Uninformed Opinion

On Blogging

2005-07-19T09:47:00.000-05:00

Let's face it, I'm a terrible blogger. I'm a terrible blogger because the second I start blogging, it becomes a chore I want desperately to avoid. It's not like I don't, in theory, want to regale the world with my thoughts on whatever, and have the world read it and love and and be changed forever by it, or that I don't have a lot to say, or that I think I say it poorly. I'm just lazy, I guess.

Like I said, it's a chore, and I have enough chores in my life right now. It's harder and harder to write at work, since I'm criticizing the government on a government computer, and by the time I get home from work or class, writing is not high on my list.

My thanks to everyone who read and commented, my apologies to everyone who wants more. But, seriously, there are a bajillion other blogs out there. No one will miss this one.

Can We Officially Bury Flypaper Now?

2005-07-12T15:42:00.000-05:00

Heather of Here's What's Left points to a radio address by President Bush on 9 July:

We are now waging a global war on terror - from the mountains of Afghanistan to the border regions of Pakistan, to the Horn of Africa, to the islands of the Philippines, to the plains of Iraq. We will stay on the offense, fighting the terrorists abroad so we do not have to face them at home.

Emphasis mine. The London bombings, in case you have forgotten, were just two days earlier. I suppose it's possible that Bush doesn't consider London, capital of our closest ally and the second-largest force in the "Coalition of the Willing", as part of "home", and instead counts it as part of the "abroad" where we're fighting the terrorists so we don't have to fight them at "home". You know, so long as it's fer'ners who are dying and not 'Murkins, it's all good. Or he was just bullshitting.

Either way, let's bury the "Flypaper Strategy", shall we?

Because after this, I think it's pretty clear that Flypaper has not worked. The New York Times is reporting that the bombs were technically advanced and appear to be the work of experts. Newsweek (via Eric Umansky) has written about the Class of '05:

In Iraq, on the other hand, hostility toward America is practically the only thing that all insurgents agree on—foreign infiltrators and native recruits alike. And jihadists in Iraq are getting direct, on-the-job training in a real-life insurgency, with hands-on experience in bombing, sniping and all the skills of urban warfare, unlike the essentially artificial training that was given at Al Qaeda's rural Afghan camps.

One of the paper's main points is that America's Iraqi troubles will not end with the insurgency. In effect, Iraq is producing a new corps of master terrorists with an incandescent hatred for the United States—the "class of '05 problem," as it's called in the shorthand of CIA analysts. This war is proving to be longer and nastier than almost anyone expected. One day, its results may be felt closer to home.

It's very possible that someone involved in the attacks spent time honing skills in Iraq. Even if no one involved had been to Iraq, we still have yet another example (after Bali, Madrid, and Beslan, to name a few) of terrorists who have not been attracted to Iraq to be killed by American forces. Instead, they're still happily murdering people around the world.

Flypaper only makes sense if we attract lots of terrorists and would be terrorists to Iraq - and kill enough of them so that they can no longer organize attacks. We fight - and kill them - in foreign lands so they cannot return to America (And the rest of the Western world - right? They still count too, right?) to launch new attacks. Of course, this was dumb from day number one.

When the Soviets invaded Afghanistan in 1979, would-be jihadis flocked to the country en masse. The Soviets spent a decade and lost 15,000 troops fighting the Afghan mujahadeen and their Arab allies. They killed tens of thousands of them. And yet, after all that, there were still enough jihadis to organize al Qaeda and its associated organizations, and to launch all of their murderous attacks of the last decade and a half. If the Soviets killed tens of thousands over a decade at a cost of 15,000 dead, how many will we have to kill, and at what cost, before we make a dent in the operational capability of terrorists?

It's a meaningless question. No matter how many we kill, more can just take their place. It's like asking: how many murderers do we have to kill before there's no more murder, ever again? We can kill a lot of terrorists, and we can attract a lot of would-be terrorists and kill them before they can do any harm. We can affect the operational capability of some groups and we can destroy others outright. But we can never get them all, because not all of them will go to Iraq, not all of them will be killed, and not all of them even exist yet.

Flypaper never made strategic sense for another reason. Among the many justifications for war (WMD! Freedom! He tried to kill my father!) presented by the Bush administration, flypaper has been getting a lot of play - but so has the neocon justification: turning Iraq into the first Arab democracy, from which democracy will spread to other Arab countries, ending the regimes that made it possible for radical political Islam to grow. Ignoring the fact that many Islamic radicals come from democracies and not dictatorships (how many of the September 11 hijackers lived in Germany?), this is utterly and totally incompatible with flypaper.

We invade an impoverished, brutalized country with barely controlled sectarian divisions. The economy and infrastructure are devastated. Years of war and sanctions have crushed the population. We want, within a matter of months, to turn it into a thriving democracy on the road to economic prosperity. What do we do? Why, we invite terrorists from all over the world to engage the U.S. armed forces in a battle to the death! Genius! The Cunning Realist raises some moral issues, too:

What gives us the right to use a sovereign nation as a catch basin for carnage so we can go on blissfully consuming and merrily flipping real estate here? Instead of flypaper, this should be called the "Night of the Living Dead Nation" strategy---using the undead, zombie-like carcass of a failed state for our own benefit. Beyond the sheer selfish immorality of it, has anyone thought about the potential for blowback? How would you feel if we were invaded by the Chinese on a false pretense, and they stated openly that their strategy was to attract and fight the scum of the earth in the streets of New York, Washington, Los Angeles and Chicago so they did not have to fight in Beijing?

Even if they thought they could kill lots of terrorists very quickly, they were still trying to attract terrorists, who were going to practice terrorism, into a country we were trying to rebuild as quickly as possible. The whole point of the war, according to this theory, was to end terrorism in the long-term by destroying the conditions which created it, and that starts with Iraq. It is, according to them, utterly vital to our national security and our survival. So we take something that's utterly vital to our survival and, just to make sure that we don't get too cocky, toss in some tens of thousands of terrorists. Does this make any sense? Any construction contractors out there? How easy is it to complete a project which is being sabotaged by terrorists while the Marines shoot back?

Either one of these two justifications for the war was utter and total bullshit, or our leaders are even stupider than I had originally thought.

Media Bias

2005-07-11T13:40:00.000-05:00

From Instapundit, via Andrew Sullivan, we get this gem of media criticism:

I bet if the media voluntarily stopped showing any pictures of all terror attacks, that the terror would stop. Thus ending the GWOT without a shot. This policy would be NO DIFFERENT than how they cover folks who run on to baseball fields: they do NOT show them on TV; they ignore them. Would the media ever put peace above their ratings/profits? Never.

The idiocy of this is astonishing. Setting aside the fact that, even sans coverage, people are going to hear about mass murder (only this time as rumor), this is still really stupid.

The reasoning goes something like this, I suppose: if people don't know about the threat of terrorism, then they cannot be scared into giving into the goals of terrorists, and so terrorism would lose its effectiveness as a tool. In theory, the terrorists would give up their ineffective tool.

The implication is: if people know the whole truth, they might make a decision that Glenn Reynolds doesn't like. To prevent this, people must be prevented from knowing the truth.

And people accuse liberals of being paternalists. So much for having an electorate of informed adults making decisions for themselves.

Right-wing criticism of so called "liberal media bias" (you know: the dread MSM which is objectively pro-terrorist and those perfidious defeatist reporters who hate Bush so much they'd rather tongue-kiss bin Laden than report positive news from Iraq, that old chestnut) has absolutely nothing to do with creating an "unbiased" media and has everything to do with pressuring the media to only report what and how conservatives want them to report.

Case in point: Kevin Sites.

Kevin Sites is a freelance journalist who works covers warzones all over the world. In November of last year he was working for NBC, embedded with the 3rd Battalion, 1st Marine Regiment in Fallujah. There, he filmed a Marine shooting an unarmed, wounded insurgent who had surrendered the day before. Two days later, NBC reported the story, and from there it spread around the world.

And immediately Kevin Sites became the enemy of all that is good and right in the world.

Go ahead, google Kevin Sites and treason. You'll get over 75,000 hits.

This is important: treason, as defined by the Constitution, consists "only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort." Sites did not levy war, nor did he adhere to our enemies or give them comfort and aid. Instead, he filmed an American soldier shooting an unarmed, wounded prisoner. And for this, in the eyes of right-wing nutjobs, he is a traitor.

Imagine, for a moment, that the goal of this media criticism really were to create "unbiased" media. What would this look like? Imagine that instead of reporters like Sites, choosing what to film and networks like NBC, choosing what to broadcast (because this is, of course, where the bias occurs, since choosing what to cover is also choosing how to portray something), we had full, blanket coverage of every square inch of Iraq at every moment of every day. Anyone in the world could log onto Iraq.com and click on any part of the map, and instantly have live video coverage of that spot, along with complete archives of everything that happened in that spot before. What would happen?

People would still have seen that Marine shoot that prisoner.

Conservatives say "we want unbiased media". They then say "we don't want the public to know about bad things like that shooting". You can't have both. If you want unbiased, you're going to cover everything, including the bad stuff. Sites didn't make it up - he simply reported it. If you don't want the bad stuff shown, you want bias - bias in favor of your agenda. You don't want a free press, or at least a free press that chooses what you don't like. You want a propaganda mill.

The idea is that, by showing lots of bad stuff in Iraq, the media will turn American public opinion away from supporting the war in Iraq towards withdrawal. Some people can't stand this - the idea that a fully-informed electorate might make a choice that runs counter to the Bush administration's agenda in Iraq. This idea if so outrageous to some people that it is more important to control access to information than it is to allow adults to make decisions of themselves in a democracy - or to address the problems in Iraq that are causing the shift in public opinion in the first place.

Resilience

2005-07-11T11:07:00.000-05:00

Human beings have the capacity for enormous depravity. From The New York Times:

Nationwide, the Drug Enforcement Administration says that over the last five years 15,000 children were found at laboratories where methamphetamine was made. But that number vastly understates the problem, federal officials say, because it does not include children whose parents use methamphetamine but do not make it and because it relies on state reporting, which can be spotty.

...But the biggest problem, doctors who work with children say, is not with those born under the effects of the drug but with the children who grow up surrounded by methamphetamine and its attendant problems. Because users are so highly sexualized, the children are often exposed to pornography or sexual abuse, or watch their mothers prostitute themselves, the welfare workers say.

The drug binges tend to last for days or weeks, and the crash is tremendous, leaving children unwashed and unfed for days as parents fall into a deep sleep.

"The oldest kid becomes the parent, and the oldest kid may be 4 or 5 years old," said Dr. Mike Stratton, a pediatrician in Muskogee, Okla., who is involved with a state program for children exposed to drugs that is run in conjunction with the Justice Department. "The parents are basically worthless, when they're not stoned they're sleeping it off, when they're not sleeping they don't eat, and it's not in their regimen to feed the kids."

But, in the face of this, as in the face of all such things, some people demonstrate our capacity for resilience, selflessness, and all those things that make it seem like we might not destroy ourselves in the end:

Ms. Glick recalls a group of siblings found eating plaster at a home filled with methamphetamine. The oldest, age 6, was given a hamburger when they arrived at the Laura Dester Shelter; he broke it apart and handed out bits to his siblings before taking a bite himself.

Breaks my heart.

HVC: Hippie Vs. Communist

2005-07-07T15:06:00.000-05:00

Whoever wins...We lose.

The other day, as I was walking to and from the supermarket, I was treated to a protest (such are the benefits of living in Washington, DC). Like most, this was run by hippies (but not all are - the weirdest was a bunch of Turks marching around, chanting "No More Lies!" and waving signs that indicated support for the US for not recognizing the Armenian Genocide). Unlike most hippie-run protests, however, this one was not about how our wars for oil are making it so that we can't eat fish from the sea (yes, seriously, I once heard a hippie chick chant/rap this at one protest to which I was privy).

No, this one was to protest against the Communist Party of China!

That's right, hippies were protesting communists. Lately I've seen ads on TV for some book, something like "Nine Commentaries on the Chinese Communist Party" that's supposedly destroying the CCP. And even though my arms were full of bags of groceries I had carried six blocks in July heat and humidity (DC is built on a swamp), a very nice Chinese lady was very insistent that I take a brochure that had something to do with the book. So, the whole thing was probably organized by some Chinese dissident group, probably the Falun Gong, who I sometimes see performing their exercises across the street from the Chinese embassy in protest of the CCP's harsh repression of their club/cult/religion/whatever.

But even if it was organized by the Falun Gong, it was still interesting and fun to listen to hippies up on a temporary stage lecturing inarticulately through a megaphone about the evils of communism.

So, for everyone out there who thinks there's a monolithic Left and that if Hillary Clinton is elected she'll install a Stalinist dictatorship, here is a clear example of Leftists rejecting communism. I'm about as big a fan of hippies as is Eric Cartman, but it's nice to see them doing something, you know, good, like criticizing an actual genocidal dictatorship for a change.

Terror in London

2005-07-07T07:27:00.000-05:00

I turned on the cable news this morning, something I only do while getting ready each day (I generally despise TV news), and saw something terrible. That CNN story seems a little out of date; the last I heard, there had been six explosions and twenty people killed.

It was with some trepidation that I got on the Metro this morning to commute to work. I'm not particularly well versed with emergency procedures on the subway. I suppose I really, really should learn.

UPDATE: The Guardian and BBC have more. Guardian is reporting on their homepage that as many as 45 people are dead. An al Qaeda group is apparently claiming responsibility. This does tend to fit their patter of multiple simultaneous attacks.

Pandagon is pointing to the Muslim Council of Britain, who are condemning the attacks. Meanwhile, LGF commenters are calling for the destruction of Mecca. Because nothing solves terrorism and religious war like genocide and more religious war!

Enuii

2005-07-05T19:54:00.000-05:00

I'm suffering from a horrible case of enuii, or some existential funk, or maybe I'm just bored and lazy, but not blogging today. I'll see if I can't turn something out tomorrow.

Who, Exactly, Did bin Laden Want As President?

2005-07-01T09:12:00.000-05:00

The Poor Man points to this interesting article in The Jerusalem Post:

Two French journalists who were held hostage in Iraq told a British documentary program that their captors believed George W. Bush's re-election as US president would help radicalize Iraqis.

...The cell leader trained with terror leader Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan and told them the insurgents supported a Bush presidency because they believed it meant that "there will be confrontation, occupation and radicalization of the Iraqi people," Malbrunot said.

Right before the 2004 election, bin Laden released a tape that caused quite a stir. "Look!" cried Republicans. "He wants America to elect John Kerry!" "No!" cried the Democrats. "He hates both equally! He'll still try to kill us regardless of who we elect! And if he has a choice, he wants America to elect George Bush!"

Most of the confusion came from the translation of the Arabic word wilaya, which is used to denote both "state" as in "nation-state", but also "state" as in "Kentucky". CNN translated a particular passage thusly:

Your security is not in the hands of Kerry or Bush or al Qaeda. Your security is in your own hands. Any nation that does not attack us will not be attacked.

The Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI) translated it a little differently:

Your security is not in the hands of Kerry or Bush or Al-Qa'ida. Your security is in your own hands, and any [U.S.] state that does not toy with our security automatically guarantees its own security.

The first translation implies that bin Laden doesn't care who wins. The latter implies that voters in America had better think twice about who they're electing - and, as everyone knows, haha! George Bush was the only one with the cojones to attack bin Laden, so of course bin Laden was saying "if Ohio votes for Bush, we'll attack Ohio". So the Republican response went something like "if you don't love terrorists and want to open-mouth kiss bin Laden, of course you should vote for Bush, because bin Laden hates Bush and warned you not to vote for him, so let's stick it to bin Laden!"

My knowledge of Arabic is extremely limited (like, to the word wilaya), so as far as I know, both translations are equally valid. MEMRI's, though, looks a little staged: it was an editorial choice to insert the [U.S.] bit - and MEMRI's own ideological biases aren't exactly a state secret. Personally, I would have liked both CNN and MEMRI to make clear the impossibility of rendering the phrase directly into English, but they both made their choices, and MEMRI chose to imply that bin Laden wanted America to elect John Kerry.

But, the terrorists keep telling us, over and over, that they love that George Bush is president! The terrorist holding the two French journalists is not the only member of al Qaeda to state, directly, that they wanted George Bush to win. Last year, Yahoo News was reporting this:

An unrelated videotape of a man describing himself as al Qaeda's European military spokesman also claimed responsibility for the Madrid bombing... The statement said it supported U.S. President George W. Bush in his reelection campaign, and would prefer him to win in November rather than the Democratic candidate John Kerry, as it was not possible to find a leader "more foolish than you (Bush), who deals with matters by force rather than with wisdom."

In comments addressed to Bush, the group said:

"Kerry will kill our nation while it sleeps because he and the Democrats have the cunning to embellish blasphemy and present it to the Arab and Muslim nation as civilisation."

"Because of this we desire you (Bush) to be elected."

They seem to like Bush because, after September 11, Bush chose to attack a country that had nothing to do with September 11. While bin Laden was saying that the United States hated Islam and wanted to conquer Muslim countries to steal their resources and destroy their religion, the US invaded an oil-rich country that was not a direct threat (or even much of an indirect threat, especially at a time when there are plenty of actual terrorist/WMD threats).

As I pointed out the other day, Anthony Cordesman agrees about al Qaeda's goals:

The goal of Bin Laden and those like him is not to persuade the US or the West, it is rather to so alienate them from the Islamic and Arab world that the forces of secularism in the region will be sharply undermined, and Western secular influence can be controlled or eliminated...Such actions also breed anger and alienation in the US and the West and provoke excessive political and media reactions, more stringent security measures, violent responses, and all of the other actions that help instigate a "clash of civilizations." The US and the West are often provoked into playing into the hands of such attackers.

And I've talked about Ayman al Zawahiri and his goals:

Zawahiri views the current phase of the jihad as a revolutionary war, and the ideological component of the struggle is thus very important...He calls on his followers, at this stage of the struggle, to “launch a battle for orienting the [Muslim] nation” by striking at the United States and Israel. Thus, al Qaeda’s immediate goal is not to destroy Israel or even drive the United States out of the Middle East; rather, it is to "orient the nation."

Al Qaeda has very patiently and clearly explained, time and time again, what it wants: to attack America, not to destroy it immediately, but to provoke a response which can be used as a propaganda tool - here comes big bad America to get us! Told you so! Here's where to sign up!

And, in order to avoid writing yet another post on what Bush has done wrong (some function of x where x is "what Bush has done wrong" and is asymptotically approaching infinity), I'll make a recommendation: I don't want to stop fighting al Qaeda and its franchises. I want to fight it in such a way that al Qaeda cannot point at us and say "See? We told you so" - and have people listen. Since we can't un-invade Iraq, this means altering our fighting style there so as to stop killing quite so many innocent people, and alienating the survivors. Beyond Iraq, this means a lot of intelligence work, a lot of Predator drones firing missiles at cars in Yemen, a lot of work to secure the homeland, a lot of work by the Treasury to cut off terrorist funding, and a whole lot of propaganda (as in actually promoting democracy and reforms without shooting people first, and more Voice of America-style work), and most importantly, a whole lot of not invading any more countries that we don't really need to invade.

Seriously. Hitler told the world what he wanted to do, and man, is the world sure kicking itself for not reading that book. Al Qaeda is telling us exactly what it wants to do and how it plans on doing it.

