for clean conduct, modesty, and honesty, which have been pointedly contrasted with the corruption of the Palestinian Authority. Many of its followers do not subscribe to religious fundamentalism, but rather support the organization due to its pragmatic approach characterized by support for the short-term objective of a Palestinian state in the West Bank, Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem, while still maintaining the long-term goal of establishing an Islamic state that would replace Israel and offer a solution to the Palestinian refugee problem.
Most importantly, perhaps, Hamas acquired much of its political credit from its charity and social service networks. It built kindergartens and schools (that offer free meals for children), education centers for women, and youth and sports clubs. Its medical clinics provide subsidized treatment to the sick and the organization extends financial and technical assistance to those whose homes had been demolished as well as to refugees living in sub-standard conditions.
In other words, Hamas was elected not only because it is considered an alternative to the corrupt Palestinian Authority, but also because Israel created the conditions that made it an indispensable social movement.
Allow me to explain. According to the United Nations, the poverty rate, defined as those living off less than $2.20 a day, climbed to 64 percent in the Occupied Territories in 2005. Even this figure, however, is inaccurate considering that half of the 64 percent, or some 1.2 million Palestinians, live not on $2.20 a day but on $1.60 or less. Impoverishment of this proportion has produced new populations that need assistance just to sustain life, or as one member of an Islamic charity stated, the past few years have engendered new types of need, which has increased the number of eligible beneficiaries and diversified the social groups requiring such assistance. These new groups currently include landowners, shopkeepers, and those whose homes have been demolished by Israeli bulldozers; in other words, they are not just the traditional poor.
As Israel destroyed the infrastructure of existence in the territories, it also engendered an institutional vacuum by targeting the Palestinian Authority. Hamas took advantage of these dire developments and used them as an opportunity to promote its own agenda.
The organization adopted a policy of providing assistance on the basis of socio-economic need rather than religious or political criteria, so that families in economic distress did not need to be Hamas members or even practicing Muslims in order to qualify for aid. Rapidly its charitable institutions became the second largest food donor in the occupied Palestinian territories after the United Nations Relief and Work Agency. As the chairman of one Islamic charity pointed out already two years before the elections, The expansion of poverty has vastly increased the pressure upon our organization, because we are receiving many more applications than before.
In its report on Hamas, the International Crisis Group concludes that while it is impossible to measure the impact of Hamas's charitable work on its popularity, the organization's positive image is significantly related to the efficiency of its social services, particularly when compared with the ineffectiveness of the Palestinian Authority.
Although this is surely the case, the Crisis Group's conclusion substitutes the symptoms for the causes. The question is not whether Hamas's social welfare organizations have helped it garner popular support, but rather why Hamas's charity network has been so successful. Indeed, the claim that Hamas's popularity results from its social welfare network conceals the fact that Israel has produced a situation where there is desperate need for charity institutions. Accordingly, Israel's efforts to undermine the Palestinian Authority alongside its success in destroying the infrastructure of existence in the Occupied Territories has not only made Palestinian life miserable, but has empowered its most lethal adversary, the Hamas.
So what lies in store for those of us living in this neck of the world now that Hamas has won the elections?
Hamas is prepared to negotiate a settlement based on the concept of a hudnah (a temporary truce). As Azzam Tamimi, the director of the Institute of Islamic Political Thought points out, Hamas as well as the majority of Palestinians consider Israel as having been built on land stolen from the Palestinian people. The creation of the state was a solution to a European problem and the Palestinians are under no obligation to be the scapegoats for Europe's failure to recognize the Jews as human beings entitled to inalienable rights. Hamas, like all Palestinians, refuses to be made to pay for the criminals who perpetrated the Holocaust. However, Israel is a reality and that is why Hamas is willing to deal with that reality in a manner that is compatible with its principles.
These principles are important. Hamas's victory appears to introduce a new dimension into the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. If the conflict first emerged as a national clash between two peoples fighting over one piece of land, as the years passed a Jewish messianic ideology which believes in the redemption of the biblical land of Israel gained ground. Thus, the Zionist camp brought a fundamentalist element to the national-territorial quarrel, inscribing a strong theological strain into the nationalist fervor.
Hamas's triumph can be seen as the introduction of the religious dimension into the Palestinian side, thus strengthening the fundamentalist characters of the conflict. In many respects, the national clash over territory is being transformed into a religious battle between Jews and Muslims. If Hamas's pragmatic strain does not prevail over its religious drive, then we are heading towards very bloody times simply because reaching some kind of political solution between the two parties will be much more difficult.
The introduction of a fundamentalist worldview will no doubt affect Palestinian society as well. Already number two on Hamas's list, Muhammad Abu Tir suggested that the Palestinian school system will be changed; girls and boys will no longer study together and a more Islamic curriculum will be introduced. Abu Tir added that the first act of the newly-elected Palestinian Legislative Council will be to introduce sharia (Muslim law) as the source for legislation. Statements like these do not bode well for the future.
How, one might ask, should the international community respond to Hamas's victory?
Israel's acting Prime Minister Ehud Olmert asked foreign leaders to boycott the new Palestinian Authority if it does not comply with three conditions: 1) the disarmament of Izzeddin al-Qassam and other paramilitary groups; 2) the annulling of Hamas's charter which calls for the destruction of Israel; and 3) and the acceptance of the agreements and obligations that the Palestinian Authority took upon itself when the Fatah party was in control.
While Olmert's first two conditions could easily be part of future negotiations rather than a condition for negotiations, his third demand puts Israel in a thorny spot. After all, Israel, not the Palestinians, has been using the separation barrier in the past three years to execute a unilateral plan which contravenes all previous agreements. Thus, according to Olmert's logic, the international community would need to boycott Israel in order to remain consistent.
Although the Quartet -- the US, UN, European Union, and Russia -- decided against immediately adopting Olmert's demands, it did warn that if Hamas refuses to abandon violence, recognize Israel and embrace the diplomatic road map to peace it would cut off foreign aid.
This threat needs to be taken seriously, since the data suggests that if world leaders decide to cut off economic aid to the Occupied Territories, humankind will witness a social catastrophe. As mentioned, today 64 percent of the population lives under the international poverty line of $2.20 a day, while the World Bank reports that acute malnutrition affects 9 percent of Palestinian children. Taking into account that financial aid amounts to almost one third of the per capita gross national income in the West Bank and Gaza, a decision to cut it off would be tantamount to an experiment in famine.
Does Olmert really want the population living under Israel's occupation to starve? Is the international community willing to take on such a responsibility?
Questions like these lead directly to the most crucial point, one that has been frequently elided by the recent discussion concerning Hamas's successful ascent to power. Despite the threatening character of Hamas's victory, Israel continues to be the stronger side in this conflict -- it is the occupier and oppressor and not the victim. Israel is unwilling to withdraw to the 1967 borders or offer a just solution to the Palestinian refugee problem, as required by United Nations resolutions 194, 242 and 381. And, finally, Israel is the one that has been implementing unilateral moves that are in direct violation of the road map and any other solution based on dialogue and mutual understanding.
Hamas, as Azzam Tamimi suggests, underscores Israel's breach of the UN resolutions and is willing to embark on a peace process based on the fact that Israel give up its sole ownership over victimhood and recognize that the Palestinians are the victims and have been victims since the state of Israel was established. All of which raises serious questions regarding who, at this point in time, is undermining the possibility of reaching peace in the Middle East.
Alfred W. McCoy: Why the McCain Torture Ban Won't Work
Source: TomDispatch.com (2-8-06)
[Alfred W. McCoy is the author of A Question of Torture: CIA Interrogation, from the Cold War to the War on Terror (Metropolitan Books, The American Empire Project, 2006) and a professor of history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.]
Just before Christmas, two of the world's most venerable legislative bodies engaged in erudite, impassioned debate over what the right balance should be between the imperatives of national security and international prohibitions on torture. They arrived at starkly divergent conclusions that reveal the depth of damage the war on terror is doing to this country's civil liberties.
On December 7, the House of Lords, reviewing cases in which a dozen Muslim militants were to be deported, spoke with moral clarity on the issue of torture, branding it "an unqualified evil" which should have no place in the proud, thousand-year tradition of British justice. Just a week later, the U.S. Senate amended the Defense Appropriations Bill to prohibit the "abuse" of detainees in American custody, including the many Muslims at our Guantanamo prison, but did so on the purely pragmatic, almost amoral grounds that it "leads to bad intelligence." Under pressure from the White House, the senators also loaded this legislation with loopholes that may soon allow coerced testimony -- extracted through torture -- into American courts for the first time in two centuries.
This disconcerting contrast is but one sign that, under the Bush administration, the United States is moving to publicly legitimate the use of torture, even to the point of twisting this congressional ban on inhumane interrogation in ways that could ultimately legalize such acts. And following their President's lead, the American people seem to be developing a tolerance, even a taste, for torture.
This country may, in fact, be undergoing an historic shift with profound implications for America's international standing. It seems to be moving from the wide-ranging but highly secretive tortures wielded by the Central Intelligence Agency during the Cold War decades to an open, even proud use of coercive interrogation as a formal weapon in the arsenal of American power, acceptable both to U.S. courts and the American people.
In the early years of its war on terror, the administration maintained the long-standing yet informal executive policy of ordering clandestine CIA torture in times of crisis. Minutes after his public address to a shaken nation on September 11, 2001, President Bush barked to his aides, "I don't care what the international lawyers say, we are going to kick some ass."
As administration lawyers translated these words into formal directives, they carefully cloaked this otherwise unlawful demand in three controversial constitutional arguments -- that the president's commander-in-chief powers allow him to override all laws and treaties; that U.S. anti-torture laws can be stretched to provide a winning legal defense for any CIA interrogator accused of torture; and most tenuously of all, that the detainee prison at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba was not on American territory and so was beyond the writ of U.S. courts.
Two years later, when the infamous photos from Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison exposed the administration's illegal interrogation tactics in lurid color, the White House was faced with an historic choice that, in practice, proved no choice at all: either definitively ban torture or defy the international community by promoting the practice.
Bartering Away Legal Birthrights
That the upper deliberative bodies of the United States and Great Britain found themselves facing the question of torture at exactly the same moment had a certain ironic appropriateness. After all, the two countries share a secret history of torture reaching back to the dark early days of the Cold War. In 1951, these two nations collaborated in a covert CIA-run mind-control research project into which the American government ultimately poured several billion dollars. Late in that decade, CIA scientists elaborated that research into a revolutionary new form of torture, more psychological than physical, that would prove both legally elusive and highly destructive to the human psyche.
Even though this "no-touch" psychological form of torture generally did greater lasting damage than its physical variant, it was surrounded by an appealing scientific aura and was, at least in theory, devoid of the obvious signs of brutality that might trouble the public and provide telling evidence for prosecutors.