Why are so few people listening?

The Withdrawal Option

2005-06-30T15:32:00.000-05:00

I'm not entirely wedded to withdrawal-as-policy, but it sounds better and better all the time.

William Saletan, writing in Slate, presents the best case for withdrawal I have yet to read:

In blood and money, it's fast becoming the most expensive welfare program in the history of the world. Like other welfare programs, it was a good idea when it started. Like other welfare programs, it has begun to overtax the treasury and the public. Like other welfare programs, it warps the behavior of its beneficiaries. But in one respect, it's unique. It's the one welfare program conservatives can't criticize or even recognize, because they're the ones running it.

...Setting a deadline for withdrawal of those troops "would send the wrong message to the Iraqis, who need to know that America will not leave before the job is done," Bush said tonight. But 45 seconds later, responding to calls for a troop increase, he cautioned, "Sending more Americans would undermine our strategy of encouraging Iraqis to take the lead in this fight." Which is it, Mr. President? Does our military presence encourage Iraqi self-sufficiency or weaken it?

I understand why Bush doesn't want to talk about withdrawal. He knows terrorists feed on fear and weakness. He knows the surest way to lose this war is to think we've lost it. He sees it not as a story that's been written but as a story we're still writing. That's why he appealed tonight to our virtues: courage, steadfastness, perseverance, resolve. He doesn't believe in objective impossibility. He believes in free will. And he's right.

But ultimately, this isn't our story. It's the Iraqis' story. They have to write it, and they have to start by drafting a constitution in six weeks. If they think Uncle Sam will prop them up till the job is done, the job will never get done. That's what conservatives used to understand about big government, before they started running it.

One of the many problems with Iraq remains that we have not established clear goals for ourselves, something that Bush used to think important back when he was criticizing Clinton for not having an exit plan from Kosovo. We have to ask ourselves: what are we willing to accept as victory? Every terrorist dead? Even if that were feasible, in the sense that continued fighting did not aid recruitment by the insurgency, we might be at that for decades. A stable government? We have to remember that less than a hundred years after declaring independence, America was fighting the bloodiest war in its history - against itself. And, last time I checked, Iraq had a democratically elected government - it's just waiting on a constitution. Oh yeah, and an army.

But Saletan, and some others, are specifically talking about our presence in Iraq as an impediment to achieving our goals.

In other words, get your act together, Iraq, or you're screwed in a way you can't possibly imagine.

Again, I'm not talking about immediate withdrawal. That would be bad. But Kevin Drum has some thoughts:

The constitution is supposed be put up for a vote on October 15. Let's announce that the second round of troop withdrawals will commence on November 15.

Elections for a government under the new constitution are supposed to be held on December 15. Let's announce that the third round of withdrawals will begin on January 15, 2006. After that, withdrawals will continue in an orderly way until the coalition presence is completely gone.

If the Iraqis ask for an extension, as the transitional law allows them to do, we should agree to push all these dates forward by an additional month. This sends a clear message: make the deals you need to make. Form a government. Get your troops trained. Because by the end of 2006, after nearly four years of war and occupation, coalition troops will be gone.

This doesn't mean the end of American help. Postwar aid has proven crucial to promoting stability and democracy in the aftermath of past conflicts, so we have every reason to be generous in providing reconstruction assistance of all kinds to the Iraqis. But it's time to let them know in a credible way that we aren't going to be there forever. Maybe that's just the motivation they need.

I approve. We have already started the process (hopefully) of splitting the Sunni nationalist element of the insurgency, which we can co-opt into the political process, from the jihadist element, which we're going to have to continue fighting.

This isn't running away. This is tough love.

More Thoughts on the Insurgency

2005-06-30T07:58:00.000-05:00

From Anthony Cordesman (page 39):

A few outlying estimates have been as low as 3,500 full-time actives making up the “core” forces. Most US military estimates range between 8,000 and 18,000, perhaps reaching over 20,000 when the ranks swell for major operations. Iraqi intelligence officials, on the other hand, have sometimes issued figures for the total number of Iraqi sympathizers and insurgents as high as 200,000, with a core of anywhere between 15,000 and 40,000 fighters and another 160,000 supporters. Newsweek quotes US sources as putting the total of insurgents at 12,000-20,000 in late June 2005. Another US expert is quoted as saying it had some 1,000 foreign jihadists,500 Iraqi jihadists, 15,000-30,000 in former regime elements, and some 400,000 auxiliaries and support personnel.

This is important. Depending on the estimates, the jihadists make up only twenty percent (at the absolute most) or four percent (at the absolute least) or eight percent (probably the most accurate). The rest are non-jihadists. They're ex-Baathists and they're Sunni nationalist. Cordesman has some theories on why the Sunnis continue to join the insurgency (page 43):

According to the CIA reports, the Sunni loss of power, prestige, and economic influence is a key factor, as is unemployment and a loss of personal status -- direct and disguised unemployment among young Sunni men has been 40-60% in many areas ever since the fall of Saddam Hussein. Many insurgents are motivated by tribal or family grievances, nationalism and religious duty. Others are motivated by the U.S. occupation – particularly those who have lost a loved one fighting U.S. forces – and the political and economic turmoil that accompanied the occupation.

It didn't have to be this way (page 42):

It is important to note that while most of Iraq’s ruling elite during Saddam Hussein’s decades of dictatorship were Sunni, the top elite came from a small portion of Sunnis, many with family backgrounds in what were originally rural military families. The top elite had strong ties now only to Saddam’s extended family, but to Tikritis in general, and the al-Bu Nasir tribe and its Bejat clan and Majid family. The vast majority of Sunnis got little special benefit from Saddam’s rule, and many Sunnis suffered from his oppression in the same way as other Iraqis.

Most Sunni Arabs, like most Shi’ite Arabs, favored a strong, unified Iraqi state during 2003-2004, when public opinion polls covering broad areas were still possible. Like Iraq’s Arab Shi’ites, polls show that Iraqi Sunnis are generally religious and see Islam as a key aspect of their lives, but do not favor a theocratic state.

In other words, a lot of Sunnis weren't so well off under Saddam and probably could have supported the US efforts to build a unitary, democratic Iraqi state - they supported a unified state and opposed a theocracy. Instead, they perceive themselves to have been marginalized politically, economically, and socially - and as such, many of them are joining or at least supporting the insurgency. And this is why it's so important to bring as many Sunnis into the political and economic process as possible, to give them a stake in the new Iraq. From page 47:

In theory, the various Sunni insurgent groups are more capable of paralyzing progress, and fighting a long war of attrition, than of actually defeating an Iraqi government which is dominated by a cohesive Shi’ite majority, and which maintains good relations with the Kurds. Regardless of who is doing the counting, the total for active and passive native Iraqi Sunni insurgents still leaves them a small minority of Iraq's population. Unless the Iraqi government divides or collapses, they cannot bring back Arab Sunni minority rule or the Ba’ath; they cannot regain the level of power, wealth, and influence they once had. They cannot reestablish the form of largely secular rule that existed under Saddam, or reestablish Iraq as a country that most Arabs see as "Sunni."

...At the same time, the various Sunni insurgent elements are becoming better trained and organized, and may be able to establish themselves as the dominant political and military force within the Sunni community—particularly if Iraq’s Arab Shi’ites and Kurds mishandle the situation. They can try to present themselves as the only legitimate alternative to the occupation, even if they fail to provide a popular agenda. This means they can survive and endure as long as the government is too weak to occupy the insurgency dominated areas, and as long as the large majority of Sunnis in given areas does not see a clear incentive to joint the government and Iraq's political process.

Emphasis his.

Sunnis are joining the insurgency because they feel they have legitimate grievances and that those grievances will only get worse under the new government. We can continue to fight the insurgency as we have been, but that raises its own problems. Our current method of fighting the insurgency is contributing to the grievances that feed the insurgency. As Knight Ridder pointed out last year, we're killing more Iraqis than the insurgency, maybe up to twice as many. If Force A says "we're fighting to liberate you from Force B" and Force B says "we're fighting to protect you from Force A", and Force B kills twice as many of your friends, family, and neighbors as Force A, this will be enough to convince some people to support Force A - and evidently it has been enough to encourage a lot of people to join the insurgency.

So, in a very vague way, I propose the following strategy for defeating the insurgency: 1) continue to combat the insurgency with force, but seek out much subtler ways of doing so that don't kill so many bystanders, and 2) engage in intense efforts to incorporate the Sunni community into the government and economy. I say "vague" because 1) I can't remember the particular news stories I read which describe our efforts to root out insurgents in town as basically a "level everything in sight and then roll out"-style operation and 2) the second deals so much with the first - we're not going to see real progress in terms of jobs or infrastructure in Sunni areas until we establish some security, and some of that requires that we stop fighting in such a way that we give people more incentive to fight against us than with us. But politically, we can start to do something now.

It's good that we're negotiating with the insurgents in an attempt to drive a wedge between them and the jihadists. (But maybe we're not negotiating - there seems to be some confusion on this points.)

This might seem distasteful to some people, the notion that we should 1) be more careful when fighting the enemy and 2) offer incentives to people who might support or consider supporting our enemies or negotiate with insurgents. But we have to ask: which is more important, making sure that potentially bad people don't get something they don't deserve and punishing them for being bad, or ending the violence? Both for the sake of Iraqis, and our own national security, I tend to place more emphasis on ending violence and establish a viable Iraqi democracy than in making sure the naughty people who don't like us and who sympathized with the insurgency get theirs. There are plenty of examples of societies which decided that, as horrible as the past may have been, the future was more important. As a result, we have South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission or Germany's Vergangenheitsbewältigung to deal with the crimes of the DDR.

So this is why I like Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani's new plan:

Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani outlined a proposal that would scrap the system used in the January election...Under the proposal, voters in national elections would select leaders from each of the 19 provinces instead of choosing from a single country-wide list, as they did in January. The new system would essentially set aside a number of seats for Sunnis roughly proportionate to their numbers in the population, ensuring that no matter how low the Sunni turnout, they would be guaranteed seats.

This isn't a perfect solution, but it's something. Under the current system voters choose from a national list. Sunnis ended up with only 17 of the 275 seats in the National Assembly, just six percent.

No, the Sunnis aren't a monolithic bloc, and yes, one of the reasons they have so few seats is because of a fairly wide-spread boycott of the elections by Sunnis. But the Sunnis were boycotting largely because they felt the system was unfair to them, and now that they have so few seats, they have even less vestment in the system. If, by doing this, we can encourage them to join the political process, we can save a lot of lives and start ending the insurgency. To me, the lives saved are worth reaching out to our enemies, who we most probably cannot defeat militarily. Plus, federalism, yay!

Things Change...

2005-06-29T08:32:00.000-05:00

...And People Never Remember

Historical memory is very, very short-term.

In the midst of all the hullabaloo over the Supreme Court rulings on the 10 Commandments, The New York Times reminds us of the origin of the displays:

The two stone tablets of sunset-red Texas granite inscribed with the Ten Commandments have been a popular draw at the State Capitol here since Cecil B. DeMille helped finance hundreds of them around the country in the years after the release of his 1956 Biblical screen epic.

That's right - what was once a publicity stunt for a movie (from the dread liberal atheist gay-loving Hollywood, no less!) is now central to the Culture Wars and the struggle between secularists and Evangelicals. Once, it was an advertisement; now, we have lawsuits, a political party dedicated to having them posted all over the country, and much moaning and wailing that any attempt to remove them from courthouses is an attack on Christianity and little baby Jesus.

People forget these things so quickly.

We're not the only ones. For all the talk about people in the Middle East having long historical memories, they forget things too. The fez was first introduced to the Ottoman civil service in 1826. It was resisted by the general population as an alien import, but later came to be accepted. In 1925 Kemal Atatürk banned the fez as part of his modernization of Turkey - and was met with riots and would-be revolutionaries who wanted to re-introduce the fez. Once it was resisted as un-Islamic, but it became so Islamic that people rioted over the hat.

So many things that we take as essential, timeless, ancient parts of our culture are relatively recent constructs - and yet, like Turks rioting over a hat their ancestors rejected, like Roy Moore fighting tooth and nail to keep a movie advertisement in courthouses around the country, like Scots wearing kilts that were invented in the 19th century to honor ancestors who never wore them, Americans going into a tizzy to defend the Pledge of Allegiance which was written by a socialist, on and on and on, we care so much about things that meant nothing five minutes ago.

Sometimes we forget things that used to be important. George Bush in 2000, via Obsidian Wings:

It must be in the national interests, must be in our vital interests whether we ever send troops. The mission must be clear. Soldiers must understand why we're going. The force must be strong enough so that the mission can be accomplished. And the exit strategy needs to be well-defined.

And in 1999, on Kosovo, via Crooks and Liars:

Victory means exit strategy, and it’s important for the president to explain to us what the exit strategy is.

I don't say this just to bash him (which I want to do) or to point out that he's a hypocritical jerk (which he is), but also to wonder: did he really believe what he said back then, and changed his mind? If so, why? If he didn't change his mind, then which does he really believe - that exit plans are good, or if they're bad? Or did he just forget that he ran on a policy of well-defined exit strategies?

Update: The Poor Man has a lot more. I guess these guys all have short historical memories as well.

Looks Like I'm Not the First One to Think What I Think

2005-06-28T18:40:00.000-05:00

From Anthony Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies (page 21):

Experts have long pointed out that one of the key differences between Islamist extremist terrorism and previous forms of terrorism is that they are not seeking to negotiate with those they terrorize, but rather to create conditions that can drive the West away, undermine secular and moderate regimes in the Arab and Islamic worlds, and create the conditions under which they can create “Islamic” states according to their own ideas of “Puritanism.”

This is why it serves the purposes of Islamist extremists, as well as some of the more focused opponents of the US and the West, to create mass casualties and carry out major strikes, or carry out executions and beheadings, even if the result is to provoke hostility and anger. The goal of Bin Laden and those like him is not to persuade the US or the West, it is rather to so alienate them from the Islamic and Arab world that the forces of secularism in the region will be sharply undermined, and Western secular influence can be controlled or eliminated. The goal of most Iraqi insurgents is narrower – drive the US and its allies out of Iraq – but involves many of the same methods.

...Such actions also breed anger and alienation in the US and the West and provoke excessive political and media reactions, more stringent security measures, violent responses, and all of the other actions that help instigate a "clash of civilizations." The US and the West are often provoked into playing into the hands of such attackers.

Just wanted to throw that out. I'll write more on Cordesman's piece tomorrow.

Faulty Logic

2005-06-28T07:27:00.000-05:00

Or, Why Rick Santorum Is King of the Douchebags

Via Andrew Sullivan, I see this gem from Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum:

It is startling that those in the media and academia appear most disturbed by this aberrant behavior, since they have zealously promoted moral relativism by sanctioning "private" moral matters such as alternative lifestyles. Priests, like all of us, are affected by culture. When the culture is sick, every element in it becomes infected. While it is no excuse for this scandal, it is no surprise that Boston, a seat of academic, political and cultural liberalism in America, lies at the center of the storm.

But why stop there?

A 2001 article from Slate points out some more problems:

More people live below the poverty line in the old Confederacy than in the Northeast and Midwest combined. You are three times more likely to be murdered in parts of Dixie than anywhere in New England, despite a feverish devotion to "law-and-order" that has made eight Southern states home to 90 percent of all recent U.S. executions. The South has the highest infant-mortality rate and the highest incidences of sexually transmitted diseases, while it lags behind the rest of the country in terms of test scores and opportunities for women. The Confederate states rail against the tyranny of big government, yet they are the largest recipients of federal tax dollars. They steal business away from the North the same way that developing countries worldwide have always attracted foreign direct investment: through low wages and anti-union laws. The flow of guns into America's Northern cities stems largely from Southern states.

But, wait a minute - these states all went for Bush in the last election!

Here's a great site which collocates a lot of good information of this sort. Red states produce more teen mothers than blue states. Fewer adults have college degrees. There's a strong correlation between voting for Bush and higher rates of chlamydia infection. Same with divorce.

In other words, there's a strong correlation between living in a state won by Bush and being divorced, being a teen mother, being uneducated, and having the clap.

One might even go so far as to say that while there are no excuses for these appalling numbers, it is no surprise that states won by Bush, the core of academic, political and cultural conservatism, lie at the center of these storms.

Maybe being conservative makes you more likely to get divorced or catch the clap. Or maybe being the kind of person who gets divorced or catches the clap makes you more likely to vote conservative.

Or, and I know this might sound crazy, or Santorum could be making an incredibly foolish logical fallacy: mistaking correlation for causation. Simply because two happen near one another, in time or space, does not mean they must have anything to do with one another. Amazingly enough, and I know this might be hard for some people to accept, but there might be something out there which is totally unrelated to the political leanings of the people nearby.

(I have a feeling that Santorum knows this, and is saying this purely for political reasons. Does that make this smear better, or worse?)

Because if Santorum wants to believe that child molestation happens because of liberalism, he must then also accept that divorce and chlamydia infections happen because of conservatism.

And if this were the case, I'd like to take a look at rates of child abuse across the country. I bet, even if a lot of the headline-grabbing cases happen to be taking place in Boston, we might find some interesting numbers for those red states.

Update: Well, I'll be the first to admit when I'm wrong. Here are some stats by state. The states with the highest rates of child abuse include such red states as Alaska and South Dakota, but also blue stalwarts Connecticut and Washington, DC - plus Florida, which is a pretty evenly-divided state. States with the lowest rates include red Mississippi and blue New Jersey. Without doing some serious statistical analyses of the numbers, of which I am pretty much incapable of doing, it would appear that there's basically no correlation between child abuse rates and who won a state.

Interestingly, poor Mississippi has low rates, while wealthy Connecticut has high rates - I would think this would be reversed. Is Connecticut just better at reporting incidents? Or is there something else at work here?

More Weblogs I Like

2005-06-27T14:43:00.000-05:00

I have added Bradford Plumer, Daniel Drezner, Eric Umansky, Obsidian Wings, Oricnus, The Poor Man, and Pharyngula. Somehow, I read all of these once a day, and still find time to squeeze some work in between.

Please, click those links, create referrals, generate traffic! Read, read, read!

Oh yeah, and enjoy them for their witty writing and insightful commentary and what-not.

God is Love Wrath

2005-06-27T08:24:00.000-05:00

So, I just happened to stumble across this very beautiful passage from the Bible, 1 Samuel 15:

1 And Samuel said to Saul, "The LORD sent me to anoint you king over his people Israel; now therefore hearken to the words of the LORD. 2 Thus says the LORD of hosts, 'I will punish what Am'alek did to Israel in opposing them on the way, when they came up out of Egypt. 3 Now go and smite Am'alek, and utterly destroy all that they have; do not spare them, but kill both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass.'" 4 So Saul summoned the people, and numbered them in Tela'im, two hundred thousand men on foot, and ten thousand men of Judah. 5 And Saul came to the city of Am'alek, and lay in wait in the valley...

...8 And he took Agag the king of the Amal'ekites alive, and utterly destroyed all the people with the edge of the sword. 9 But Saul and the people spared Agag, and the best of the sheep and of the oxen and of the fatlings, and the lambs, and all that was good, and would not utterly destroy them; all that was despised and worthless they utterly destroyed. 10 The word of the LORD came to Samuel: 11 "I repent that I have made Saul king; for he has turned back from following me, and has not performed my commandments."

Holy shit! Lesson learned: do not fuck with God!

Let's review what we just read: God orders the Jews to wipe out an entire people - men, women, children, infants, even their livestock. And then, when Saul, king of the Jews, showed mercy and spared some of them, God got pissed off! God wants results, and God gets results!

When I wrote about religion being divorced from ethics, this is what I meant: Christians now (most of them, anyway) would be appalled by this sort of thing. In fact, chances are, if someone said "I just killed all these people because God told me to kill them", they wouldn't believe him, because they know their God would never command such a thing.

But we know God commanded such things all the time. Here's just one example. "Oh!" you whiny Christians afraid to confront your own religion exclaim, "God never did that, and even if he did, the New Testament supersedes the Old Testament!"

Except this has nothing to do with that. It's one thing to argue that the ban on eating shellfish has been lifted because Christians need no longer follow Mosaic law. It's one thing to argue that God would never demand what he did from Abraham because Jesus’ sacrifice meant that this would never be asked again.

But it's one thing to say that some of the rules don't apply anymore; it's another to say that this is irrelevant to modern Christianity. This is God - it's the same God. God did it once - why couldn't He do it again? How can Christians reconcile this? They reconcile it, essentially, by deciding for themselves which parts of the Bible they'll accept and which they'll reject - by deciding which parts of their religion, which parts of their God, fit best with their moral choices, and not the other way around.

I suppose that this part of the Bible might be wrong, but how would Christians know that this bad part was wrong, while the good parts were right?

I suppose that this part of the Bible might be open to interpretation, while other parts literal, but how would Christians know that this bad part was and the good parts were literal?

I suppose that Christians could just assume that, because they know their God is love, He would never order this again. But doesn't this assume that Christians know the mind of God - and isn't that a tremendous act of hubris?

And on and on and on. The fact remains: here is God ordering the murder of infants. It's the same God. It's the same Bible - the same Word. Saying "He did that in the past, so it doesn't matter" is sort of akin to saying "Osama bin Laden murdered people in the past, so he's not a murderer anymore".

No, what I get from this is: Christianity as it is now is different from Christianity in the past. Christian ethics have changed. Christians would no longer accept this sort of thing from a just, loving God - yet their God has done this before. They have proof, from the Bible. So, Christians want to pick which parts of the Bible they'll accept as literal, or as a template for living a good life - and reject the parts that they don't like.

But they're all part of the same Bible, and it's the same God. Christians want to reject parts of Bible they don't like. Christians want to reject parts of God they don't like.

The Bible hasn't changed. God is still God - He doesn't change His mind (wouldn't He have to be wrong about something to have to change His mind?). God hasn't changed. Christians have changed. Christian ethics have changed.

If Christian ethics can change, while God remains the same, this implies that Christian ethics are not, in fact, derived from the scriptures or from God.

If Christian ethics can change while God remains the same, can't others?

If Christian ethics are not derived from God or the Bible, why do Muslim ethics have to be derived from Allah or the Koran?

If, when we turn to the Bible, we find horrible things which Christians have disowned, why do we turn to the Koran when trying to explain terrorism committed by Muslims?

We don't try to understand the First World War by analyzing the Bible. We don't explain away Christian violence by saying "it's the Bible's fault". But people are completely comfortable explaining away Islamic violence by saying that it's Islam's fault - that is, because the Koran says some pretty bad stuff, you must also do bad stuff if you become a Muslim. And that just doesn't work.

The reason I harp on this: not just because it bothers me immensely to see Christians being hypocrites by claiming Muslims do bad things because Islam is bad while ignoring the murder of Amal'ekite children, but because I think that the answer to "why do they do what they do?" lies somewhere else. If we're going to fight them, we have to understand them - and this is a red herring that clouds the real causes. Stop mucking things up for the people who are on the right track.

Deterring Terrorism

2005-06-24T09:59:00.000-05:00

Brad Plumer links to a piece in The New Yorker on nuclear war-theorist Herman Kahn. Kahn wrote some pretty disturbing stuff:

The most infamous pages in "On Thermonuclear War" concern survivability. What makes nuclear war different, Kahn points out, is not the number of dead; it's a new element—the problem of the postwar environment. In Kahn's view, the dangers of radioactivity are exaggerated. Fallout will make life less pleasant and cause inconvenience, but there is plenty of unpleasantness and inconvenience in the world already. "War is a terrible thing; but so is peace," he says. More babies might have birth defects after a nuclear war, but four per cent of babies have birth defects anyway. Whether we can tolerate a slightly higher percentage of defective children is a question of trade-offs. "It might well turn out," Kahn suggests, "that U.S. decision makers would be willing, among other things, to accept the high risk of an additional one percent of our children being born deformed if that meant not giving up Europe to Soviet Russia."

The book proposes a system for labeling contaminated food so that older people will eat the food that is more radioactive, on the theory that "most of these people would die of other causes before they got cancer."

But Kahn didn't write this stuff for the hell of it; he wrote it for a very strategic reason: if we were going to deter the Soviets by threatening them with nuclear war, we had to act like we thought we could win a nuclear war, despite its horrors, and so we'd be willing to fight the war - making the threat credible. As Plumer wrote, "the Soviet Union had to believe that we were actually crazy enough to fight—and accept the costs of—the worst of nuclear apocalypses".

So Plumer asks an interesting question:

Now the interesting, and maybe less appalling, question is whether a similar deterrence strategy could work today, against terrorism. What if the United States made it clear that September 11-type attacks were no big deal. What if the general tenor of national security discourse ran: "Okay, well even 12,000 or 20,000 dead is tragic, but life will go on, and society won't collapse." Would that change anything? Say I'm a terrorist trying to achieve X amount of terror; ideally I'd like to do it in the cheapest way possible—perhaps by exploding a suicide bomb in a mall. But if I know that American society is perfectly willing to absorb a minor attack like that, then the stakes are raised. A bomb in a mall would be useless. To achieve X amount of terror, I would have to go blow up a chlorine tank or something. Or try to get my hands on a nuclear suitcase. If America had a cavalier attitude towards terrorist attacks—rather than the fairly frantic one we do have—would that persuade some terrorists to try to up the ante and think up even more deadly attacks, or it would it discourage some terrorists from even trying?

I think the answer is "no", for two reasons.

The first: we could probably dissuade some terrorism, but not very much. Most terrorists act in order to alter the cost/benefit ratio of a particular course of action. When the Stern Gang wanted the British to evacuate the Palestine Mandate so as to found a new Jewish state, they started mailing bombs to British officials and blowing up hotels. This changed the cost/benefit ratio for the British - they already didn't really want to be in Palestine, and this terrorism raised the costs of staying (or lowered the benefits) to the point where they simply left.

But this is a fairly isolated example of terrorism having success. Most terrorist campaigns to achieve some political goal - independence, autonomy, political ascendancy, etc. - have failed totally or have dragged on for decades without achieving their goal. See: Colombia, Spain, Northern Ireland, and Sri Lanka for some long-running terrorist campaigns that have failed to do anything but kill a lot of people.

So, in other words, in a case where people have low tolerance for tolerance and little incentive to fight, terrorism works. In cases where people have a high tolerance or a high incentive to fight, terrorism will fail. But this doesn't stop terrorists from trying, since many fight for decades. And, in these cases, terrorism usually has the opposite of the desired effect: it usually galvanizes and unifies a population and leads them to support harsher responses than they would normally.

We've faced this sort of terrorism from al Qaeda and its buddies in the Middle East before, as in Lebanon in the 1983 attack on the marine barracks which killed 241, or in Saudi Arabia in the 1996 attack on the Khobar Towers which killed 20. The goal of this sort of terrorism is as I discussed before: to make staying in the Middle East not worth the cost to the US, in the hopes that we'd withdraw from the region.

But the sort of terrorism we faced on September 11 was different. That attack was much more complicated in its intent. If we decided, after the attack, to withdraw from the Middle East, then al Qaeda would have achieved one of its goals and could concentrate on overthrowing regimes in the region now lacking US support. But, this was not the primary motivation (nor was it, as some have claimed, simply because "they hate us" or "they want to destroy us" - sure they hate and want to destroy us, but they're crazy, not stupid, and they know that one attack will not destroy America). Al Qaeda decided some time ago to concentrate not on its "near enemies", the regimes they are attempting to overthrow, but rather their "far enemy", us. No, the primary motivation was precisely to provoke an attack on a Muslim country which could be seen as an attack on Muslims or Islam in general and which would radicalize Muslims - rallying them to al Qaeda's cause.

How do we know this? Because they told us so.

So pretending that we don't care about terrorism will not dissuade al Qaeda, since they would simply continue escalating their attacks until they got massive and destructive enough that we'd respond as they're hoping we'll respond.

We probably couldn't deter al Qaeda strategically, but we can deter individuals from wanting to fight us in the first place - we just need to continue capturing and killing enough of them to change an individual's own cost/benefit analysis, and make it way too costly to want to fight us.

The key will be to respond in such a way that we don't create the conditions that al Qaeda is already seeking - we have to fight al Qaeda without doing things that could radicalize Muslims the way al Qaeda wants to. This means not doing things like killing more Iraqis than al Qaeda is, or torturing cab drivers, or generally convincing Muslims that we're fighting them and not just al Qaeda. Oh, we're already doing those things? Woops.

Digby reminds us of a Pentagon flier advertising a showing of The Battle of Algiers in an attempt to avoid the French mistakes in trying to put down an insurgency in Muslim Algeria:

How to win a battle against terrorism and lose the war of ideas. ... Children shoot soldiers at point blank range. Women plant bombs in cafes. Soon the entire Arab population builds to a mad fervor. Sound familiar? The French have a plan. It succeeds tactically, but fails strategically. To understand why, come to a rare showing of this film.

Second reason: we'd actually have to pretend that, after we conquered two countries after having been attacked, we didn't care about terrorism. Bush can't open his mouth without invoking September 11. Matthew Yglesias points to a Cato report which states: "in almost all years, the total number of people worldwide who die at the hands of international terrorists anywhere in the world is not much more than the number who drown in bathtubs in the United States." There are a lot of things which hurt more people than terrorism - car accidents being one of them. But we're not going to declare war on bathtubs or traffic accidents. Our society has utterly and totally fetishized terrorism - and there's not going to be any way, after our reactions over the last few years, that we're suddenly going to convince anyone that we don't care anymore or are willing to tolerate casualties.

All Hail the Spaghetti Monster

2005-06-23T20:22:00.000-05:00

Pharyngula points to a wonderful alternative to both evolution and intelligent design:

Let us remember that there are multiple theories of Intelligent Design. I and many others around the world are of the strong belief that the universe was created by a Flying Spaghetti Monster. It was He who created all that we see and all that we feel. We feel strongly that the overwhelming scientific evidence pointing towards evolutionary processes is nothing but a coincidence, put in place by Him.

...I think we can all look forward to the time when these three theories are given equal time in our science classrooms across the country, and eventually the world; One third time for Intelligent Design, one third time for Flying Spaghetti Monsterism, and one third time for logical conjecture based on overwhelming observable evidence.

Perfect!

The problem with giving equal time in school to evolution and intelligent design is that, no matter how hard ID proponents argue, ID is not and never will be science.

When a scientist uncovers something he or she doesn't understand and for which an adequate explanation does not already exist, he or she thinks something like this:

"I don't understand this. Using my knowledge of existing natural laws and some intuition, I will try to deduce an explanation. I will then test this hypothesis. If it fails the test, I will reject it and attempt to find another explanation. If it passes the test, I will accept the hypothesis as the closest approximation to the truth that I have, until it is either disproven by later experiments or superceded by a better explanation."

When an ID person uncovers something he or she doesn't understand and for which an adequate explanation does not already exist, he or she thinks something like this:

"I do not understand this. As a result, this can not possibly be the result of existing natural laws. I will not seek other hypotheses - having rejected only one hypothesis, I will assume that there is one and only one alternative. Nor am I willing to accept that I simply don't know. Instead, I will assume the existence of a designer, one for whom no evidence exists, whose existence can never be tested, and who exists entirely outside known natural laws."

Get it? ID isn't science - it's the assumption that things that go unexplained must be the result of something which has not and cannot be observed. Furthermore, no experiment could ever be conducted to disprove its existence. Further, furthermore, this unobservable, untestable designer does not design through known natural laws - that would kind of defeat the purpose of a designer, if we could already figure out a mechanism for evolution - but exists beyond those natural laws: hence, supernatural.

Sorry folks. Science isn't in the business of the supernatural which is, by definition, beyond the scope of science. And in science class, we teach science.

And Spaghetti Monsterism. Same diff.

Rose Madder

2005-06-23T20:20:00.000-05:00

I just finished reading Stephen King's Rose Madder, and while I enjoyed it immensely, I feel like the ending left a little something to be desired.

Vague spoilers ahead! If any of my readers have read this one, and understood the ending, could you let me know? What's up with the fox? And the seed? And the tree? And the rages? Either King was just winging it, or there's massive symbolism I'm missing here. Just the ending. Thanks in advance.

Iraq: What Do We Do?

2005-06-22T20:47:00.000-05:00

Again, let me preface this by saying: like I have a clue. But, since you people keep reading, I'll keep writing.

Bush and Cheney have stated that the United States will remain in Iraq "until the job is done". But what's the job that we want done? A stable, enduring democracy? Recall that we fought a civil war about seventy years after we wrote our constitution. An end to the insurgency? There's a good possibility that we'll never really see the end of the insurgency, as long as enough Sunnis continue to feel so thoroughly hostile to the government. Countries as varied as Colombia, the UK, Spain, and India are all democracies which have suffered long-running terrorism-utilizing insurgencies, and all of them continue to go about their business without too much success in ending their rebellions. Some of these have been going on for thirty years or more, with no end in sight - is this how long we'll be in Iraq?

I hope not, because as I mentioned in my last post, I have a feeling that the continued US presence is part of the reason that something like 30,000 Iraqis have joined the insurgency in the last ten months.

Justin Logan points to this article from The New York Times:

Marines patrolling this desert region near the Syrian border have for months been seeing a strange new trend in the already complex Iraqi insurgency. Insurgents, they say, have been fighting each other in towns along the Euphrates from Husayba, on the border, to Qaim, farther west. The observations offer a new clue in the hidden world of the insurgency and suggest that there may have been, as American commanders suggest, a split between Islamic militants and local rebels.

A United Nations official who served in Iraq last year and who consulted widely with militant groups said in a telephone interview that there has been a split for some time.

"There is a rift," said the official, who requested anonymity, citing the sensitivity of the talks he had held. "I'm certain that the nationalist Iraqi part of the insurgency is very much fed up with the Jihadists grabbing the headlines and carrying out the sort of violence that they don't want against innocent civilians."

The nationalist insurgent groups, "are giving a lot of signals implying that there should be a settlement with the Americans," while the Jihadists have a purely ideological agenda, he added.

The last line is interesting, but that's the first I've heard about anyone wanting a settlement with us, so I don't have much to say about that.

What is important from this article is the recognition that there are multiple components of the insurgency. We have some pretty nasty al Qaeda types, who seem to be predominantly foreign and cause a lot of trouble out of proportion to their small number. But we also have something much more dangerous in the long run, the Sunni nationalist segment. There's nothing quite like a foreign occupier to rally the people, even if the leadership is repugnant to them. This is the sort the Nazis learned in the Soviet Union, when Stalin rallied the Russian people to his Great Patriotic War, or when the Vietnamese people fought to the death, not so much for Ho Chi Min or communism but for their country. We're seeing it now as the Sunnis, who believe they have or will lose everything under the new system, continue to join the insurgency in large numbers, regardless of how many we kill or capture.

In other words, we can kill a thousand every day, but if a thousand and one are joining the insurgency every day, we can't win. And as we get better at fighting them, they get better at fighting us - ensuring that we'll always be playing catch-up.

We invaded Iraq with enough troops to overthrow Saddam, but not to secure the country. By "secure" I mean that we didn't have enough troops to provide the basic security that could have brought law and order to Iraq, prevented the massive looting that occurred right after the war, and prevented the formation of the insurgency in the months that followed - whether by engaging it militarily while it was in its infancy, by projecting enough power to dissuade people from joining, or by guarding weapons caches and denying the insurgents the weapons they need to fight. Or, probably most importantly, we could have provided that security and stability necessary for Iraq to begin forming a government which provided basic services like sewage and electricity, a functioning economy, and local democracy - the factors that would have meant that the insurgency would have a much smaller appeal to many fewer people. We started to have all those things, at first, but because we didn't have enough troops to provide security, we have lost a lot of these things - unemployment stands around 50%, electricity production has gone down, oil exports and revenue are down, water and sewage projects have no funding, and many local governments disbanded or are under siege - the conditions needed to piss off a lot of people, and to make sure they have no hope for the future under the current system. By not providing security, we have ensured the conditions for a disgruntled population - especially the Sunnis who feel like and are the big losers after Saddam's fall - to be attracted to an armed insurgency.

But, as I said, we missed our chance. If we poured tens of thousands of more troops into Iraq, maybe we could provide security from this point forward, but from where will they come? From other countries? Nope. From our armed forces? Not enough left. From a draft? It would take a year at least to draft, train, equip, and ship them.

So, if we stay, we continue to piss off enough people that the insurgency grows, despite killing or capturing thousands of them. The longer we stay, the better they get at fighting us. And we don't have any reinforcements to send that might tip the balance in our favor.

What should we do? Well, eighty-two Iraqi parliamentarians have already asked us to leave. Maybe we should be thinking about that.

But not just a "well, we'll be seeing you!" style withdrawal, but something along the lines of "if you're good and achieve some things we want you to achieve, then your reward will be us leaving". I keep hearing that we shouldn't talk about withdrawal because this will embolden the terrorists. You know, the same terrorists who routinely assassinate government officials, who have made it impossible of Americans to leave the Green Zone, and who have increased the number of suicide attacks in the last few months? How much more emboldened can they get?

We could, however, start thinking about emboldening the Iraqi people. We're not too popular with very many of them these days. Before the elections, Sunni leaders came to us and said, basically, "we'll participate in the elections if you give us a timetable for withdrawing from Iraq". They wanted us out. They were willing to give us something in return. If we want the Iraqis to achieve certain things, let's give them an incentive: an end to the occupation.

Matt Yglesias has been leading the charge on this:

The trouble is that the "emboldening" factor isn't going to go away. The purported non-emboldening alternative to leaving on a high note is to stick around until the war is won and the insurgency is defeated. This, however, is not an especially realistic goal. As you see in places like Ireland, the United Kingdom, Spain, and to some extent even France where you have minority groups whose goals can't be achieved through the rules of the electoral game, you can have terrorist bombing campaigns that go on essentially forever. Latin America is littered with examples (Mexico, Peru, Colombia, to some extent even Brazil) of governments in good standing that don't exercise a monopoly of force throughout 100 percent of the territory under their nominal control.

Nor is it really in the power of the United States to guarantee that the post-election Iraqi government maintains its democratic character for the long run. There are so many ways that emerging democracies can go awry, and to a large extent it simply depends on what Iraqi figures plan on doing.

Just leaving at some arbitrary moment while an enemy's still in the field is always going to be an unappealing, potentially emboldening thing to do. So if we miss our chance, the result is likely to be the establishment of a semi-permanent protectorate-type situation.