For the next 20 years, Washington deployed these torture techniques against communists and other revolutionaries in Asia and Latin America. Simultaneously, London used them to fight nationalists in its far-flung territories during the long, bloody eclipse of the British empire -- in places like Aden, Brunei, British Guiana, and Northern Ireland.
In 1978, charged before the European Court of Human Rights with torturing IRA suspects, Britain swore "a solemn undertaking" that it would never again deploy these psychological torture techniques. Last month, in reversing the deportations of Muslims convicted on "evidence procured by torture inflicted by foreign officials," London's law lords cited this case in ruling that "bedrock moral principle" from centuries of common law and recent international conventions made torture anathema in the country's courts.
By contrast, confronted with strong evidence of detainee abuse at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo, the Bush White House has fought back by defending torture as a presidential prerogative and so precipitating an epic political struggle in this country. As a powerfully symbolic state practice, synonymous with brutal autocrats, torture, even of the few, raises profound moral and legal questions about the limits of presidential power, the quality of our justice, and ultimately the character of this American civilization.
While the Bush White House has protected and promoted senior officials implicated in the torture scandal, an ad hoc civil-society coalition of courts, media, and human rights groups has mobilized to stop the abuse. In June 2004, the Supreme Court ruled in a landmark case, Rasul v. Bush, that the Guantanamo detainees were indeed on U.S. territory, no matter what the administration's lawyers claimed, and so deserved access to American courts. This decision prompted some of the country's top law firms, working pro bono, to file 160 habeas corpus cases on behalf of some 300 Guantanamo detainees.
Last summer, Senator John McCain proposed an amendment to the must-pass Defense Appropriation Bill that would ban all "cruel, inhumane and degrading" treatment of detainees and set the U.S. Army Field Manual as the standard for any interrogation, whether by the military or the CIA. President Bush reacted by vowing to veto the bill, should it somehow pass the Republican-controlled Congress.
When Bush's bluff failed, the White House began lobbying for the insertion of loopholes into the proposed prohibition. First, Vice President Cheney pressed McCain to exempt the CIA from his ban. The senator refused. Next, National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley weighed in, urging broad legal exemptions for CIA torturers. Again, the senator stood his ground. Suddenly, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's Pentagon rewrote the Army Field Manual to teach interrogators, as the New York Times reported, "how to walk right up to the line between legal and illegal interrogation" -- changes one Defense official termed "a stick in McCain's eye."
To placate the White House, McCain eventually softened his prohibition by adding a legal defense for accused CIA and military interrogators that mimes the extreme exculpatory logic of the Justice Department's notorious August 2002 Bybee memo. Drafted to protect CIA interrogators after 9/11, this now-disavowed document argued that torture, as defined under U.S. law, required that the suffering inflicted "be equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death." In a section of McCain's amendment called "Protection of United States Government Personnel," the final legislation opened a little noticed but similarly cavernous legal loophole for future torturers. It allowed U.S. officials "engaging in specific operational practices that involve interrogation of aliens" to claim, if charged, that they "did not know that the practices [they used] were unlawful."
After the Senate passed McCain's torture ban by a resounding 90-9 vote, ending any hope of a presidential veto, the administration tried to further neutralize its impact by backing an amendment authored by Republican Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina. As originally drafted, this amendment would have allowed the courts to consider all evidence collected under any but the most outrageous uses of "undue coercion." No less startlingly, it denied detainees in places like Guantanamo -- those "unlawful combatants" - any right to challenge their detention by filing writs of habeas corpus in U.S. courts. Complaining that "Non-Citizen Terrorists" at Guantanamo were filing cases over "the quality of their food," Graham urged passage of his amendment to spare "our troops fighting in the War on Terror" from being "sued in every court in the land by our enemies." For a mess of partisan pottage, the senator was bartering away this nation's constitutional birthright of habeas corpus, a foundational legal protection born of Parliament's long struggle to ban royal torture writs by the infamous Court of Star Chamber.
After the Senate approved Graham's amendment by a 49-42 vote on November 10, reformers led by Democratic Senator Carl Levin fought an uphill battle to moderate these extreme proposals -- replacing the bill's blanket acceptance of "coerced" evidence with ground rules for its evaluation by the courts and trying to limit the ban on habeas corpus appeals from Guantanamo to future cases, allowing those already filed to proceed.
But in the final legislation, titled "The Detainee Treatment Act of 2005," McCain's now-compromised ban on cruel treatment of detainees was effectively eviscerated by Graham's denial of legal redress. To nullify the landmark Supreme Court ruling that Guantanamo is, in fact, American territory and so falls under the purview of U.S. courts, Graham also stipulated in the final legislation that "the term 'United States,' when used in a geographic sense, does not include the United States Naval Station, Guantanamo Bay." In this way, he tried once again to deny detainees any legal basis for access to the courts. In effect, McCain's motion more or less bans torture, but Graham's removes any real mechanism for enforcing such a ban.
The Media Mirage of a Torture Ban
Last December 15, all these tensions seemed to dissolve in a dramatic Oval Office handshake between Senator McCain and President Bush who announced that the landmark legislation made it "clear to the world that this government does not torture."
That White House photo-op was, however, a complete media mirage. Within hours, the administration began moving deftly to pull any teeth left in this legislation. Speaking to CNN, Attorney General Antonio Gonzales quickly dismissed McCain's reform as insignificant, insisting that existing legislation only banned the infliction of "severe" physical or psychological pain in interrogations -- the same linguistic legerdemain that had allowed the administration to start torturing back in 2002. The attorney general seemed to be echoing the opinions of his subordinates who, according to the Washington Post, were already arguing that the McCain amendment would, "under certain circumstances," still allow "waterboarding" -- the same method that the French Inquisition had once called the "question de l'eau" (water question) or "torturae Gallicae ordinariae" (standard Gallic torture) -- and other harsh techniques.
On December 30, right after signing a defense bill that included the McCain amendment at his Crawford ranch, President Bush issued a "signing statement" -- carefully released at the extremely unnewsworthy hour of 8:00 pm that Friday night -- insisting that his powers as commander-in-chief and head of the "unitary executive branch" still allowed him to do whatever was necessary to defend America. So much for McCain's efforts as the year ended.
Just four days into 2006, Senator McCain, though claiming confidence that the "President understands Congress's intent" in passing the torture ban, promised "strict oversight to monitor the Administration's implementation of the new law." Faced with nullification by the presidential signing statement, Senator Edward Kennedy warned, during Judge Alito's confirmation hearings, that President Bush was insisting "whatever the law of the land might be, whatever Congress might have written, the executive branch has the right to authorize torture without fear of judicial review."
As if to confirm this pessimistic view, the administration quickly deployed the new Detainee Treatment Act to quash any judicial oversight of its actions -- particularly the dubious designation of detainees as "unlawful enemy combatants" unworthy of any protection by the Geneva Conventions or the U.S. Constitution.
On January 3, the Justice Department, citing this new law, notified federal judges that it would soon seek the immediate dismissal of all 160 habeas corpus cases already filed for 300 Guantanamo detainees. On January 12, the Solicitor General, again citing the new law, told the Supreme Court it no longer had jurisdiction over Guantanamo and asked the justices to dismiss another potential landmark "unlawful combatant" case, Hamdan v. Rumsfeld. Then, putting the cherry atop the administration's many-layered legal confection, on January 24 the Army changed its standing orders to allow military executions at Guantanamo, thus keeping the U.S. courts from intervening in any drum-head death sentences for detainees.
All these maneuvers were part of a White House campaign essentially aimed at formalizing those three dubious legal doctrines that had long underpinned its torture policy. Recoiling from the prospect of an "Imperial Presidency" implicit in these moves, the New York Times of January 15 called on Congress "to curtail Mr. Bush's expansion of power" and his "unilateral rewriting of more than 200 years of tradition and law."
Looking through a glass darkly into the future, the possible implications of these trends for the quality of American justice are troubling indeed. The military tribunals at Guantanamo are not required to reveal the sources of their evidence against the 500 detainees on trial, even though significant parts of it undoubtedly come from torture and abuse of either the accused or other detainees. Moreover, under the Detainee Treatment Act, federal courts will be able to consider the use of this same coerced information in hearing any appeals from Guantanamo. In a sharp, sad contrast with Britain's law lords, our congressional legislation allows the courts to weigh the probative value of tortured testimony, potentially introducing coerced evidence into the federal courts for the first time in our nation's history.
One question seldom asked is: Why has the public response to issues that cut to the very core of America's national identity been so muted? The short answer: The administration's increasingly unapologetic advocacy of torture has echoed subtly but effectively with the trauma of 9/11.
With the horrific reality of the Twin Towers attack still resonating and endless nuclear-bomb-in-Times-Square/ticking-bomb interrogation scenarios ricocheting around the media and pop culture, torture seems to have gained an eerie emotional traction. Polls taken over the last three years have confirmed this. With a complex reality reduced to a few terrifyingly simple, fantasy-ridden scenarios, torture in defense of the "homeland" has gained surprisingly wide acceptance, while the torture debate has been reframed -- to the administration's great advantage -- as a choice between public safety and the lives of millions or private morality and bleeding-heart qualms over a few slaps up the side of the head. In this way, old-fashioned morality has been made to seem little short of immoral.
Through the invisible tendrils that tie a state to its society, the media has often reflected aspects of administration policy on such subjects. Television, in particular, has had a powerful effect in its repeated portrayals of harsh, even abusive interrogations as effective and morally justified acts --when, in fact, they are neither. After years of watching television shows such as "NYPD Blue" and "24" with plots that mimic the ticking-bomb scenario, millions of ordinary Americans seem to believe that we have entered an era when abuse, or even torture, is necessary to save lives.
Each week, for instance, up to 20 million Americans have watched the fictional detectives of "NYPD Blue" use harsh methods to "tune up" suspects in the "pokey,'" or interrogation room, risking their careers to extract information that regularly saved lives and made the city safer. Accepting the need to torture just one criminal in this week's episode, or just one terrorist with a ticking bomb in Fox Television's popular CIA drama "24," opens ordinary Americans to consider whether the torture of real terrorists is not only justifiable but imperative. It seems likely that these televised scenarios have lent a hand in creating a public climate tolerant of governmental torture.
Does Bush administration policy really reflect a fundamental shift in moral choices by the American public? Have we really developed a taste for torture?
As a people, we are now faced with a decision that will influence the character of our nation and its reputation in the eyes of the world. We can agree with the Bush administration's decision to make torture a permanent weapon in the American arsenal -- or we can reject this policy and join the international community by honoring our commitments under the UN convention, as well as under U.S. law, and banning torture unconditionally.