This isn't about an immediate withdrawal that would basically destroy Iraq. The Iraqi armed forces, which will take more years to fully develop than we're really willing to wait, cannot stand on its own right now. But would offering an incentive - say, when X number of units are combat ready (really combat ready, not Cheney-pretend-combat ready) and when the constitution is written, we'll be out of here. Fair trade?

Yglesias, again, links to an article by Spencer Ackerman which you should read, and has this to say:

Obviously, there can be no guarantee that a post-withdrawal Iraqi government would steer through the shoals successfully. Doing so, however, essentially requires sound and moral political judgment on the part of Iraqi leaders, something we can't provide no matter how many troops we put in the field. Indeed, one can plausibly make the case that our open-ended military commitment encourages brinksmanship and maximalism on the part of Iraqis "inside" the political process rather than the spirit of "hang together or hang separately" that the situation requires.

It should also be said that getting our forces out of the field on a reasonable timeline neither does nor should preclude us from offering the sort of assistance we would normally offer any emerging decent regime being challenged by violent extremists. We can give financial and diplomatic assistance, intelligence cooperation, etc., etc. And, indeed, one would hope that other governments around the world would do the same. The insurgency is composed of really bad people which should not be forgotten. But for now, clouds of distrust stemming from the US presence, its uncertain future, and the shaky pretenses for having introduced it in the first place make it hard to rally international support for the new government.

Juan Cole thinks we should try to hand it off to the UN, but I can't imagine anyone at the UN wanting the responsibility or the danger of Iraq.

So, that leaves me with: withdrawal-as-incentive-for-progress. Plus it would, you know, mean that our troops would stop exploding, as they are currently wont to do.

Plus, the Bush administration totally said that the insurgency was in its last throes, and that we'd stay until the job gets done and not a moment later. So we'll be withdrawing soon anyway, right?

Sorry

2005-06-22T10:29:00.000-05:00

Sorry guys, lots of meetings today (on blogs - the irony!), so no posting until this afternoon/evening. Please don't stop reading!

Iraq: What Is Wrong?

2005-06-21T08:48:00.000-05:00

Like I have a clue (hence the title of this weblog - which really should be a disclaimer for 99% of all weblogs). But, since everyone is talking about Iraq and what is to be done, I figured I'd give it a shot as well.

I am going out on a limb here, but I'm going to say that things in Iraq don't seem to be going so well for us or the new Iraqi government. Dick Cheney says that the insurgency is in its last throes, but the number of attacks has been going up. But I doubt that matters - I have a feeling that there is no metric at all that wouldn't be spun by Cheney so as to indicate that we were winning. Attacks going down? We're winning! Attacks going up? We're winning!

Anyway. I think the key problem here is this: Brookings estimates that the strength of the insurgency nationwide has remained somewhat constant over the ten months or so at somewhere between 16,000 and 20,000 fighters. The number of foreign fighters is estimated to be about 1,000 - about 5 or 6 percent of the total strength of the insurgency.

In case you're wondering about the source of these numbers, Brookings lists such America-haters as Lowell Jacoby, head of the Defense Intelligence Agency; General John Abizaid; General Richard Myers; and John McLaughlin, Deputy Director of the CIA.

Brookings also reports that, according General George Casey, "15,000 militants were killed or captured between January 2004 and January 2005", with another few thousand captured or killed since then.

That's a lot of people - about 18,000. Yet, during that same time, from January 2004 to the present, the insurgency is estimated to have grown from between 3,000 and 5,000 people to somewhere around 20,000, and the estimate has hovered around that number for almost a year.

In other words, despite having killed or captured thousands and thousands of insurgents, the insurgency has grown in strength, and continues to make up its losses - and only a handful of these replacements are foreign fighters.

In other, other words: despite the fact that Cheney claims that the insurgency is in its last throes, something like 30,000 or more Iraqis have joined the insurgency in the last ten-or-so months.

Why, despite the fact that the insurgency continues to use torture, assassinations, and suicide bombings, do Iraqis continue to join it?

There is the obvious: a lot of Iraqis are unhappy with the direction in which Iraq is headed:

As bad as conditions became after Saddam fell from power and the Americans were running things, many Sunni Arab leaders claim conditions have only become worse under the government of Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari.

The headline: "Iraq's Sunnis say things never worse".

It doesn't really matter if the Sunnis think things are worse because they have lost status and power since the fall of Saddam, or if things really are worse - because they feel they'll have no say in a country dominated by Shi'ites, or because the government of al-Jaafari is singling them out for random arrests, or because Sunnis have also found themselves the victims of the insurgency and Shi'ite militias, or because things like electricity production have gone down since the fall of Saddam, what with the general lack of security and the looting and random killing and what not. No, it doesn't really matter if the Sunnis have grievances we'd consider legitimate or not. What matters is that they perceive that things are worse, that the present course will only lead to worse things, and that the source of the problem is the new Iraqi government and the Americans who protect it.

But I have a feeling that a lot of it has to do with this Knight Ridder piece from September of last year (via the Dread Cole):

Operations by U.S. and multinational forces and Iraqi police are killing twice as many Iraqis - most of them civilians - as attacks by insurgents, according to statistics compiled by the Iraqi Health Ministry and obtained exclusively by Knight Ridder.

According to the ministry, the interim Iraqi government recorded 3,487 Iraqi deaths in 15 of the country's 18 provinces from April 5 - when the ministry began compiling the data - until Sept. 19. Of those, 328 were women and children. Another 13,726 Iraqis were injured, the ministry said.

While most of the dead are believed to be civilians, the data include an unknown number of police and Iraqi national guardsmen. Many Iraqi deaths, especially of insurgents, are never reported, so the actual number of Iraqis killed in fighting could be significantly higher.

...Iraqi officials said the statistics proved that U.S. airstrikes intended for insurgents also were killing large numbers of innocent civilians. Some say these casualties are undermining popular acceptance of the American-backed interim government.

Emphasis mine. If the police in your city were trying to catch a serial killer who had murdered fifty people, and in the process, killed a hundred of your friends, family, and neighbors, wouldn't you be a little pissed at the police? We should not be surprised when these people get angry at us for doing them more harm than the insurgency from which we claim to be protecting them.

Certainly, some Iraqis appear not only to be pissed, but feel justified in joining the insurgency. Well, about 3,000 a month do.

No matter how many times we point out that Americans are fighting against the suicide bombers who murder children, it doesn't really matter - many Iraqis blame American troops for suicide attacks, not because they really believe that Americans caused the attacks, but because they feel that Americans are responsible for the lack of security in the first place. Check it out: Iraqis blame Americans.

So we have created a situation, by only sending enough troops to overthrow Saddam but not secure the country, which allowed the insurgency to flourish, Iraqis blame us for not securing the country. So we fight the insurgency - and in the process do more harm to the Iraqis than the insurgency. So Iraqis get pissed off even more. In other words, our continued presence appears to be generating the ill-will that feeds the insurgency.

A lot of the people we're fighting are pretty nasty - I'm thinking of Zarqawi and his al Qaeda friends - and want to establish a Salafi theocracy. Others are former Baathists who want to re-establish a Baathist dictatorship. But not everyone joining up can be al Qaeda or a Baathist - there are only so many of those. No, we're facing the same sort of thing we did in Vietnam: we're turning a war against a nasty political cadre into a general, patriotic, nationalist conflict. Most of the Vietnamese weren't communists, but they still fought for the communists - because they perceived the Americans as foreign invaders. Similarly, Stalin was able to rally the Russian people to the Great Patriotic War, despite the fact that most Russians (and other subject peoples) really didn't like the Soviets. Every day that we're there, we're probably alienating more and more people.

Do I recommend withdrawal? No. Lord, no. I think that if we simply announced a withdrawal, the country would go to hell - you know, a deeper layer of hell or something. I think that the Iraqi armed forces are weak enough right now that they would be unable to fight the insurgency - or the civil war that would probably follow a US withdrawal prior to the writing of a constitution. And then we'd have problems that would make pre-September 11 Afghanistan look like Switzerland. Oil, sectarian violence, involvement by Iran and Syria and Saudi Arabia, a trained cadre of terrorists with no one to fight...

Withdrawal is not an option we should be considering. At least, not immediately. See my next post for more on this.

Morning Roundup

2005-06-20T09:30:00.000-05:00

Here's the good stuff:

Iran's presidential election has produced a run-off vote between semi-reformer Rafsanjani and semi-fascist Ahmadinejad. Rafsanjani will probably win, but there seems to be a good chance that the election was rigged to get Ahmadinejad into the running. I hope this pisses off the Iranians enough that there's enough public will and political impetus for more reform.

Over at Left2Right, Elizabeth Anderson talks about the difference between formal freedom of action and the freedom afforded by a larger opportunity set, and why the latter is more important than the former:
If the only kind of freedom that matters is that no one intentionally interfere with one's formal freedom of action, and not that one's opportunity set be large and full of worthwhile options, then freedom-lovers would have to oppose traffic laws, stop lights, and so forth, for interfering with freedom of movement. The result of a lack of such laws, however, is not actual freedom of movement, but, in areas of high traffic density, gridlock. (And, in areas of high traffic flow, grave danger.) To be sure, in a state of gridlock, one has the formal freedom to choose any movement in one's opportunity set--which amounts to being able to rock forward and back a couple of inches from bumper to bumper, getting nowhere. Some freedom! By contrast, if we give up certain formal freedoms--to run red lights and stop signs, to drive indiscriminately across lanes--we get in return a vastly expanded opportunity set, including the ability to actually get to places one wants to go, more safely and quickly than if we hadn't given up those freedoms. The point of formal freedom of movement--the right to move around, without coercive interference by the state or other people--is that it is instrumental to expanding actual opportunities to move around where one wants to go. Merely formal freedom of movement, with nowhere to move to, or nowhere worth moving to, is not an end in itself.
Modern American liberals frequently are accused of having abandoned classical liberalism because they support state interference. I think this is incorrect - liberalism to me was never about minimizing government power or action, but rather it was about creating a government which would maximize the freedom of the citizenry. If that can be done without government intervention, fine. If it can be done with government intervention, fine.

Kevin Drum has some fun with Scott McClellan's "last throes" daily briefing.

Here's What's Left points to some wingnuttery about the Downing Street Memos - "these memos which say things which we don't like are suspicious in some ways and the only possible explanation is that they're fake!" - which sounds a lot like the wingnuttery surrounding ~~Creationism~~ Intelligent Design - "evolution hasn't explained everything yet and the only possibly explanation is that there's a God who created everything!" - in other words, the old "without any proof, as long as a question has not yet been answered, I'll just assume what I've already assumed". Kevin Drum explains the evidence for the Memos being real, Pandagon has more on the memos, and Digby points out that even when presented with evidence, wingnuts don't care and just go on believing whatever crazy thing it is they already believe. I like being a member of the reality-based community.

The first solar sail-powered spacecraft is being launched tomorrow. Neat!

That's it for now.

Religion and Ethics

2005-06-19T10:55:00.000-05:00

George H. Smith once posed this scenario (I'm paraphrasing):

Imagine if an American general in Iraq were to order his troops to capture a city and slaughter all of the men and boys in the city, as well as all non-virginal women, including all pregnant women, with the troops free to do with the virginal girls as they wished. There would very likely be a great deal of outrage on the part of the entire world that such a terrible thing had taken place. Now, imagine if the American general, in responding to this outrage and the inevitable court marshal, said something like "I did it because God commanded me to do it, and as a faithful Christian, I simply carried out his command".

This probably wouldn't sway very many people to the general's side, would it? (If you think it would, I'm eager to hear from you too.) Most people would probably be disgusted and outraged, not just by the general's actions but also by his invocation of the most holy God in defense of his terrible act. But why not?

After all, when the Israelites, those with whom God Almighty formed a covenant naming them as His chosen people, were conquering the Holy Land from the Philistines, God frequently ordered His chosen people to conquer cities and slaughter all the men, boys, and non-virginal women - including the pregnant ones - and to enslave the virginal girls.

Smith argued that religion followed ethics, and not the other way around. This was his way of establishing that leading an ethical life did not require religion - that, in fact, ethics were divorced from religion. We know that followers of the same religion once believed it was ethical to murder pregnant women, and we know that this is now considered unethical. The text of the religion has remained static, yet people believe now believe that text implies the opposite of what it once did. Either people have gotten much better at understanding the Bible, or ethics are divorced from religion.

Similarly, one late night, I was speaking with a friend who is an Evangelical Christian and is also in the Army about the enemy he might have to face someday - the mujahideen, we called them.

The mujahideen wouldn't hesitate to kill us, he said. They are cold-blooded murderers.

Yes, I said, but - just to be contrary - imagine what it would be like if you thought your God had asked you to murder innocent people for Him.

I know, he said, that my God would never ask me to murder an innocent person.

Ah, I said, but your God does ask such things of his believers. He told Abraham to kill Isaac - so you know that God orders those who have faith in Him to kill innocent people. Do you claim to know the mind of God, and that He will never again ask this of his followers?

My friend quickly changed the subject.

Which leads me to this: one of my commenters, in response to my post about al Qaeda as vanguard party, has argued that the problem is with Islam itself, that violent jihad is integral to Islam and that Islam is, structurally, designed to produce the sort of conflict we are currently fighting:

Got it? Straight out of the Koran. Straight from the "prophet's" mouth. But no - the Koran has nothing to do with it at all. It's all just one big misunderstanding on the part of a tiny minority of extremists who have hijacked the religion of peace.

Islam is not a religion of peace. There is no such thing as a religion of peace. There are things in the Koran, as there are in the Bible, which are terrible, and there are things which are wonderful.

And just as every Christian chooses what to believe and what to reject from the Bible, every Muslim chooses what to believe and what to reject from the Koran. And every single one of them believes that he or she has stumbled across the one true interpretation of those texts.

Many Christians have chosen to ignore the violent, wrathful God who ordered those conquests and murders, or the God who ordered Abraham to kill his only son. Not all of them have - how many people have been killed in the name of a God who ordered his followers not to kill? One would think that the commandment - "thou shall not kill" - is pretty straightforward. No, some will tell you - it's not "thou shall not kill", it's "thou shall not murder", it's ok to kill as long as the person deserves it - and the speaker is usually the one qualified to make the decision as to who deserves it.

If a line as simple as "thou shall not kill" is so open to interpretation - and so easily ignored - then what hope do we have for the rest of these texts?

Let's use another example, homosexuality. Homosexuality is condemned in the Bible, and by modern religious authorities - but so are a great many other things. Andrew Sullivan quotes Chuck Muth:

Now that the Pope has spoken, let only those Catholics who are without similar sin cast stones on gay marriage. If you wish to rely on the Pope's decree with regard to gay marriage, you MUST also support what ELSE the Pope said in the same speech. In addition to condemning gay marriage, the Pope also condemned DIVORCE, ARTIFICIAL BIRTH CONTROL and TRIAL MARRIAGES. If you're Catholic and relying on the Pope's condemnation of gay marriages to support your own opposition to same-sex nuptials, you had better not be ... divorced, have ever used condoms or birth control pills and never have "shacked up" with a lover who was not your spouse. If you have, you have NO moral authority, at least based upon your Catholicism, to attack gay marriage without being considered a complete hypocrite.

And that's just it - homosexuality is forbidden by the Bible, but so is divorce. Many Christians condemn homosexuals, citing the Bible as reason, but many continue to get divorces (I've read that, by religious group in America, the highest divorce rate is among Evangelicals).

There is a disconnect: the Bible condemns both homosexuality and divorce, but many Christians condemn one and do the other. These Christians have chosen that some words in the Bible - those about divorce - are unimportant, irrelevant, acceptable to ignore, while others - those about homosexuality - must be adhered to.

Now, let's look at an example from Islam: the appropriate dress for women. The Koran states that clothing has been provided for men and women to cover their bodies, and for luxury, but that the best garment is righteousness. Further, the Koran calls on both men and women to dress modestly - women are told to cover their breasts in public, but not their hair.

And yet, there are groups such as the Taliban who claim to want to return to an older, purer form of Islam than exists today. The Taliban, claiming to have the one true interpretation of Islam, felt that it was necessary to throw acid into the faces of women who did not cover every inch of their bodies. Likewise, the Koran says little about homosexuality, yet the Taliban could never quite decide which punishment was most Koranic - burying alive or being dropped of a building or being crushed by a collapsing wall.

In other words, there are Muslims who claim to have the one true interpretation of the Koran, and who claim that the Koran is the only guide for life, yet they make up rules and punishments which are nowhere to be found in the Koran.

Just as Christians interpret the Bible in ways that suit their needs and desires, so do Muslims. The Bible forbids murder - yet countless people have been killed, whether by the Inquisition, the Wars of Reformation, or Charlemagne's conversion of the Saxons (to name a few), in the name of a God who said "thou shall not kill". The Koran forbids the murder of innocent people, the killing of women and children, and the mutilation of one's enemies - yet al Qaeda has no problem doing any of these things in the name of Allah.

The Koran commands Muslims to engage in jihad. Muslims are free to interpret this as they wish - as a violent and bloody confrontation with the infidel, as an internal struggle for purity, or as something that can be as safely ignored as the Bible's prohibition of divorce. Most Muslims have chosen the latter two paths - the average Muslim is not engaged in terrorism, or actively trying to conquer the world. The average Muslim does pretty much what the average Christian and the average Hindu and the average Jew does - try to live his or her life.

Or are we to believe that while Christians are free to interpret the Bible as they wish, Muslims are incapable of interpreting the Koran any differently than al Qaeda and the Taliban have chosen to interpret it?

That’s why all this talk about Islam being the problem bothers me so much: it implies that a Muslim is incapable of making a choice that a Christian is capable of making. As far as I’m concerned, as an atheist, you’re all a bunch of nuts, but this strikes me as painfully bigoted.

Al Qaeda as Vanguard Party

2005-06-17T06:31:00.000-05:00

So, what do we know about al Qaeda?

We know that they are well-educated. From The New York Times:

We examined the educational backgrounds of 75 terrorists behind some of the most significant recent terrorist attacks against Westerners. We found that a majority of them are college-educated, often in technical subjects like engineering. In the four attacks for which the most complete information about the perpetrators' educational levels is available - the World Trade Center bombing in 1993, the attacks on the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, the 9/11 attacks, and the Bali bombings in 2002 - 53 percent of the terrorists had either attended college or had received a college degree. As a point of reference, only 52 percent of Americans have been to college. The terrorists in our study thus appear, on average, to be as well educated as many Americans.

Marc Sageman, a doctor and sociologist writing in Strategic Insights covered this in April:

In terms of socio-economic background, three-fourths come from upper and middle class families. Far from coming from broken families, they grew up in caring, intact families, and were mildly religious and concerned about their communities. In terms of education, over 60% have some college education. Most are in the technical fields, such as engineering, architecture, computers, medicine, and business. This is all the more remarkable because college education is still relatively uncommon in the countries or immigrant communities they come from. Far from being immature teenagers, the men in my sample joined the terrorist organization at an average age of 26.

Most of the terrorists have some occupational skills. Three-fourths are either professional (physicians, lawyers, architects, engineers, or teachers) or semi-professionals (businessmen, craftsmen, or computer specialists). They are solidly anchored in family responsibilities. Three-fourths are married and the majority have children. There was no indication of weak minds brainwashed by their family or education. About half of the sample grew up as religious children, but only 13% of the sample, almost all of them in Southeast Asia, were madrassa educated. The entire sample from the North African region and the second generation Europeans went to secular schools. About ten percent were Catholic converts to Islam, who could not have been brainwashed into Islam as children.