This article first appeared on www.tomdispatch.com, a weblog of the Nation Institute, which offers a steady flow of alternate sources, news and opinion from Tom Engelhardt, a long time editor in publishing, the author of The End of Victory Culture, and a fellow of the Nation Institute.
Fouad Ajami: The ballot is not infallible, but it has broken the Arab pact with tyranny.
Source: WSJ (2-7-06)
[Mr. Ajami, Majid Khadduri Professor and director of the Middle East Studies Program at Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies, is the author, among other books, of "Dream Palace of the Arabs: A Generation's Odyssey" (Vintage, 1999).]
So, some now say, a people led for more than three decades by Yasser Arafat, a man who dodged all moral and political responsibility, have flunked a great democratic test. It wasn't a pretty choice that the Palestinians were presented with: the secular autocracy of plunder and pretense represented by Arafat's inheritors on the one side and the cruel utopia of the Hamas hard-liners on the other. This was where Palestinian history led. Ever since the Palestinians had taken to the road after 1948, that population had never been given the gift of political truth. Zionism had built a whole, new world west of the Jordan River, but Palestinian nationalism had insisted that all this could be undone.
An Arab intellectual of discerning intelligence, the Moroccan historian Abdullah Laroui, caught the logic of this refusal to accept history's verdict. "On a certain day," Palestinians believed, "everything would be obliterated and instantaneously reconstructed and the new inhabitants would leave, as if by magic, the land they had despoiled; in this way will justice be dispensed to the victims, on the day when the presence of God shall again make itself be felt." There is, then, nothing distinctive or unique about Hamas's refusal to acknowledge the legitimacy of a Jewish state on the land. Its secular predecessors and alternatives had not been possessed of much greater realism.
This was not a defeat of President Bush's "diplomacy of freedom" that has just played out in Gaza and the West Bank. The claim that the bet on Arab democracy placed by the president has now been lost is shallow and partisan. These were Palestinians who voted a mix of incoherence and legitimate wrath at a ruling political class that had given them nothing but false bravado and fed them on a diet of maximalism. For decades, the outside world had asked precious little of the Palestinians. Arafat, the Maximum Leader of their movement, had never owned up to any historical responsibility, and there were always powers beyond waiting to bail him out, to wink at his deeds of terror, to subsidize the economy of extortion and plunder that he and his lieutenants, and his security services, had brought with them to the Palestinian territories in the aftermath of the peace of Oslo.
It was with this ruinous indulgence of the Palestinians that George W. Bush was to break in the summer of 2002, when he gave the Palestinians a promise of American support contingent on their renunciation of terror. Where American diplomacy during the Clinton years had averted its gaze from Arafat's cynical use of deeds of terror, Mr. Bush had put that Palestinian leader beyond the pale. The claims of "victimhood" would no longer acquit the Palestinians; they would now be held responsible for the politics, and the history, they made. It proved hard for the Palestinians to make that adjustment, but there can be no denying that a measure of sobriety came into their world. The Arabs who had granted the Palestinians everything and nothing at the same time had drifted away from the cause of Palestine. The center of political gravity in Arab lands had shifted from the Mediterranean to the Persian Gulf; Ramallah was of little consequence when compared with the sea lanes of the gulf, and the fight in the Arabian Peninsula between the forces of order and those of religious bigotry. The romance of the "children of the stones" had subsided. Heartless and unsentimental, Arab society, in the midst of another windfall of oil wealth, now sought a reprieve from political and religious furies. A stock frenzy has taken hold in the Arabian Peninsula and the gulf; the tales of Palestinian woes would no longer hold other Arabs....
Daniel Pipes: Cartoons and Islamic Imperialism
Source: New York Sun (2-7-06)
[Mr. Pipes is the director of the Middle East Forum. His website address is http://www.danielpipes.org. Click here for his HNN blog.]
The key issue at stake in the battle over the twelve Danish cartoons of the Muslim prophet Muhammad is this: Will the West stand up for its customs and mores, including freedom of speech, or will Muslims impose their way of life on the West? Ultimately, there is no compromise: Westerners will either retain their civilization, including the right to insult and blaspheme, or not.
More specifically, will Westerners accede to a double standard by which Muslims are free to insult Judaism, Christianity, Hinduism, and Buddhism, while Muhammad, Islam, and Muslims enjoy immunity from insults? Muslims routinely publish cartoons far more offensive than the Danish ones . Are they entitled to dish it out while being insulated from similar indignities?
Germany's Die Welt newspaper hinted at this issue in an editorial: "The protests from Muslims would be taken more seriously if they were less hypocritical. When Syrian television showed drama documentaries in prime time depicting rabbis as cannibals, the imams were quiet." Nor, by the way, have imams protested the stomping on the Christian cross embedded in the Danish flag.
The deeper issue here, however, is not Muslim hypocrisy but Islamic supremacism. The Danish editor who published the cartoons, Flemming Rose, explained that if Muslims insist "that I, as a non-Muslim, should submit to their taboos ... they're asking for my submission."
Precisely. Robert Spencer rightly called on the free world to stand "resolutely with Denmark." The informative Brussels Journal asserts, "We are all Danes now." Some governments get it:
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Norway: "We will not apologize because in a country like Norway, which guarantees freedom of expression, we cannot apologize for what the newspapers print," Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg commented.
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Germany: "Why should the German government apologize [for German papers publishing the cartoons]? This is an expression of press freedom," Interior Minister Wolfgang Schauble said.
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France: "Political cartoons are by nature excessive. And I prefer an excess of caricature to an excess of censorship," Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy commented.
Other governments wrongly apologized:
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Poland: "The bounds of properly conceived freedom of expression have been overstepped," Prime Minister Kazimierz Marcinkiewicz stated.
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United Kingdom: "The republication of these cartoons has been unnecessary, it has been insensitive, it has been disrespectful and it has been wrong," Foreign Secretary Jack Straw said.
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New Zealand: "Gratuitously offensive," is how Trade Negotiations Minister Jim Sutton described the cartoons.
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United States: "Inciting religious or ethnic hatred in this manner is not acceptable," a State Department press officer, Janelle Hironimus, said.
Strangely, as "Old Europe" finds its backbone, the Anglosphere quivers. So awful was the American government reaction, it won the endorsement of the country's leading Islamist organization, the Council on American-Islamic Relations. This should come as no great surprise, however, for Washington has a history of treating Islam preferentially. On two earlier occasions it also faltered in cases of insults concerning Muhammad.
In 1989, Salman Rushdie came under a death edict from Ayatollah Khomeini for satirizing Muhammad in his magical-realist novel, The Satanic Verses. Rather than stand up for the novelist's life, President George H.W. Bush equated The Satanic Verses and the death edict, calling both "offensive." The then secretary of state, James A. Baker III, termed the edict merely "regrettable."
Even worse, in 1997 when an Israeli woman distributed a poster of Muhammad as a pig, the American government shamefully abandoned its protection of free speech. On behalf of President Bill Clinton, State Department spokesman Nicholas Burns called the woman in question "either sick or … evil" and stated that "She deserves to be put on trial for these outrageous attacks on Islam." The State Department endorses a criminal trial for protected speech? Stranger yet was the context of this outburst. As I noted at the time, having combed through weeks of State Department briefings, I "found nothing approaching this vituperative language in reference to the horrors that took place in Rwanda, where hundreds of thousands lost their lives. To the contrary, Mr. Burns was throughout cautious and diplomatic."
Western governments should take a crash course on Islamic law and the historically-abiding Muslim imperative to subjugate non-Muslim peoples. They might start by reading the forthcoming book by Efraim Karsh, Islamic Imperialism: A History (Yale).
Peoples who would stay free must stand unreservedly with Denmark.
This article is reprinted with permission by Daniel Pipes. This article first appeared in the New York Sun.
Thomas J. Sugrue: Now Detroit Has to Face Its Real Self Again
Source: Detroit Free Press (2-6-06)
[THOMAS J. SUGRUE is Kahn Professor of History and Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania. He is author of "The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit"]
Super Bowl XL brought the international limelight to the Motor City. Travel writers and out-of-town visitors for the most part marveled at the "new" Detroit. And minus a little post-game litter, Detroit's downtown sparkles.
Downtown's new businesses include a Borders and a Hard Rock Cafe. Suburban empty nesters and young artists are colonizing long-abandoned buildings. The views are better than ever from the city's surreal People Mover, the usually empty, elevated train that snakes through downtown.
Scroll back to 1980. The Big Three auto companies are hemorrhaging market share to the Japanese. Detroit is ravaged by thousands of layoffs. As the city's long downward spiral accelerates -- as the Motor City becomes an international symbol of urban crisis -- city planners seize on the idea that a downtown
"renaissance" will bring Detroit back. And a big event will be the catalyst.
"Detroit Loves a Good Party" was emblazoned on T-shirts and billboards as the city prepared to host its biggest extravaganza ever. The Republican National Convention brought a deluge of national leaders, celebrities and journalists.
The streets were gussied up with 10,000 new trees and shrubs. Dozens of rundown buildings were bulldozed.
"There is little doubt that Detroit has turned the corner on some of its most obvious problems," gushed the Washington Post. "Middle-class whites are moving back into the city, and a visitor senses a new vitality downtown. People are coming downtown to eat in restaurants ... and visit its glistening Renaissance Center."
When the last delegate left town, the nearly universal consensus was that the convention had been a success. Detroit got dressed up and threw one helluva party.
The convention boosted Detroit's spirits. But the highly touted downtown renaissance did not do much for the city. In the next 20 years, Detroit lost more than 250,000 people and tens of thousands of jobs. By the turn of the century, large sections of the city were empty.
Unfortunately, there are striking parallels between Detroit 2006 and Detroit 1980. The Big Three have announced massive layoffs and plant closings. Paralyzed by the depressing news of downsizing, Detroiters are looking again to downtown as the city's savior. If somehow we can persuade the glitterati that Detroit is hip, if we can attract the "creative class" to renovated lofts, if we can get suburbanites to spend their money in downtown restaurants and clubs, and, above all, if we can attract tourists, we'll rise from the rust.
This is trickle-down urbanism -- the belief that a new, improved downtown will save the city. And it won't work.
Look at some of Detroit's peers. Cleveland struggles with rates of poverty as high as Detroit's despite its Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and revivified waterfront. Baltimore has tens of thousands of vacant lots and abandoned houses, even with its gentrified Inner Harbor and world-class Camden Yards stadium. Philadelphia now has the nation's third most populous downtown, its streets bustling with suburban empty-nesters and international tourists. But in its shadow are vast, desolate wastelands, pockmarked block after block, and stunningly high rates of unemployment.
Even where downtown gentrification has been most successful, it has not done much for urban blue- and pink-collar workers. In U.S. cities, the poor have gotten poorer. The massive subsidies and tax abatements that cities use to lure developers exact a high price. Working-class taxpayers bear the burden of the cost of casinos and stadiums and loft apartments. What do they get in exchange? Cuts in city services to their own neighborhoods and, for the most part, poorly paying service sector jobs....