We know that they are the core of a network of cells and parties around the world. From the Congressional Research Service:

Cells and associates have been located in over 70 countries, according to U.S. officials. Among the groups in the Al Qaeda coalition, virtually all of which are still active today, are : the Islamic Group and Al Jihad (Egypt), the Armed Islamic Group and the Salafist Group for Call and Combat (Algeria), the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU), the Jemaah Islamiyah (Indonesia), the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (Libyan opposition) and Harakat ul-Mujahedin (Pakistan, Kashmiri).

Also from CRS we know they are the radical, revolutionary wing of the Salafist movement:

According to a number of scholars, the use of violent jihad is not inherently associated with puritanical Islamic beliefs. Among certain puritanical Muslims — be they self-described Salafis or Wahhabis — advocacy of jihad is a relatively recent phenomenon and is highly disputed within these groups. Some scholars
date the ascendancy of militancy among Salafis to the 1980s war of resistance against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan.

...Although the majority of Salafi adherents do not advocate the violence enshrined in bin Laden’s message, this ideology has attracted a number of followers throughout the Muslim world.

We know that their ultimate goal, based on the writings and philosophies of long-dead theorists, is to overthrow their governments, install Sharia as law, and establish a new Caliphate that will usher in utopia and eventually encompass the globe. We also know, thanks to their chief strategist Ayman al Zawahiri, that their short-term goal involves propaganda and radicalizing a non-revolutionary populace:

The jihad movement must . . . make room for the Muslim nation to participate with it in the jihad for the sake of empowerment. The Muslim nation will not participate with [the jihad movement] unless the slogans of the mujahidin are understood by the masses. . . . The one slogan that has been well understood by the nation and to which it has been responding for the past 50 years is the call for jihad against Israel. In addition to this slogan, the [Muslim] nation in [the 1990s] is geared against the US presence. [The Muslim nation] has responded favorably to the call for the jihad against the Americans. . . . [T]he jihad movement moved to the center of the leadership of the [Muslim] nation when it adopted the slogan of liberating the nation from its external enemies. . . . [Striking at the United States would force the Americans to] personally wage the battle against the Muslims, which means that the battle will turn into a clear-cut jihad against infidels.

Who does this sound like?

Well, to me, this sounds a lot like Lenin's theory of the vanguard party: a group of educated men who sat in Europe's coffee shops by day, reading Marx and debating his theories, and planting bombs at night - with the goal of using terrorism to spark a revolution which would overthrow the government and establish a new government based on Marxism, bring about a socialist utopia, and eventually grow to encompass the globe. Connected to a network of cells and parties through their various Internationals, they plotted in the name of a proletariat to which they didn't belong, which didn't want their revolution, and which they felt needed to be led out of their "false consciousness" by the elite, revolutionary vanguard - the violent wing of the larger socialist movement which primarily sought change through nonviolent political action.

By this analogy I don't mean to say that al Qaeda is the exact equivalent to the Bolsheviks, or that history will play out exactly the same, or even that our response should be the same (we didn't do too well against a number of revolutionary communist movements, if I recall correctly). What I mean by this analogy is that the two are similar, and that this can be a useful framework for understanding modern Islamist terrorism - taking the unfamiliar and casting it in familiar terms.

Saying "al Qaeda attacked America because they hate our freedom" is true. It is also adds nothing of value to the discussion. It is like saying "the Bolsheviks killed the Czar and his family because they hated the ruling class". Yes, of course, the Bolsheviks hated the ruling class, but killing the Czar and his family was not an act of hateful violence, and the Bolsheviks did not imagine that by doing so a communist paradise would magically come into being - it was a calculated strategic act meant to eliminate a powerful symbol of the monarchy and any heirs around which a counterrevolution could be organized.

Similarly, al Qaeda does hate America and all for which it stands, but it did not strike us out of rage or blind hate. Similarly, al Qaeda did not strike us because of the belief that a global Caliphate would magically arise out of the ashes. Al Qaeda did so for calculated strategic reasons - and if we want to know those reasons, all we have to do is read the words of al Qaeda's strategists. It doesn't get much simpler than this. Why did they do it? Ask them, and they'll tell you - and they'll tell you they did it to spark a war that would revolutionize Muslims around the world.

I'm not really sure what the strategic implications of this are yet - other than some vague ideas about strategic communications, not offering our enemies more propaganda tools, and making sure that we don't turn this into a war against Islam. Plus this is a fairly new idea for me, so I'll have to think about it more first.

George Bush Gets Something...Right?

2005-06-16T14:23:00.000-05:00

From The New York Times (via Abu Aardvark), I see that Bush is going after yet another Democrat:

[T]he White House was trying to remove a major figure from the board that oversees American international broadcasting efforts, particularly the Arabic and Persian language radio and television networks aimed at countering the anti-American programming on Al Jazeera and other networks.

The board member is Norman J. Pattiz, a Los Angeles radio executive and Democratic contributor who was first appointed to the board by President Bill Clinton in 2000. His name was sent for reappointment by the Democratic leadership more than a year ago, but the White House has not forwarded it for approval. Mr. Pattiz has directed the start-up of the American networks in the Middle East, principally the television network Al Hurra and Radio Sawa.
"Norm Pattiz has been the driving force behind our most successful public diplomacy undertakings since 9/11," Mr. Biden said in a statement. "Radio Sawa and Al Hurra TV are attracting significant audiences in the Middle East."

Mr. Biden said the administration, which has taken credit for the two networks, was being "short-sighted and doing the country a disservice" by refusing to reappoint Mr. Pattiz to the board.

...Democrats charge that the White House is uneasy about an active Democrat running such a delicate area. Only last week, he had a fund-raising dinner in his Beverly Hills home featuring Senators Harry Reid of Nevada, the minority leader, and Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York.
"When I called the White House and asked why my name wasn't sent forward, they said that it was under review," Mr. Pattiz said. "It was under review because my name had appeared in a Kerry campaign ad last year. That's the explanation I got."

The Bush administration is certainly no stranger to placing ideological and political concerns over grave issues of national security:

When the U.S. government went looking for people to help rebuild Iraq, they had responded to the call. They supported the war effort and President Bush. Many had strong Republican credentials. They were in their twenties or early thirties and had no foreign service experience. On that first day, Oct. 1, they knew so little about how things worked that they waited hours at the airport for a ride that was never coming. They finally discovered the shuttle bus out of the airport but got off at the wrong stop.

...They had been hired to perform a low-level task: collecting and organizing statistics, surveys and wish lists from the Iraqi ministries for a report that would be presented to potential donors at the end of the month. But as suicide bombs and rocket attacks became almost daily occurrences, more and more senior staffers defected. In short order, six of the new young hires found themselves managing the country's $13 billion budget, making decisions affecting millions of Iraqis...For months they wondered what they had in common, how their names had come to the attention of the Pentagon, until one day they figured it out: They had all posted their resumes at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative-leaning think tank.

So, it would not surprise me in the absolute least if the Bush administration were placing ideological concerns over defending America. Can't have Democrats in high places, even if they're the best qualified for the job and know what they're doing, unlike their Republican replacements!
Except here's one time when it might not be partisan. As the Aardvark said:

Joe Biden is correct that Norm Pattiz is the driving force behind Radio Sawa and al-Hurra, but that's the problem with him, not a reason to defend him. Al-Hurra, in my opinion, has been a terrible failure, a white elephant which has sucked up resources while having no discernible impact on Arab public opinion. I was quite happy when I heard the rumor a few months ago that Pattiz was on his way out. But I want him out because people recognize al-Hurra's failings and are ready to change course, not because he's a Democrat.

According to The Century Foundation, Al-Hurra is watched by only about 29 percent of adult television viewers, and only about half of its viewers rate its news coverage as reliable - so we're having success with only around 15 percent or so of the target audience. Radio Sawa is only a little better, garnering positive noise from under 30 percent of listeners. Not so good. Generally, our existing strategic communications efforts suck, to put it mildly. If Pattiz is the one in charge, I don't care if he's a Democrat: I won't weep if he gets replaced.

Why I Am an Idiot

2005-06-16T13:14:00.000-05:00

So, I just finished a long and well-written post on the nature of al Qaeda as a vanguard party. I copy-pasted from Notepad into Word to spellcheck, forgot about it, responded to a comment in my comments section, and copy-pasted that into Word to spellcheck that. And didn't save in Notepad. Or Word. And lost the post.

This is why, in the middle of the day, I should not be allowed outside to watch croquet in the sun where beer and wine are freely available and everyone shirks their work.

Yes, all of the stereotypes about government laziness are true.

So, until I can recover the data or rewrite it, I have nothing for you guys. My apologies. And, after work, I'm off to kickball - yes, kickball! - so there probably won't be anything until tomorrow.

Morning Roundup

2005-06-16T08:50:00.000-05:00

Here's the stuff:

Andrew Sullivan on gays in the military: the number of discharges for being openly gay fell from over 1,200 in 2001 to 653 last year. Possible explanations: there are fewer gays in the military now, or those who are in the military are keeping it a secret, or at a time when the armed forces are falling short of their recruitment goals and applications to military academies are falling, the military recognizes the necessity of retaining gay soldiers. Which, if it's the case, implies that being gay and a soldier isn't that bad after all, and that the discharge of gay soldiers in peacetime, when it's convenient, is more about prejudice than it is about unit cohesion or any of their usual excuses.

From The Washington Post, via Balloon Juice, we see that the House has voted against the Patriot Act provision which allowed the FBI to seize library and bookstore records, which means the government can no longer keep tabs on what we're reading - our dangerous, subversive book and periodical selections. This is a very good thing.

Justin Logan quotes from a Congressional hearing on North Korea's nuclear program. Joseph Biden, ranking Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, really rips into Chris Hill, Assistant Secretary of State, for the administration's lack of a policy on North Korea's nuclear program.

The other day, Tom Friedman wrote that liberals "don't want to talk about Iraq because, with a few exceptions, they thought the war was wrong and deep down don't want the Bush team to succeed". Yesterday, Matthew Yglesias called him out: which liberals, exactly, does Friedman know want Bush to fail? Or is Friedman just making it up? We report, you decide.

The Washington Post fronts an article on presidential elections in Iran. Though the elections will most likely be a sham, and there's a good chance of a massive boycott (good chance? What the hell do I know about the chances?), there is some optimism here. The professor teaching my Farsi class who is, oddly enough, Iranian, believes that the likely outcome of the election will be an attempt at normalizing relations with the US. I tend to be an engagement kind of guy, especially with Iran (I believe that their pro-American population offers a lot of potential for engagement), so I'm very hopeful on this.

Pakistan has already lifted travel restrictions on Mukhtaran Bibi. Good job, Ezra.

Ok, that's it for now. More later!

Things That Make You Go "WTF?!?"

2005-06-15T11:10:00.000-05:00

This interview with Donald Rumsfeld has so many things wrong with it that I just don't have the time to go over them all (especially when I've gotten some complaints that my posts are a little too, ahem, long). So I'll just cover a couple of the more salient points.

Rumsfeld was asked why the insurgency has grown so much. Rumsfeld's response was:

I think people who come up with those numbers are pulling them out of the air. I don't know how you know those. I don't know those. I hear different numbers from different people at different times and then I hear the same people changing their numbers.

That's funny, because Brooking's Iraq Index indicates that the insurgency has grown from around 5,000 in November of 2003 to something like 16,000 to 20,000 plus in the last year. And where does Brookings get its numbers? Why, it gets them from General John P. Abizaid, and Major General Raymond T. Odierno, and General Richard B. Myers, and Director of Defense Intelligence Lowell Jacoby. So, according to Rumsfeld, these guys are just "pulling them out of the air". That, or Rumsfeld is pussyfooting around the question by trying to cast doubt on the very numbers reported by his officers.

The thing that got me worse that, though, was when Rumsfeld was asked if the security situation in Iraq is better today than it was on the day after the war ended ("Mission Accomplished", boys!). Rumsfeld's response:

Well, statistically no, but clearly it has been getting better as we've gone along.

In other words, all of our metrics indicate that things are getting worse: the insurgency is stronger, assassinations are up, car bombings are up, casualties are up, more and more Iraqi troops are deserting or joining the insurgency, out of the very small number we've even managed to train, and so on and so forth. But things are getting better, clearly!

Wait, let me try that again. Here's another way of putting it: all evidence indicates that things are getting worse, but clearly, things are getting better!

Screw evidence. You only need evidence if you're a member of the reality-based community.

So why, exactly, is it that anyone still believes that Rumsfeld has any credibility left, whatsoever?

Morning Roundup

2005-06-15T08:01:00.000-05:00

Here's some interesting things:

Ezra Klein has a great post on Mukhtaran Bibi, the Pakistani woman who was gang raped as punishment for a crime committed by her brother, who went on to found two schools and a shelter for abused women, among other good works, and who was placed under house arrest by the Pakistani government for trying to visit America. Ezra generously provides the email addresses of a number of relevant Pakistani officials here in the US.

Ezra also covered a poll of Senators by popularity. Apparently, of the ten most-popular Senators, eight are Democrats. Of the ten least-popular, eight are Republicans. I wonder if this has anything to do with the Republican Party's new anti-anti-lynching stance? No, probably not, I just felt like throwing that out.

This is a little old, but I wanted to mention it anyway. Foreign Affairs reports that people of Arab descent living in the US are (economically, educationally, etc.) better off than the average American. Dan Drezner pointed out that a lot of Arab immigrants to the US are Lebanese Christians. Coincidence?

As an interesting side-note, one of my friends is currently dating a Lebanese woman and, yes, she is hot, and so is her sister. Stereotypes, what?

This is another older item as well, but worth reading, and I'll try to post about it if I can. It's an article in Foreign Affairs by Bernard Lewis on the history of autocracy in the Middle East - and why the Arab world's current situation is a fairly recent development.

That's it for now. Longer post this afternoon, hopefully.

And Now for Something Completely Different

2005-06-14T14:50:00.000-05:00

I thought I’d make a change from what I’ve been writing about for a week, and instead write about something I promised Caroline, my own religious beliefs. Perhaps this will help put some perspective on my discussions of things like, oh, say, Islam.

I am an agnostic. I am also an atheist. I am also a better Christian than you.

Two pieces of writing beautifully summarize my attitudes toward God. The first comes from Carl Sagan’s The Demon Haunted World:

"A fire-breathing dragon lives in my garage" ...
Suppose (I'm following a group therapy approach by the psychologist Richard Franklin) I seriously make such an assertion to you. Surely you'd want to check it out, see for yourself. There have been innumerable stories of dragons over the centuries, but no real evidence. What an opportunity!

"Show me," you say. I lead you to my garage. You look inside and see a ladder, empty paint cans, an old tricycle--but no dragon.

"Where's the dragon?" you ask.

"Oh, she's right here," I reply, waving vaguely. "I neglected to mention that she's an invisible dragon."

You propose spreading flour on the floor of the garage to capture the dragon's footprints.

"Good idea," I say, "but this dragon floats in the air."

Then you'll use an infrared sensor to detect the invisible fire.

"Good idea, but the invisible fire is also heatless."

You'll spray-paint the dragon and make her visible.

"Good idea, but she's an incorporeal dragon and the paint won't stick."

And so on. I counter every physical test you propose with a special explanation of why it won't work.

Now, what's the difference between an invisible, incorporeal, floating dragon who spits heatless fire and no dragon at all? If there's no way to disprove my contention, no conceivable experiment that would count against it, what does it mean to say that my dragon exists? Your inability to invalidate my hypothesis is not at all the same thing as proving it true. Claims that cannot be tested, assertions immune to disproof are veridically worthless, whatever value they may have in inspiring us or in exciting our sense of wonder. What I'm asking you to do comes down to believing, in the absence of evidence, on my say-so.

The only thing you've really learned from my insistence that there's a dragon in my garage is that something funny is going on inside my head. You'd wonder, if no physical tests apply, what convinced me. The possibility that it was a dream or a hallucination would certainly enter your mind. But then, why am I taking it so seriously? Maybe I need help. At the least, maybe I've seriously underestimated human fallibility.

Imagine that, despite none of the tests being successful, you wish to be scrupulously open-minded. So you don't outright reject the notion that there's a fire-breathing dragon in my garage. You merely put it on hold. Present evidence is strongly against it, but if a new body of data emerge you're prepared to examine it and see if it convinces you. Surely it's unfair of me to be offended at not being believed; or to criticize you for being stodgy and unimaginative-- merely because you rendered the Scottish verdict of "not proved."

Sagan, by not rejecting the notion, is being incredibly generous here. But, to be generous, this is why I call myself an "agnostic" – because I literally don’t know, and probably will never know. In fact, I like to think of myself as a sort of "pure" agnostic – following Descartes, I know that I exist, because there are these thoughts, and I draw a circle around them, and I call them "me". But unlike Descartes, I stop there – beyond my own existence, I can never know anything. Hence agnosis - without knowledge.

But, let’s look at the second piece of writing, an article written by Jonathan Wallace:

On September 11, more than 3000 people died horribly, some by high speed impacts which tore their bodies to pieces, while others were crushed by falling steel and concrete, or fell from 1000 feet in the air, or asphyxiated from smoke, or were burned by flaming jet fuel. And, as I write these words on December 18 of the same year, I have just heard that New York's famous and venerable Cathedral of St. John the Divine is burning. When we try to understand the relationship of God to such events, the choices are very limited:

He caused them or angrily permitted them to occur. This was the theory favored by the reverends Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson. In a conversation on the 700 Club cable show, Falwell said: "God continues to lift the curtain and allow the enemies of America to give us probably what we deserve....And when we destroy 40 million little innocent babies, we make God mad." This is a brutal and primitive idea of God, that he killed Father Judge and knocked down St. Nicholas (or allowed St. John the Divine to burn today) in order to scourge us.

God had the ability to intervene but declined to. This argument is usually used in connection with the proposition that God refuses to intervene in order to guarantee free will to everyone, including Mohammed Atta. Atta's freedom was therefore more important than that of the 3000 people he killed. Some future Mohammed Atta may bear an instrumentality that could end all life on earth. In that case, will a single individual's right to choose evil over good be more important than the continued survival of all life? If not, can we say there is a threshold at which God will intervene, for example, if half the life on earth is threatened, or 100 million people are, or....Note that you would have to set that threshold well north of all the people killed as a result of American slavery, or during World War II. If there is such a threshold, how do you reconcile the idea of a compassionate God with a bureaucratic threshold that dictates that 100,000,001 people will be saved from a terrible death but not 100,000,000? How do you reconcile this view of God with the parable of the shepherd, who leaves the 99 healthy sheep to go rescue the one in trouble?

God cannot intervene in human history. This is the least popular proposition
but you hear it sometimes. But if God is powerless to intervene--more helpless than we are--than in what sense is He God? Yes, an all-knowledgeable, all-suffering being may exist, who can watch but is unable to help, but what evidence have we ever seen in our world that such a being exists in another?

In fact, regardless of whether or not He exists, our world functions exactly as if there was no God. In a Godless world it is easy to understand how men invoking an imaginary God could fly fuel-laden 767's into towers full of people. In a Godful world, such events are impossible to comprehend.