Detroit instead has to think creatively about how to bring back the good-paying and secure jobs that made it one of the mightiest cities in the world just a few generations ago. A weekend of parties -- even a year of them -- won't do the trick. For most Detroiters, the party has been over for a long time.
Bernard Chazelle: France's Colonial Blowback
Source: Website of Bernard Chazelle
[Bernard Chazelle is Professor of Computer Science, Princeton University.]
... There is the creed of the French Republic. And then there is the reality: riots that convulsed the nation for 3 weeks last fall. The roots of the crisis go back to the labor shortage of the sixties. Boatloads of North African immigrants landed on France's shores to provide the transient workforce needed to sustain an unprecedented economic boom. The transient part of the plan took a hit when the guests got the bizarre idea of having—gasp—children. Though of French nationality, this new generation, self-named Beurs (why Beurs? read on), grew up with the distinction of being neither truly French nor, for that matter, truly Arab. The Algerians among them bore the added stigma of a particularly nasty bout of decolonization.
The government parked the new immigrants in giant housing projects, called cités, apparently confident in the integrating virtues of reinforced cement concrete. To be fair, these were the same Le Corbusier-designed monstrosities that housed the poor in the wake of World War II. Fifty years on, priding itself on having inflicted the full brunt of architectural genius on two generations of urban guinea pigs, the government is finally calling in the bulldozers.
Strangers in their own land, young Beurs face an identity crisis that had spared earlier immigrants: France is their house but it won't be their home. Caught in the void between competing cultural narratives, they suffer social exclusion, employment discrimination, and a jobless rate that is twice the average. Social progress in France is often measured by the rhythms of civil protest. Aspiring children of the Republic, the Beurs have mastered the very French notion that taking to the streets is just politics by other means: always theatrical; sometimes destructive; rarely lethal. Last fall's unrest killed only 1 person, yet spread to 274 cities over 22 days [14]; a mere sideshow compared with the 1992 LA riots: 53 deaths; 1 city; 5 days [15].
Street protests in France are anti-authoritarian People vs. Cops dustups, not “multiculturalist” sports events like the race riots in Britain and Australia last year. The rioting Beurs took their cue from the farmers, truckers, and transit workers, for whom the street world is a stage. So secular, so Fight-The-Man, so French. The Union of French Islamic Organizations issued a fatwa against the riots, whose utter ineffectiveness only served to highlight the irrelevance of organized Islam in France. Hard as it may be on a neocon's digestive tract to swallow, religion played no role in the riots.
Predictably, the view stateside was fittingly twisted. Fresh from blowing away the competition in Iraq as the world's top manure producer, the US mainstream media saw the French riots as the perfect excuse to crank up production. The New York Times informed its readers that “No other country in Europe immolates cars with the gusto and single-minded efficiency of France. Even during tranquil periods, an average of 80 vehicles per day are set alight somewhere in the country” [16]. Never mind that, even during tranquil periods, an average of 192 vehicles per day are set alight somewhere in the UK [17]. But, to quote Saint Judy, why let facts get in the way of a good story?
The Washington Times wouldn't know. Taking a break from bouncing off his padded walls, the reliably batty Mark Steyn put on his tinfoil hat to identify the culprit: “an assertive Muslim identity more implacable than anything likely in the Middle East” [18]. (Take that, Osama.) By then fully intoxicated with his own brilliance, Steyn had to let his hallucinations do the talking: “France's Arab street correctly identified Jacques Chirac's opposition to the Iraq war for what it was: a sign of weakness.” Nothing like a nice big cup of Neocon Kool-Aid to cheer up the asylum.
Of course, the Islamofascist connection did not escape the paranoid gaze of the vigilantes manning the barricades at The New Republic: “If a significant fascist party existed in France, it is among these young Arab and North African children of immigrants [...] that it would recruit for its storm troopers” [19]. Yes, of course; and when the KKK tries to sign up new members it goes scouting the hood in Compton for recruits. TNR has been nicknamed the “in-flight magazine of Air Force One.” Evidently, it doubles nicely as a barf bag.
Men in designer suits order bombs to be dropped on pajama-clad children in the dead of night: some call them war criminals; others statesmen. Boys in hoodies shoplift burger patties from supermarkets: some call them vermin; others rotten vermin. And when they compound their crimes by having names that no decent churchgoer can even spell we call them rotten vermin twice evil—or Beurs, for short.
Poverty is the key variable that correlates crime and ethnicity. This correlation is the sea in which the racist fish swims. Distribute nonwhites across the social spectrum of wealth and watch racial discrimination recede like the ocean at low tide. Here's how you do it: have the government hire all unemployed white guys named Jacques and dispatch them all across France to steal burger patties. This way, when Ahmed applies for a job, the interviewer will sigh with relief and say: “Well, at least your name is not Jacques.” (To appreciate the full genius of my scheme, note that all Jacques will be fully employed, so it won't matter a whit if they're now the ones to suffer employment discrimination).
Another solution is to jail everyone named Ahmed. America has been working on a variant of this for a while now and the verdict is mixed: only 30 percent of all black males are expected to be incarcerated in their lifetime, so there's still some ways to go [20].