And this is why I call myself an atheist – because even though I can’t possibly know whether or not there really is a God, the universe acts precisely as if there is no God. There is a total lack of evidence that could indicate to me that there might be a God – unless you consider the utter absurdity of life to be an indication of a Divine Prankster – and as such, I feel no need to believe. Certainly, it’s possible that He does exist, but it’s also possible that unicorns and fairies and Rush Limbaugh’s integrity all exist as well. In the absence of evidence I see no reason to believe any one of the infinity of possible things for which no evidence of existence exists, I’m not going to believe in any of them. That’s my default position. If you can prove me wrong, if you can demonstrate the existence of God or Zeus or the Furies, I’d be more than happy to do so. But until someone does, I see no more reason to believe in God than I do to believe that the sun is ten feet away and made of candy.

I was raised in a vaguely Protestant, vaguely Unitarian household. I have been an atheist probably since I was eight or nine years old, and it initially had nothing to do with skepticism or empiricism, at least in terms of a lack of evidence. This is when I first became aware of the problem of evil. I simply cannot reconcile the concept of an all-loving, all-powerful, all-knowing being with the existence of evil. Yes, I have heard all of the counterarguments to this, and no, none of them satisfy me, and no, I am not interested in hearing about them. So, I’ve been an atheist ever since, content to let science and logic guide my understanding of the universe.

But, I also said that I was a better Christian than you, and here’s where we can start playing some fun philosophical games.

An idea of something is necessarily different from the thing itself, if the thing really exists, no? I think we can all agree on this, right? My idea of the rock is different from the rock itself. I cannot say that “my idea of the rock = the rock”, right? Ok, good.

So, one’s idea of God is necessarily different from God. One’s idea of God is necessarily not God. So when you think of God, when you worship God, are you really worshipping God? No, you are thinking about and worshipping your idea of God.

I’m not the first one to have this notion. Abraham Isaac Kook, who was the first Chief Rabbi of the British Mandate of Palestine, believed that atheists weren’t rejecting God (which, technically, we can’t do, because you can’t reject something that’s not there – atheism is very specifically the absence of belief, not the belief that God does not exist). He believed that atheists were rejecting the idea of God. And since the idea of God is necessarily not God, atheists were in fact rejecting a very human image of God – and since any human-made image of God is an idol, atheists were rejecting an idol being worshipped by those calling themselves Christians.

That’s right, Christians reading this. I accuse you of being idolaters. Hello, second commandment, people.

But, seriously, so far as I can understand, the only way to worship God, to believe in God, is to not believe in God. In other words, any religious experience, belief, faith, whatever, is be necessity an unconscious act. One cannot possibly contain in one’s finite head a true representation of an infinite being. Any idea of God is a mask behind which the real God may or may not exist. And this is why we should all be atheists – if God is behind the mask, then rejecting the mask is the only sure way of achieving a clear path to God. And if there is no God behind the mask, why waste our times believing in a mask, an idol?

Anyway, that’s meant in some seriousness but not much. It’s mostly a fun intellectual exercise, like most of my understanding of religion. Religion to me is exceedingly beautiful – as philosophy, as literature, as mental gymnastics – but not as religion.

For example, can God have an orgasm? An orgasm requires sensation. Sensation requires a change of condition. God is perfect. If God’s condition changes, can He get more perfect? No, if God wanted to have an orgasm, He would have to stop being God.

Or, God is an atheist, because He believes in no power greater than Himself, but Satan is a true believer, having known God first hand. So God is an atheist, but Satan’s a Christian.

Or this one – it’s a personal creation. God is infinite, right? People usually take this to mean, in one sense, that God is everywhere always. Well, to me, the logical extension of this is that God is everything. How can God be infinite – without limit – and be said to be not, well, anything? If God is infinite, how can the statement “God is not X” mean anything? For God to be infinite, He must not just be at a place, He must be the place itself – and everything else as well. In other words, God is the computer you’re using, the chair on which you’re sitting, the air you’re breathing, and you yourself. There is nothing that is not God. So, what are the implications for things like, I don’t know, free will, consciousness, and the like? No idea.

One of the coolest concepts I’ve come across comes from the Jewish Kabbala – the idea of tsimtsum. God is infinite, right? We established that. Kabbala came up with a solution to the problem I just posed. In the beginning, God literally was everything and everywhere. In order to great a space for the universe to be created, something that was necessarily not Him, He pulled away from Himself – a cosmic rending of God away from God, and within that gap the universe was born. But since that gap is necessarily not God, and is devoid of God, evil could be born as well.

Of course, there’s no proof for that either. But what is proof? What is logic? Why are they useful? David Hume was the first to point out that reason is kind of made up too. Hume demonstrated that we can never have knowledge of a thing itself. Hume also demonstrated that things like causation and extrapolation - integral to logic - were groundless. If something happened in the past, what possible reason do we have to believe it will happen again? If something happened before another, what possible way do we have of proving the first causes the second? Thanks, David Hume. Thanks a lot.

But it’s still fun. I could go on and on. Kierkegaard and the story of Abraham? Love it. The Book of Job? A war in heaven? It’s all so much fun to play around with.

I hope this sparks a couple of conversations in my comments section.

Morning Roundup

2005-06-14T08:04:00.000-05:00

So, the other day I received a comment and a link from Dave Schuler of The Glittering Eye (thanks for both!) and noticed that he did something very smart.

He discusses, briefly, all the news stories that catch his eye each morning.

And I thought, I can do that too! So, each morning I'll try to mention a few things of interest, and then post one of my longer pieces in the afternoon. Here we go:

Of all the things going on in the world, all I saw on the news this morning and on every front page - Michael Jackson. As I've said before, the media isn't biased in favor of liberals. The media is biased in favor of idiots.

An op-ed in The New York Times discusses an analysis of the educational background of 75 terrorists. Almost all of them attended college, not the madrassas that everyone has been blaming for pumping out indoctrinated radical would-be terrorists. While this is sort-of surprising, since everyone has been talking about madrassas for years, but it's sort-of not surprising if you think about al Qaeda as a vanguard party, which I have recently started doing. These are the college-educated elite who sit in coffee shops discussing philosophy and then throw (and sometimes wear) bombs in an attempt to spark a general revolution. Haven't I been talking a lot about how we don't understand the nature of our conflict? Eric Umansky has more.

The Washington Post is reporting that applications to US military academies are dropping. This follows the military's poor recruitment numbers. Even if we win resoundingly in Iraq, it's going to take a long, long time for our military to recover from this. Fewer applications to the academies means fewer new officers years from now. This is having a ripple effect far into the future.

Slow news day so far. I'll have more next time. Remember, this is a work in progress!

Understanding to Win

2005-06-13T11:26:00.000-05:00

This one is pretty long, and is the final third of my three-part post on understanding the nature of our conflict with radical Islam.

As I wrote the other week, there is a great deal of misunderstanding when it comes to Islam and our current struggle against radical Islam, misunderstandings that will hamper our attempts to actually combat radical Islam. To illustrate this, I'll point to something written in my comments section:

If we had waited for the German moderates to confront the Nazi SS extremists, do you think we would have won WWII? It's just not going to happen. We have to confront the extremists ourselves.

This is a fairly typical response, and is very problematic. I'm confused as to why some of you believe that we cannot both militarily confront the small number of radical terrorists currently plotting against America while simultaneously engaging in a strategy of public diplomacy designed to weaken the appeal of radical, militant Islam.

The key difference between the Nazi regime and radical, militant Islam is that Nazism was wedded to a single country. By confronting and defeating that country's armed forces, and then occupying that country, we were able to destroy Nazism. Radical Islam, on the other hand, knows no such restrictions. We invade Afghanistan and enough of al Qaeda's leadership removes to Pakistan to carry on its struggle. We capture or kill important leaders and more take their place. New recruits are sent out to die as suicide bombers and more take their place. We cannot invade every new country to which they retreat. There is no army to defeat in the field - if we kill a dozen, a hundred more pop up - and not just as new recruits to al Qaeda proper, but forming new cells around the world. Unlike the Wehrmacht, which required large numbers of men in uniform and large quantities of materiel, which could be surrounded or destroyed in set-piece battles, members of al Qaeda's global franchise system can easily set up shop in, say, Spain, with no connection to al Qaeda proper, and go on to murder hundreds of people. Will we invade Spain, then, as well?

No. We cannot invade every country in which al Qaeda and its franchisees might operate. We cannot entirely kill off a leadership that replenishes itself. We cannot totally defeat an army in the field that can perpetually replenish itself, which can operate from almost anywhere in the world, which only requires a handful of "troops" to stage attacks that cause massive casualties. Even if we did defeat al Qaeda-proper, we'll still have to face new versions of it, enterprising little start-ups forming independently, in places like Spain, and Morocco, and Indonesia, and California, and so on.

What we can do is this: we can kill the current leadership, we can track down and kill or arrest the current membership, but if we want to prevent people from becoming leaders, if we want to stop people from becoming new recruits, if we want people around the world from setting up new franchise operations, then we must also win the battle of ideas.

Ayman al Zawahiri, the apparent brains behind al Qaeda, recognizes this, as I mentioned the other day. Chris Henzel wrote:

Zawahiri views the current phase of the jihad as a revolutionary war, and the ideological component of the struggle is thus very important. Like Mao and the North Vietnamese General Vo Nguyen Giap, Zawahiri considers political and propaganda action to be just as important at some stages as military efforts are. “The jihad must dedicate one of its wings to work with the masses, preach, provide services. . . . [T]he people will not love us unless they feel that we love them, care about them, and are ready to defend them.” This last point—convincing the people that the revolutionary Salafists are “ready to defend them”—again illustrates how Zawahiri sees high-profile terrorist strikes against the external enemy as a means of
making propaganda for the Muslim masses. He calls on his followers, at this stage of the struggle, to “launch a battle for orienting the [Muslim] nation” by striking at the United States and Israel. Thus, al Qaeda’s immediate goal is not to destroy Israel or even drive the United States out of the Middle East; rather, it is to “orient the nation.”

As I said, the common wisdom is that we must look at what our enemies have been saying in order to understand their motivations, much as the West should have paid more heed to Hitler's Mein Kampf. Well, Zawahiri very explicitly, in his Knights Under the Prophet's Banner, explained that he viewed attacks against America as a chance to start a war between the US and Islam. Muslims did not support his agenda for establishing a new Caliphate. A war between Islam and "the infidel" would energize, politicize, unify the masses. Al Qaeda is a vanguard party, the radical minority who intend to drag the minority, kicking and screaming, out of false consciousness and into a new revolutionary fervor. Think of Lenin and the Bolsheviks. To him, it's all about propaganda. It's all about winning hearts and minds.

Fortunately, he doesn't seem to be doing a very good job, according to one Kashmiri terrorist (from Jihad Unspun and via Jihad Watch):

When I see a Palestinian mother crying over a her child’s dead body, I feel guilty as if I have slaughtered him, when I see an Iraqi mother mourning his dead son, I feel guilt because I sat in my cozy chair and did nothing, I slept in my bed while my sister was being raped. I kept on enjoying my comfortable life as my brethren’s life was made a living hell. Yet the insult over injury is that our youth are allergic to the word jihad, our hearts starts sinking with fear of a thought of jihad.

Emphasis mine.

I'm not sure why there is a problem understanding this. Our enemies are making this very explicit for us. The average Muslim, apparently, doesn't want much to do with their violent struggle against the infidel or to establish a new Caliphate. The goal must be to convince them otherwise.

And our goal must be to thwart their intentions.

This is not an impossible task. America is not particularly popular in the Muslim world. Current US efforts at strategic communications aren't very successful - a handful of radio and television stations, along with magazines and the like, which aren't very popular in the Muslim world, or taken very seriously.

This does not mean the task is impossible, however, simply because we haven't done the best job in the past. As I mentioned before, Abu Aardvark demonstrated what was possible when Bush spoke clearly and directly about Hosni Mubarak's attempts at faking democratic reform in Egypt:

I don't think Hosni Mubarak is quaking in his stylish yet affordable boots over Bush's comment that this is "not our view of how a democracy out to work" - actual criticism, in a statement rather than in the last answer to a press conference on a different subject, might have been stronger. Or concrete actions, even. One casual Bush remark in a press conference won't solve everything, any more than did Rice's intervention on behalf of Ayman Nour earlier in the year - especially if there is no follow-up. But it's a start, and I commend Bush for saying the right thing here.

He then goes on to quote six headlines from major Arab media clearly placing Bush on the side of democratic reform.

Furthermore, here's another hint of what could be, from the Council on Foreign Relations:

Informing people about aid in the areas in which America’s strengths are acknowledged had a significant positive effect on the attitudes of focus group members. (The more favorable impressions among Moroccan women due to democracy assistance and in Indonesia after the outpouring of tsunami aid are pointers in this direction.)

...Fortunately, we now have a window of opportunity to reach out to the Islamic world. Recent developments, including the Iraqi elections, renewed hopes for Israeli-Palestinian peace, mass mobilizations for Syrian withdrawal from Lebanon, and announcement of multi-candidate presidential elections in Egypt, as well as the tsunami relief effort, have improved the atmosphere. Even voices that have been critical of the Bush administration recognize that we “may be entering a time of unusually ripe opportunity for creative public diplomacy, when people who have generally been hostile to American policies might be willing to give an American message at least a listen.”

I'd go and do an analysis of public diplomacy and options for doing things better, but this CFR report really has done all the work for me, so please, please, please, if you have a chance to read a 94-page report on this stuff, this is the one to read.

We've heard, over and over, the refrain that we need to go to the source: we need to read bin Laden, and Zawahiri, and Sayyid Qutb, the intellectual father of modern Muslim radicalism. So I start reading these people, and instead of saying "we want to destroy America because we hate its freedom!" they say "we want to provoke America into attacking Muslims in order to rally Muslims to our cause". That's it, straight from the terrorists themselves. So, I report to my readers that this is the case: that Zawahiri is engaged in an attempt to win hearts and minds, and that it's important to counteract his attempts.

No, no, I'm told. I've got it all wrong, apparently. This is appeasement. This is surrender. Islam is the problem. We've been fighting Muslims for centuries. Trying to convince any of the world's billion or so Muslims who hate us or might hate us to not hate us is a worthless project, because either they'll always hate us or because this will only encourage them to hate us more or because they'll smell our fear if we don't spend 100% of our resources bombing and invading.

Michael of Here's What's Left quotes Powerline responding to a statement by Nancy Pelosi:

[T]he foolishness of Pelosi's commment resides not in the error of her substantive position, but rather in her fantsay [sic] of a "clean slate." While that concept may have some applicability in therapy, there is no such thing in international relations, as anyone who has studied history for five minutes knows. And the idea of a clean slate with Muslims, a group with whom the west has clashed for something like ten centuries, is particularly ludicrous. Some of the Muslims from whom Pelosi would like to receive a clean slate are still upset about the reconquest of Spain. And then there's the small matter of the existence of Israel.

Michael responds:

I'm sure that "some of the Muslims" are upset about the reconquest of Spain. Just like "some of the conservatives" wish the South had won. That's the thing -- identifying a large group of people based on some characteristic of a small group of them -- we have names for that kind of thing.

...Paul at Powerline...misreads what she's saying and inadvertantly reveals something. He subtly replaces the vague political rhetoric of a clean slate for American in the "Muslim world" with "Muslims." That he thinks there can be no clean slate with Muslims, because the West has been at war with them for a millenium. He personalizes it. In the mind of Powerline, mainstream conservatives that they are, we're engaged in a clash of two peoples, a straight line from medieval Europe and the reconquest of Spain to the present -- the Westerners vs. the Muslims.

Paul's not talking about "terrorists." The word "terrorists" doesn't even appear until the very end of his post. He's talking about "Muslims."

This is wrong, terribly terribly wrong. Why is this wrong? Because this is exactly what Zawahiri wants us to do. Why would we do exactly what Zawahiri wants us to do?

Islam is a religion adhered to by about a billion people. Are we to believe that among a billion people there are no differences of opinion? Consider that it took nineteen hijackers to kill three thousand people. Let's say that they were supported by a few hundred others. This is a tiny, tiny, tiny fraction of a fraction of the world's Muslims. Many more are actively fighting and plotting around the world. Many tacitly supported the act. Many welcomed it, for a variety of reasons. But if we were really fighting a billion Muslims, when nineteen killed three thousand, wouldn't you expect more to be dead?

Of course. We're not fighting Islam, we're fighting an extremist sect of Islam. We need to make sure that we continue to fight extremists, and not Islam.

Currently, our enemies are doing a good enough job of convincing Muslims to join their cause that we're still fighting them. The question, then, is this: do we still wish to be fighting them in ten, or twenty, or fifty years? And the addendum to that question: considering that a handful of our enemies can kill thousands of Americans in a single attack, and considering that our enemies are actively pursuing weapons of mass destruction, can we afford to wait fifty years when the odds of them eventually succeeding keep going up with each passing year?

A Note on the Name

2005-06-13T09:32:00.000-05:00

A couple of people have wondered if my choice of title for this weblog is, in fact, a riff on Juan Cole's Informed Comment or an attempt at flippancy. I tell you: it is neither.

I mean it in all honesty. Sure, I read a lot, and I is real smart, and I've done quite a bit in my short time here in Washington (sitting in with Bush, Powell, Lieberman, meetings at the European Command HQ in Stuttgart, stuff like that). But does any of this make me an expert on anything except being a low-ranking civil servant/yuppie? No, of course not. This is all my opinion, and most of it grossly uninformed.

Someone like Cole, regardless of what you think of his politics (I haven't read him all that much, certainly not enough to even begin to comment on this), he is an expert in his field. As such, I'd rank his weblog as far more valuable a resource for his field than, say, some schmuck who knows nothing about it except what he gets from Instapundit and Fox News.

This isn't a riff on Cole. This is a riff on the blogging enterprise. I remain quite dubious (hypocritically, of course, since I maintain my own weblog) about the whole thing. Someone like Michael Totten has actually spent time in the Middle East, and so I'm more willing to trust his insight on, say, Lebanon. Now, if Mr. Totten were to start writing about, say, neural surgery, I might take him a little less seriously because he has, as far as I know, no background in neuroscience.

Anyone can write a weblog and I encourage them to do so, if that's their cup of tea, what what. Dissent, debate, questioning of authority - these are all good things. But at a certain point, one must stop and say "I know less about this topic than this other person, and as a result, this person's conclusions stands a good chance of being more accurate than mine".

Just saying, is all.

Odds and Ends

2005-06-13T07:28:00.000-05:00

Well, first off, thanks to everyone for reading this last week. You pushed my number of visits over a thousand already. Huzzah!

Second, I've updated the list of weblogs I like. Just a few more, but they're good and interesting and funny and witty and all that, so take a look. I'll be adding a few more as the day goes by, so keep checking it out.

Probably the most interesting link that I added was to Iraqi Bloggers Central. After my call went out for more Middle Eastern media resources, I got some very good suggestions (thanks to everyone for their ideas - I'll be taking a look at everything you mentioned). IBC has saved me the trouble of tracking down all the Iraqi blogs suggested by listing them in one place. And this is a good, varied list - whatever ideological bias the author(s) might have, these are less important than presenting Iraqi blogs of all different persuasions, as well as the weblogs of soldiers in Iraq and Iranian weblogs. It's commendable that someone is more interested in disseminating information than anything else. Somehow I ended up on their list of "Blogs of Interest" which is pretty damn cool, too. Great one-stop-shopping for this sort of thing.

Finally, some people have mentioned to me that it is difficult, considering the length and number of my posts, to have serious discussions about some of the ideas I'm bringing up. In the interest of fostering discussion, as well as saving my sanity, I will try to limit myself to one extensive post a day. The last part of my post on understanding the nature of our conflict with radical Islam will be up today, probably sometime before noon.

Anyway, welcome back.

Friday

2005-06-10T14:48:00.000-05:00

Well, it's the end of the week and I don't think I'm going to finish the third part of that post on Islam. I'll finish it up and have it ready for Monday. This weekend I'll be taking a break.

Thanks so much to everyone for reading, commenting, and linking, especially the many of you who disagree with every word I write.

In the future I'll try to post around the same time each day, to post more frequently, and be a little briefer (brevity is something you might have noticed me lacking).

It's been a great week. Hope to see you on Monday.

The Beginnings of an Understanding

2005-06-10T11:26:00.000-05:00

The common wisdom for a long time has been that if more people in the West had bothered to read Hitler's Mein Kampf, we could have avoided a lot of problems like, say, the Second World War, because in that book Hitler very clearly (as well as anyone could explain the disjointed mess of Hitler's racial and political ideologies) explained his intentions. You know, like conquering eastern Europe and killing or enslaving its population? Yeah. So, the common wisdom now goes, if we wish to understand radical Islamic fundamentalists, we should read what they have been writing.

Unfortunately, a lot of this is hard to get because it is in, you know, Arabic. It was a lot easier to translate Hitler's German than Sayyid Qutb's Egyptian Arabic into English. Qutb, one of the most important members of Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood in the 1950's and 1960's, wrote several books, including Milestones and the extensive In the Shade of the Koran, which are considered by many to be the intellectual foundation for today's modern radical Islamic movement. Unfortunately, English translations don't seem to be all that abundant or readily available.

The same goes for stuff written by bin Laden or Ayman al Zawahiri, the Egyptian doctor-cum-al Qaeda strategist and intellectual leader. Zawahiri wrote a book in 2001 called Knights Under the Prophet's Banner in which he describes, among other things, al Qaeda's reasons for attacking America. I can find some translated excerpts through the Foreign Broadcast Information Service (FBIS), but not the whole thing. And sadly, FBIS is not available to the general public - I'm actually working on a project here at work to start making translated jihadist statements available to everyone.

Anyway, a lot of people believe that the reason al Qaeda is attacking America is because they hate our freedom, they wish to destroy America and think they can do so by flying some planes into buildings, they want to convert America to Islam, and so forth. While Zawahiri makes very clear his hatred of the US and his desire to establish a Caliphate in Muslim lands, his plan doesn't quite line up with the understanding of many that we were attacked because they hate our freedom:

The jihad movement must be eager to make room for the Muslim nation to participate with it in the jihad for the sake of empowerment [al-tamkin]. The Muslim nation will not participate with it unless the slogans of the mujahidin are understood by the masses of the Muslim nation.

The one slogan that has been well understood by the nation and to which it has been responding for the past 50 years is the call for the jihad against Israel. In addition to this slogan, the nation in this decade is geared against the US presence. It has responded favorably to the call for the jihad against the Americans.

...

The masters in Washington and Tel Aviv are using the regimes to protect their interests and to fight the battle against the Muslims on their behalf. If the shrapnel from the battle reach their homes and bodies, they will trade accusations with their agents about who is responsible for this. In that case, they will face one of two bitter choices: Either personally wage the battle against the Muslims, which means that the battle will turn into clear-cut jihad against infidels, or they reconsider their plans after acknowledging the failure of the brute and violent confrontation against Muslims.

Zawahiri makes no bones about hating America or Israel. I'm sure that, in his optimal world, he'd be able to destroy both. But he also makes no bones about attacking America or Israel in the immediate, very real world. Attacking Israel has great propaganda value. To him, it's a slogan. Attacking America, on the other hand, would provoke a US response around which Muslims could rally - a "clear-cut jihad against infidels". Zawahiri envisions al Qaeda as a vanguard party, much as Lenin considered his Bolsheviks to be a vanguard party, the goal of which is to politicize and radicalize a population that has not yet adopted an ideology but is ripe for the plucking. Zawahiri wrote:

The jihad movement must dedicate one of its wings to work with the masses, preach, provide services for the Muslim people, and share their concerns through all available avenues for charity and educational work. We must not leave a single area unoccupied. We must win the people's confidence, respect, and affection. The people will not love us unless they felt that we love them, care about them, and are ready to defend them.

In short, in waging the battle the jihad movement must be in the middle, or ahead, of the nation. It must be extremely careful not to get isolated from its nation or engage the government in the battle of the elite against the authority.

We must not blame the nation for not responding or not living up to the task. Instead, we must blame ourselves for failing to deliver the message, show compassion, and sacrifice.

Certainly Zawahiri cares about fighting the US for the sake of fighting the US, but in a vague, theoretical sense. He cares about fighting the US because, provoked, we will provide an external enemy, a rallying point for the mass of Muslims who are not yet radicalized. This isn't about destroying our freedom. This is about propaganda, ideology, false consciousness, hegemony (in the Gramsci sense), and what-not.

Chris Henzel, a Department of State official, wrote in Parameters that:

Zawahiri views the current stage of the jihad as one of worldwide, revolutionary struggle, to be waged by means of violence, political action, and propaganda against the secular Muslim regimes and secularized Muslim elites. Zawahiri argues that because the terrain in the key Arab countries is not suitable for guerilla war, Islamists need to conduct political action among the masses, combined with an urban terrorist campaign against the secular regimes, supplemented with attacks on “the external enemy”—i.e., the United States and Israel—as a means of propaganda that will strengthen the jihad’s popular support.

...the revolutionary Salafists do not expect to actually defeat America or its allies (whatever al Qaeda propaganda may claim). Instead, spectacular terrorist attacks are a means toward the end of changing the character of the conflict, changing it from a campaign waged by a small faction of extremists against the regimes of Muslim world, into “a clear-cut jihad against infidels,” which would, the Salafists hope, attract wide support among the Muslim masses.
Zawahiri views the current phase of the jihad as a revolutionary war, and the ideological component of the struggle is thus very important. Like Mao and the North Vietnamese General Vo Nguyen Giap, Zawahiri considers political and propaganda action to be just as important at some stages as military efforts are. “The jihad must dedicate one of its wings to work with the masses, preach, provide services. . . . [T]he people will not love us unless they feel that we love them, care about them, and are ready to defend them.” This last point—convincing the people that the revolutionary Salafists are “ready to defend them”—again illustrates how Zawahiri sees high-profile terrorist strikes against the external enemy as a means of making propaganda for the Muslim masses. He calls on his followers, at this stage of the struggle, to “launch a battle for orienting the [Muslim] nation” by striking at the United States and Israel. Thus, al Qaeda’s immediate goal is not to destroy Israel or even drive the United States out of the Middle East; rather, it is to “orient the nation.”

Folks, this is why I harp on strategic communications so much: our enemies very clearly understand their struggle to be a propaganda struggle to win hearts and minds. This is why our strategy must be to counter Zawahiri and offer a better, more attractive alternative. Or, at the least, make sure Zawahiri's isn't given enough consideration to continue winning converts.

A Lack of Understanding

2005-06-10T10:16:00.000-05:00

This is another post that got way too long, so it, too, has been broken into three parts.

Dan Drezner is plugging a couple of books on the topic of suicide bombing. He quotes extensively from the review for one, which I shall now purloin:

An "explanation of the unexplainable," this lucid and comprehensive study of the historical roots and contemporary motivations of suicide terror is a major study. Bloom's historical range is formidable; the first eight chapters are a marvel of historical compression, moving from the Zealots of first-century Judea to the Japanese kamikaze of WWII within a few bleak but instructive pages. Bloom stresses that suicide bombings can only thrive with the implied consent of an aggrieved population, which can be withdrawn: the Omagh bombing of 1998, for example, was a disaster for the IRA. Over and over again—from Chechnya to the West Bank—history teaches that harsh counterterror tactics become part of the cycle, or, as University of Cincinnati political scientist Bloom terms it, part of the contagion of violence. She sees hopeful signs in Turkey's recent measured and partially successful response to the Kurdistan Workers' Party, or PKK. The book also includes a fascinating chapter on suicide terror as practiced by women, especially in Chechnya and Sri Lanka, and how it is viewed, ironically, as a source of female empowerment.

Ah, religion.

Human beings tend to be an excitable lot. It doesn't really take all that much, in the grand scheme of things, to whip us up into a murderous frenzy. Look at what happened in Afghanistan recently: people rioted, and people died, because of a blurb in a Newsweek story about a book being flushed down the toilet.

Every religion produces its extremists. In America we have people like Eric Rudolph who attacked abortion clinics and gay nightclubs in the name of an all-loving God. In Ireland the Protestants and Catholics have been blowing each other up for years - and let's not forget that this very violent split goes back to Martin Luther and the Protestant Reformation, which was one of the bloodiest periods in Europe's already bloody past. In India, land of the peaceful Hindus, we have Hinduvata, the Indian version of fascism. In a series of riots a few years ago Hindus, who don't even kill animals, raped, dismembered, and burned alive thousands of innocent Muslims. (Of course, other Muslims in other parts of India later went on to kill other, uninvolved, innocent Hindus. What fun!) In Sri Lanka, where über-peaceful Hinduism coexists with über-peaceful Buddhism, we've had a decades-long civil war that has seen the world's only example (so far) of Hindi suicide bombers. We even have Jewish terrorists who do things like try to blow up schools full of little girls.

And of course, we have Islam. I don't think we have to go over that one.

But there are people out there who would argue that Islam is the "root cause" for Islamic extremism. That somehow, something about Islam is structurally unsound, and breeds extremism. I'm not sure how, when confronted with the sadly huge number of extremists of other religions, committing violence in the name of their religion, that people can still believe this, but they do. I guess we're supposed to believe that Islam not only caused Osama bin Laden to become a terrorist, but also Eric Rudolph.

Or, it could simply be that a tendency towards violent extremism is simply part of human nature, and religion frequently offers a handy excuse. Considering that both extremely terrible and extremely wonderful acts have been committed in the name of religions throughout history, one might be inclined to believe that religion is frequently the justification for acts by both very bad and very good people. I mean, seriously. This sort of illogic is something that bothers me enough that I'll repeat it: if religion X is the root cause for religious violence by its adherents, then is religion X also the root cause of identical violence by adherents to religions A, B, and C? If religion X produces violence, then how does one account for the fact that the vast, vast majority of adherents who have committed no violence?

If you want to be logical, you cannot say "Islam produces violence" when other religions also have violent believers. It's like saying "fascism is the root cause of tyranny" and ignoring little things like communism. It's like saying "cabbage is the root cause of flatulence" when, clearly, beans are the musical fruit.

If you want to be logical, you cannot say "Islam produces violence" when most Muslims are not violent. That's like saying "Hinduism produces violence" because of Hinduvata or "religion produces violence" because of all those examples listed above. Or like saying, as some idiots on the Left have said, that poverty produces violence when the vast, vast majority of poor people struggle through their lives just trying to make it by without ever hurting someone else. Or like saying "eating bread produces violence" because most murderers ate bread sometime in the week before the committed their crime. If a lot of people do something (believe in God, are poor, eat bread, whatever), and then some of them go on to do terrible things, you have to look for some other reason for their terrible acts.

If you're seeking a better understanding of radical Islam, the dangers it poses, the causes of its violence, and how to stop it, saying "it's all Islam's fault" is, well, dumb.

I don't say this to defend Islam. Organized, formal religion of any kind and I don't really get along very well.

But I do believe that if we a) want to understand the problem well enough to combat it as efficiently as possible and b) avoid a destructive clash of civilizations that will pit us against not just way more people than we're already fighting, but way more people that we can possibly fight, then we need a better understanding of the situation - of Islam, of the Middle East, of its history, languages, culture, of the philosophies of the extremists as well as the moderates, and so forth - something we are painfully lacking.

A Request

2005-06-10T08:58:00.000-05:00

I have to admit, I know less about current events in, as opposed to the history of, the Middle East than I'd like to. I'm trying to put together a reading list of sorts that will give me a better idea, but I would like to ask for help from my readers.

In terms of blogs, Abu Aardvark (I like this one especially - I need to start reading some of the media he references), Juan Cole (yes, I know he's controversial, but he publishes a lot of straight news from the ME), and Winds of Change all seem to have good stuff.

The Carnegie Endowment publishes the Arab Reform Bulletin, which is good, but long enough that I never really get around to reading the whole thing.

al Jazeera, obviously, but are any of the other major satellite-news orgs recommended?

There are some useful journals like MERIA and useful think-tanks like The Washington Institute.

I guess what I'm looking for are Middle Eastern newspapers and blogs, written by Middle Easterners in English, which are useful for getting an idea of, you know, what's going on on a day-to-day basis. Israeli newspapers I know about - JPost and Haaretz and all that. Any Arab dailies or blogs? I know there are a few Iraqi blogs out there that everyone reads, but I'm not too clear on those.

Also, Persian blogs - I'm learning Farsi, but after only two months a three-year-old would school me, so I am interested in those in English. I'm aware of Blogs by Iranians, but a lot of those listed aren't updated anymore.

So, if anyone has any favorites, or is aware of any really good Middle Eastern dailies/journals/think-tanks/blogs, please let me know in the comments.

Button-Pushing Ethics

2005-06-09T07:50:00.000-05:00

Writing in Slate, William Saletan comments on Bush's hypocritical approach to stem-cell research:

The standard Bush set four years ago and repeated last week is that we shouldn't take one life—even an embryonic life—in order to save others. Cost-benefit analysis is never sufficient grounds for the premeditated killing of civilians—except when it comes to the death penalty. When the discussion shifts from embryos to murderers, Bush and his spokesmen routinely argue that killing is justified not because murderers deserve it, but because it's moral to take one life in order to save others. He doesn't say that Person A should be executed because Person A is a danger to society. He says that Person A should be executed because the execution will deter Person B from killing Person C.

Saletan's argument is weakened by the fact that those executed are ostensibly guilty (though considering the number of death sentences overturned because of evidence uncovered by a college journalism class, many of them probably aren't). One could make the argument that it is acceptable to kill a criminal in order to protect innocent people.

Saletan's argument would have been better served if, instead of execution, he had contrasted Bush's policy on stem-cell research with his policy on, say, invading Iraq.

Bush's arguments for invading Iraq have shifted over the years, but they all boil down to the necessity of killing some people in order to protect others. Whether it was invading to disarm Saddam to prevent Iraqi nuclear weapons being used against Americans, or invading to save Iraqis from a genocidal dictator, or invading to combat terrorism, the invasion had a certain math to it: a certain number of innocent (and not-so-innocent) people had to die so that a larger number of people could live.

This reminded me of an essay by Jonathan Wallace:

Last October, U.S. planes carried out an air strike against a tractor pulling a trailer on an isolated road in Afghanistan, within a few miles of a Taliban stronghold. My source for the following information is an article on page 1 of the February 13, 2002 New York Times. The article does not specify whether the vehicle was a "tractor-trailer" truck or an agricultural tractor, a detail which is not terribly important. In any event, U.S. planes killed 21 civilians who were fleeing the vicinity of a strike on the Taliban compound, including seventeen children and three women. The survivors of the hit on the trailer were brought into a nearby house, which itself was struck in a follow-up sortie just minutes later. The victims ranged from an eighteen month old infant to a twenty-five year old woman. A sixteen year old girl named Gulfari related how she was splattered with the blood and body parts of her relatives. "When I put my hand up I felt blood. It was like meat and I threw it away."

Lt Col Jim Yonts, speaking classic Pentagon-speak: "We verified the target and on the night of the 21st, we dropped some precision-guided munitions on the target and destroyed that target. All the munitions were accounted for--on the target."

The attack on the Afghan trailer-full of children made me think of the parable of the magic button, familiar from your introductory college ethics class. A genie appears and tells you that in order to eliminate lung cancer from the world, you need only push the red button in front of you. However, a side effect of pushing the button is that one innocent child, half the world away, will die horribly. Do you push it?

...

God, natural rights, and ideas of "progress" or "civilization" don't unambiguously tell us why we shouldn't (or should) kill babies or splatter Gulfari with gore. In Professor Mothersill's introductory ethics class at Columbia in 1975, we spent most of the semester searching the fabric of the universe for a solid cornerstone for human ethics. I don't remember what we concluded.

I don't pretend to have an answer. At least, I don't pretend that I have anything like a universal ethical framework to inform decisions like these.

I play a game with friends - the hypothetical game. One scenario was designed to determine how much a person was willing to give up to help others. We started with the extreme and worked our way to the realistic. The extreme: imagine that you are given a choice between torturing, to agonizing death, the person you love most in the world, or watching several billion people suffer that fate. Which is it? Save the world or hurt the person you love most?

Anyway, the point isn't really to play the hypothetical game right now, or to try to create some sort of ethical framework. I'm too tired and too dumb to try that. The point is to illustrate the ethical weakness behind Bush's stem-cell research policy (or his Iraq-invasion policy, whichever you prefer).

Bush says that it is wrong to end an innocent life to save another, and so we should not destroy balls of cells to save thinking, feeling people. Bush says it is right to end an innocent life to save another, and so we should destroy thinking, feeling people to save other thinking, feeling people.

Pessimistic interpretation: Bush cares more about the embryos of white people than he does about the thinking, breathing, feeling children of brown people.

Optimistic interpretation: Bush doesn't really believe that saving a ball of cells is more important than not killing an actual, live child, but he's saying that he does out of mercenary political calculations.

There are clearly situations in which I would accept the killing of an innocent child. The fact that I feel this fills me with more than a little disgust at myself, but I accept it as true. If killing one innocent child saved a trillion innocent children, then I'd kill that child. I don't know if I'd be able to live with myself afterwards, no matter how many people I saved, but I'd still make that choice. (A sci-fi novel - I think it was Clarke’s Rendezvous with Rama or one of its sequels - featured a race of aliens whose leaders, if they voted for war, also voted for their own executions. They accepted that war had to be declared, and abided by it, but believed that a leader who voted for war was too dangerous to live. And the leaders went into this willingly - if they believed the war was necessary, they also accepted the consequences. I'm not suggesting that we do this, but I do think we might want to maybe start being a little more serious about our decisions that result in the deaths of innocent people. You know, a little more somberly or something.)

I know there are plenty of people who agree with me, and who'd kill one child to save others. In fact, there are plenty of people who are actively killing innocent children in order to save others. Our soldiers don't set out to kill children, but we all know that in the course of prosecuting this war that children have died and will continue to die because of our direct actions - American bombs and American bullets. We all know this, and many of us accept this as necessary (and for those who don't accept it in this situation, I'm sure most of them would accept it in another situation, like the trillion-to-one hypothetical). There are clearly many people who feel this way as well - all those who supported the war by speaking out or voting for Bush (his "accountability moment") or whatever. All those people essentially said "we know that if we go to war innocent people will die, whether we want them to or not, and we believe this is morally acceptable".