If all else fails, of course, one can always ask white people to stop being such racist pigs. But recent genomics research indicates that mutation from swine to angel requires more than a hectoring preacher with a wagging finger. It requires creating job opportunities and enforcing anti-discrimination laws. The latter is tough to do in France because the state may not gather any racial, ethnic, or religious demographics. The ban was meant to propitiate the gods of égalité but seems to have riled them up instead. Pinning yellow stars during the Vichy years was not the best advertisement for ethnic monitoring, and the idea is still unpalatable to many. But, regardless of what pleases its tastebuds, France needs the proper tools to fight discrimination. No one shines a brighter light on race than the racist, and it is an abiding irony that the Republic's blindness to the light has only enhanced its brightness.
France needs affirmative action; the preferred term is discrimination positive, a lovely oxymoron that evokes the upbeat desperation of “exquisite pain” while begging the transience of “hot ice cream.” The nutty fundies of the Republic can bleat all they want about the evil of affirmative action and the dread of communautarisme that it drags in its wake: it is a red herring. An ostracized, ghettoized populace is the ultimate form of communautarisme. Affirmative action is no panacea: in fact, it is the worst possible remedy—with the exception of all the others.
Political representation is another sore point. The marvelous chromatic unity on display in the gilded halls of the Palais Bourbon (the parliament) suggests a new French tricolor: white, white, white. Legislators recently passed a “parity law” meant to promote the presence of women in politics. It would do well to extend the idea to ethnic minorities. The Cassandras who read in the tea leaves of affirmative action the end of the Republic suffer either from bad faith or from a tragic lack of imagination.
From Tom Friedman's business class seat, 30,000 feet above the Calcutta Golf & Country Club where he'll soon be predicting the end of Indian poverty while practicing his tee shot, the world looks awfully flat. From the burning banlieues it is anything but. Friedman's cherished globalization has deepened inequalities and tied up the government's hands just as it needed more wiggle room. Despite its tight labor market and high unemployment, France has been a neoliberal's dream: more companies in the Fortune Global 500 than both Germany and the UK; more foreign direct investment flowing into it than into the US; tighter fiscal policies, etc. [4, 21]. If anything, the riots prove that France is well on its way to being fully Friedmanized: a flat world with cracks just wide enough to swallow up the impoverished masses.
Racism and globalization are the ingredients of the stew brewing in the cités: France's political class is the chef that keeps it stirred. Frighteningly competent and hopelessly out of touch, the chef suffers from advanced autism. The competence stares you in the face: trains run on time without the help of a fascist dictator; cell phones are real phones—not cheap excuses for standing outside in the rain while pretending to be searching for a signal; potholes are tiny orifices in the sort of kitchenware that... well, you get the point. As for being in touch, the ruling elite is passionately in touch with its favorite kind: itself. It is obsessed with self-preservation, ossified, and lordly. De Gaulle once compared the French to dawdling calves: apparently, someone forgot to tell Chirac it was a joke.
Both wings of the political spectrum have fused into a gloppy miasma of opportunism. Most politicians these days graduate from the same school, ENA, and learn early on to confine their differences to their choice of dessert in the school cafeteria. From the recent European constitution fiasco to Le Pen's day in the sun of the 2002 presidential election, French leaders have demonstrated a phenomenal ability to misread the electorate. The Beurs were born to be the left's dream catch. That the only catching they got was from the neighborhood cops says much about the socialists' state of decay. Alas, civil unrest invariably rewards the wrong side, and few sights are more repulsive than a smug Le Pen licking his drooling chops. ...
NIall Ferguson: Missing the Cold War
Source: LAT (1-30-06)
MISS THE Cold War. I know I ought not to, but I just can't help it. So I was naturally delighted by last week's spy story. Admittedly, as one of the papers here in London cruelly remarked, it was more Johnny English than James Bond.
In a television documentary that had Kremlin fingerprints all over it, four British Embassy staffers were accused of being spooks. Blurred video footage purported to show them fiddling with a rock in a Moscow suburb. According to Russian counterespionage, the rock contained an illicit electronic device for communicating with Russian "accomplices."
Well, it's possible. But why would Her Majesty's Men in Moscow want to conceal what they were up to if, as the Russians allege, they were merely transferring funds to Russian nongovernmental organizations? Only in the fevered imagination of Vladimir Putin, the ex-Soviet spook who now runs Russia, do NGOs figure as subversive entities.
Putin's crackdown on NGOs is part of a wider pattern of behavior that strongly suggests that my nostalgia for the Cold War is shared in the Kremlin. ...
Nobody can now pretend that Russia is just — as the old Cold War joke had it — "Upper Volta with rockets." Soaring energy prices have brought boom times to Russia, even if the returns mainly flow into the coffers of the new nomenklatura. The Russian stock market went up 80% last year. So if Putin wants Cold War II, you might be forgiven for thinking he can certainly afford to have it.
Of course, I was not being entirely serious when I said that I miss the Cold War. I would never wish the Soviet Union back, not least for the sake of the Poles, the Czechs, the Hungarians and all the other peoples who won back their liberty in 1989.
What makes me nostalgic is that Soviet wickedness made politics so much simpler in my youth. All you had to do was to go to the Eastern Bloc to see what a real military-industrial complex looked like — and to feel for yourself what the absence of freedom really meant.
Every time I took the S-Bahn to Friedrichstrasse, the old gateway to East Berlin, I shuddered at the knowledge that I was entering the realm of despotism — a place where there were no rights to privacy, to property or to political representation. Now you need to take a trip to North Korea if you want to get that salutary feeling, which did so much to clarify my own political views. ...
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