Many of these people also agree with Bush's stance on stem-cell research - that it is wrong to destroy an embryo that was bound for the garbage anyway in order to save a person's life. And herein lies an enormous disconnect.

It is wrong to destroy a clump of cells to save the life of a thinking, feeling person. It is right to kill a thinking, feeling person, with all those things that go along with being a person - parents and friends and a favorite book and hobbies and crushes and embarrassing moments and all the rest - in order to save other thinking, feeling people.

I don't know about you, but the living person seems infinitely more valuable than a ball of cells with the potential to become a person (if it weren't headed for the trash). But Bush and his supporters seem to have inverted this. They are unwilling to destroy that cell, but advocate the killing of innocent, living people.

I don't know about you, but this seems to me to be both enormously hypocritical, as well as an enormous misplacement of priorities.

Hypocrisy, All Around the World

2005-06-09T07:48:00.000-05:00

Digby has frequently harped on the hypocrisy of the "moral values" folks:

Still, it is kind of interesting that Neilson reports that while 12 million people tuned in to Monday Night football last week, 24 million watched "Desperate Housewives" the night before.

Needless to say, all the people watching "Housewives" in Real America were gay tourists from San Francisco.

And again:

Perhaps it is just sheer hypocrisy, I don't know. But, the fact is that somebody in the red states is watching Will and Grace and somebody is watching Girls Gone Wild and a whole bunch of somebodies are downloading pornography. I'm sure they tut-tut those terrible liberals while they pass the popcorn and laugh over The Bachelor's latest catfight. The biggest hit of the TV season is the sexually adventurous Desperate Housewives and it ain't just because people in new York and LA are watching it. The National Enquirer and the Globe are hugely popular in Middle America with their fascination with Hollywood dirt.

This is mass consumer culture and it plays very successfully all across that great swathe of red. Somebody's watching all this stuff and buying all this stuff and consuming all this stuff. I'm sure that many believe it's a problem, but I'm just not sure it's our problem. After all, these are the salt of the earth individuals who believe in taking personal responsibility, unlike us Hollywood and east coast elites. And let's not forget who's making the profits selling all this decadent culture to these innocent, God fearing folk who are evidently hypnotised into buying it. Republican Big Business.

And again:

But I'd really appreciate it if they'd can the phony sanctimony from now on and shut the fuck up about "Desperate Housewives" and dirty talk on TV. If it's ok for the First Lady of the United States to joke publicly about her husbands limp dick and jerking off farm animals then it's ok for Whoopie Goldberg and everybody else to make Bush jokes.

I sympathize, I really do. Hypocrisy seems to be a requirement these days for American citizenship.

But rejoice, for we truly are global citizens! Something I came across while browsing through CFR's report on strategic communications (page 38):

Because of their powerful influence, American movies came in for particular criticism as being lewd and harmful:
Sadly, those who get American movies see either sex or horror movies. This is the reason why we have an increase in violence here. (older Egyptian man)

I don’t like the violence [of American movies], they’re not good for
children. (older Indonesian woman)
Yet despite everything, Hollywood’s siren song remains strong. An older Moroccan man remarked, "Who would skip an American film to watch a French one? None of us."

Lots of people around the world are guilty of this sort of thing, claiming they hate American cultural imperialism and then spending their money on American cultural products, encouraging the production and sale of more.

Not that I can blame them. Most foreign movie industries just don't have the industries of scale that Hollywood has, and the production values of their films are lower as a result. I took a class on German film and saw the same actors over and over again, because they have a much smaller pool than we do (maybe that's a good thing?). I'm sure it's worse in not-so-first-world countries.

But anyway, the point isn't to harp on foreign movie industries. The point is to remind Digby that it's not just our red staters who like to get offended and then shop at one of the many adult megastores popping up all over their beloved states. Muslims around the world like to complain about the immorality of American movies while eating them up.

Same old, same old.

Viva Cuba Libre

2005-06-09T07:44:00.000-05:00

Jacob Weisberg, writing in Slate, deals well with our current Cuba policy:

Since Fidel Castro seized power in 1959, our Cuba policy has been regime change. We have plotted to assassinate and invade. We have frozen assets and suspended diplomatic relations. Most significant today are the sanctions we maintain, which forbid most trade and prevent Americans who cannot obtain a special Treasury Department license from visiting the island. Needless to say, isolation has not produced the desired result. Castro is the world's longest-serving political leader.

I am, by no means, a Cuba-expert, or even an armchair-pretend-blogosphere Cuba-expert. I do, however, feel that engagement is usually preferable to trying to isolate our enemies. The reason? Well, it's not like dictators are know for handing out radios and asking their people to tune into Voice of America. No, dictators are usually know for confiscating radios and punishing people who absorb foreign ideas about things like "freedom" and "democracy". You don't see Kim Jong Il struggling to bring in foreign media.

Weisberg says it well:

Given the obvious failure of our 45-year embargo, an American president intent on liberating Cuba would surely be considering alternatives. The most obvious one, never tried, is free trade and increased contact. It's hard to imagine that Castro would still be in power today if Havana had spent the last couple of decades awash in American tourists, Cuban-American visitors, and development-driving entrepreneurs (though walking around Havana's gorgeous, tropical decay makes you perversely glad it hasn't). Trade-fueled growth doesn't always undermine autocracy—look at China. But it does tend to, because liberal ideas and truthful information come as part of the package. The other alternative policy, which would inflict more misery on both sides and almost surely not work, would be a tighter embargo banning family visits and dollar "remittances" altogether in an effort to starve the regime of hard currency.

Haven't we seen enough countries, when facing embargoes or other crippling situations, struggle on to the bitter end? Castro certainly is, and North Korea hasn't changed hands, despite the fact that literally millions of people have starved to death. Remember, Nazi Germany reached its peak military production at the height of the Allied bombing campaign, and the remnants of the Wehrmacht fought on until the absolute bitter end. Bad guys usually don't just give up and call it quits when the going gets rough. Generally, things like embargoes make things easier for them because it gives them an external enemy. Plus, as Orwell pointed out, dictators want their citizens to be impoverished, because it makes it easier to control them.

So why don't we alter our Cuba policy? Matt Yglesias pins a lot of the blame on the Cuban exile community in Miami:

What you have here, in essence, is a dispute between dissidents living in Cuba, and the rightwing exile community based in Miami. The latter group has never been very popular in Cuba, descended as it is from the Battista dictatorship whose friendliness to American businesses and organized crime figures made it considerably better loved in Washington than in Havana.

But it's also a politically powerful group in the United States and a major bastion of support for the Republican Party. So, naturally enough, the White House has largely ignored the indigenous dissident movement in favor of the exiles' idée fixe -- that our embargo policy will suddenly start working after 45 years of failing.

The exile community has never really seemed very interested in actually bringing freedom to Cuba - considering their support for the embargo - but do seem very interested in returning to Cuba once Castro dies so they can reclaim lost property and set themselves up as the next generation of Cuban leadership.

But if our goal were to actually, you know, promote freedom around the world, we would change our policy. This isn't a situation like Uzbekistan, where an argument can, theoretically I suppose, be made that our strategic interest in maintaining bases in an important region trumps democracy promotion. We could and should engage Cuba. So when Bush says "I want freedom everywhere in the world" and then does the opposite of what it takes to achieve democracy in a Communist dictatorship because of pressure from a politically important interest group, it becomes a little harder to take him seriously.

Folks who wonder why liberals tend not to get excited over Bush's democracy-promotion talk: we don't lack excitement because we hate freedom or because we have ceded democracy-promotion to the Republicans or because we don't care anymore. We haven't forgotten to talk about these things. We just don't take Bush seriously. He took our words and made them sound hollow, by the millionth time he'd repeated them and then coddled dictators in Saudi Arabia and Uzbekistan, or maintained our Cuba policy. The words themselves start to sound a little cheap and a little banal.

We still care. We've just had our words appropriated by someone who seems to want to strip them of meaning.

No Press Is Bad Press

2005-06-08T12:38:00.000-05:00

From The Washington Post (via David Holiday), I have learned that in the wake of Amnesty International's Gulag comment,

traffic on Amnesty's Web site has gone up sixfold, donations have quintupled and new memberships have doubled.

Which, of course, reinforces the cliché that there is no such thing as bad publicity.

That said, I welcome everyone who came here courtesy of Michael Totten. Regardless of the fact that he called me a troll, which I never was (hello, it's called satire people - Jonathan Swift proposed that the Irish eat babies, and people love him for his wit), I've gotten lots and lots of traffic over the last couple of days. And I've only been blogging for three!

Keep it coming.

A few people in the comments section have asked me what I think should be done in Iraq. That's something that will take me a little while to write, so bear with me. I'll get to it soon.

Epistemology, Part Two

2005-06-08T09:59:00.000-05:00

So, the Bush administration would like us to believe that things are improving in Iraq. We're about to turn the corner! Or not:

July 24, 2003 (from the New York Times, after the deaths of Uday and Qusay Hussein): "White House officials however exuded determination they had turned a corner in the increasingly difficult task of restoring order from chaos in Iraq."

August 13, 2003 (from Fox "News" show Special Report With Brit Hume, Fred Barnes speaking): "Now, Paul Bremer says -- who's over there running the American regime in Iraq, where they've turned the corner in defeating the Baathists and so on and most of the country is safe and stable, says we don't need more troops...I think Bremer also said it was only about 100 terrorists have come in from...outside the country from Iran. And that's not really that many. So I don't think it's that big a problem."

January 1, 2004 (from ABC News, after a bomb blew up at a Baghdad New Year's celebration): "Last night's attack came at a time when coalition officials were cautiously beginning to feel that they had turned a corner here in Iraq."

June 2, 2004 (from CNN's Inside Politics, then-National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice speaking): "The reason that we've turned a corner and, more importantly, that Iraq has turned a corner and the Iraqi people have turned a corner is that they now have a government in place broadly representative of, broadly capable, I think, of representing the views of the Iraqi people that can now accept sovereignty and can be a full partner in trying to secure Iraq and in accelerating its reconstruction. The Iraqis don't like occupation any more than we would like occupation. And it is time for that occupation to end."

September 14, 2004 (from CNN's Newsnight With Aaron Brown, Senator Lindsay Graham speaking): "And between now and our November election and between now and January there will be hell to pay in Iraq because the stakes are very high but, if we can make it through January, Aaron, then I think we've turned the corner."

February 9, 2005 (from CNN's Wolf Blitzer Reports, Senator Lindsay Graham speaking after the Iraqi - and American - elections): "If we think we've turned the corner, this is a misreading of what happened. The attacks are going to continue."

April 15, 2005 (from Fox "News" show The Big Story With John Gibson, Richard Perle answering a question about whether or not a corner has been turned in Iraq): " I believe we've turned a corner. And that was -- that corner was turned when 8.5 million Iraqis braved death to cast their first votes. Now a government is being formed. The Iraqi people are invested in the future of their own country. And that was the critical turning point." The next question Gibson asked Perle was whether or not he ever felt like saying "we were right."

After the SLAM DUNK! case for disarming Saddam of his WMD and eliminating his ties to al Qaeda, I'm not sure what credibility this administration really has on Iraq anymore. Yet, there are still plenty of people out there who really do believe this.

Peruse the conservative side of the web. The media is underreporting good news from Iraq. The media is overreporting bad news from Iraq. Don't forget that good news that the stinky media doesn't tell you about! The media is aiding the insurgency. Go ahead, google some terms like "media" and "underreporting" and "treason". The general theme among many conservatives goes something like this:

"The situation in Iraq is better than it is portrayed in the media. I know this because the Bush administration insists that things are getting better and that we are close to victory. A small number of news stories supports this. The fact that the media coverage of Iraq is overwhelmingly negative is, in no way, an indication that things might actually be bad. Instead, this is evidence that the media is horrifically biased against Bush, freedom, and all that is good and right in the world. When presented with a hundred negative stories and one positive story, I know that the one positive story, which conveniently confirms my belief that the war would produce positive results, is correct. I also know that the hundred other stories are false and the result of bias - despite the fact that this information (which, I remind you, overwhelmingly indicates that things are bad) is my only source of information on Iraq."

It's amazing, and it raises the very interesting epistemological question: the only way we can know anything about Iraq is through what other people tell us. Other people are telling us, almost overwhelmingly, that things are bad. Yet somehow, many people have decided that they know that this information is incorrect. How do they know? If your only source of information says "X" then how do you know that "not X" is true?

This is a breathtaking illustration of selection bias at work. This is sad and fascinating at the same time. Before the Iraq war, no one knew what the outcome would be. No one could possibly know - this isn't a linear-equation-style problem, wherein you fire a canon a couple of times and the cannon ball lands in roughly the same place. We're talking about multiple countries, hundreds of millions of people, trillions of dollars - in other words, more variables than anyone could possibly be aware of. We could make guesses, but that's it.

So people had guesses - hypotheses, if you will: things will turn out well, or they will turn out poorly. The only way of knowing was to test the hypotheses, and we have, by waging that war. So far, despite limited progress, things don't seem to be working out so well. It turns out that one hypothesis was wrong, and the other was right. Or at least, more accurate. This is the essence of the scientific method and all that reason, logic, rationality, enlightenment stuff that comes along with it.

So I guess that's a key difference between the reality-based community and the non-reality-based community. Before the war, I guessed that things would turn out well. Then we tested that, via the war, and I saw the test results, and I said "I was wrong". I accept that I have no direct access to Iraq and must rely on and trust the people actually there to be an authoritative source - the only source. Instead of accepting and acknowledging, or even accepting the possibility, that they were wrong, conservatives reject the evidence. And then they tell the only authoritative source of information on Iraq, people actually there, that they are wrong because they contradict previously-held conservative assumptions. (There is an enormous act of hubris going on here too - "No matter how much experience you have or how expert you are, if you disagree with my assumption, you are wrong".) Like I said, I find this fascinating. I wonder if any of them sit back and wonder how they could possibly know "The Truth" when the only people with access to "The Truth" are telling them that they are wrong.

No, probably not.

Epistemology, Part One

2005-06-08T07:52:00.000-05:00

This post got a little too long (brevity, soul, wit, whatever), so I decided to break it into two parts.

Epistemology is, basically, the philosophical inquiry into how we know what we know. The situation in Iraq provides us with a very interesting look into the field of epistemology. Just how do we know what we know about what's going on in Iraq?

Since most of the people in the world are not in Iraq, they cannot observe the situation first-hand. As such, we must rely on other people, those actually there, to provide us with information. We have lots and lots of information coming out, unfortunately not nearly enough to give us a really accurate picture but enough to give us a general idea of what is going on. News from reporters on the ground, reports from returning soldiers, government releases - these are our sources of information. This is how we know what we know about current events in Iraq.

According to Los Angeles Times, things aren't so good:

Suicide bombings have surged to become the Iraqi insurgency's weapon of choice, with a staggering 90 attacks accounting for most of last month's 750 deaths at the militants' hands. Suicide attacks outpaced car bombings almost 2-to-1 in May, according to figures compiled by the U.S. military, The Times and other media outlets. In April, there were 69 suicide attacks, more than in the entire year preceding the June 28, 2004, hand-over of sovereignty. The frequency of suicide bombings here is unprecedented, exceeding that of Palestinian attacks against Israel and of other militant insurgencies, such as the Chechen rebellion in Russia. Baghdad saw five suicide bombings in a six-hour span Sunday.

...

U.S. officials and Iraqi analysts say the insurgents' resources are increasing on several fronts: money to buy vehicles and explosives, expertise in wiring car and human bombs and intelligence leaks that help them target U.S. and Iraqi forces. Suicide attacks are on the rise because the explosive devices "are simple to construct and easy to operate, thus making suicide bombers difficult to detect," said Navy Cmdr. Fred Gaghan, in charge of the Combined Explosive Exploitation Cell in Iraq that studies bomb scenes for clues to insurgent tactics. "They are viewed by terrorists as a successful means with which to kill or injure coalition, Iraqi security forces and innocent Iraqi citizens," Gaghan said. "At this time, there is nothing to indicate that the availability of volunteers is on the decline," he said, noting the media coverage and videos of suicide bombings posted on the Internet that are said to fuel extremist recruitment.

But according to Vice President Dick Cheney (via Kevin Drum), things are actually getting better:

The level of activity that we see today from a military standpoint, I think, will clearly decline. I think they're in the last throes, if you will, of the insurgency.

So we have two sources of information - the LAT and the Vice President - and their stories are conflicting. How do we know which is more accurate?

We can turn to other sources of information, as many as possible, to get as broad a picture as possible. And what does that broad picture look like? Well, generally, a lot of the news coming out of Iraq is bad, very very bad. You know, increasing attacks by terrorists, frequent assassinations, money being diverted from reconstruction projects to pay for security costs and multi-billion dollar accounting "mistakes", large parts of Iraq still completely unsafe to travel, rampant inflation and unemployment, and so forth. The Brookings Institution has a handy index of variables. US casualties have been rising since a low in March. Iraqi military casualties are way up. Car bombings more than doubled between March and April. Insurgent casualties have been dropping from a high last November. The estimated strength of the insurgency has not declined significantly, nor has the estimated number of foreign fighters. Electricity production has actually declined since last August. Unemployment has not gone down, and there's a good chance it will go even more (via Obsidian Wings):

Iraqis, who are already dealing with food shortages, daily power blackouts and a deadly insurgency, on Sunday received another dose of bad news: Their newly elected leaders may slash budgets and government jobs...

As many as half of Iraq's 6.5 million-strong workforce is employed by the state, thanks in part to ousted President Saddam Hussein, who increased the public payroll to mask unemployment and shore up a faltering economy...

Salaries account for only 20% of public expenses, Shamaa said. Iraqi ministry employees earn about $130 a month on average. He warned that with increasing food prices, 30% unemployment and 9 million Iraqis living below the poverty line, any budget cuts could push more Iraqis toward violence...

On Sunday, members of Iraq's elite police commando units, heralded by U.S. and Iraqi officials as a key to stemming the insurgency, staged a protest outside Baghdad's heavily fortified Green Zone, saying they hadn't been paid in four months, witnesses said.

Things just keep getting better and better, right?

FIND OUT NEXT TIME!!!!

Irony

2005-06-08T07:39:00.000-05:00

Here are a couple examples of what I like to call irony.

First up: according to Digby the ACLU has won a legal ruling requiring the government to turn over all photographs and videos of prisoner abuse at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.

Remember, the Bush administration determined that the Geneva Conventions don't apply to our prisoners from the War on Terrorism and that it's only torture if itinvolves "severe pain" equivalent "to the level of death, organ failure, or the permanent impairment of a significant body function."

But, according to the ACLU, "Attorneys for the government had argued that turning over visual evidence of abuse would violate the United States’ obligations under the Geneva Conventions".

Did you catch it? Did you catch the irony - of the Bush administration saying the Geneva Conventions didn't apply so they could use torture, but that they did apply when the Bush team needed to cover their asses and prevent the release of photographic evidence of their torture? Do you get the irony? Huh?

Second: many conservatives in the chattering classes whip themselves into a tizzy over the fact that the media uses the word "insurgent" to describe our enemies in Iraq instead of the preferred "super-duper-hella lame terroristical Islamojihadocommufascistico homicide radical bad guys".

Here are some examples! Chris Hitchens:

In my ears, "insurgent" is a bit like "rebel" or even "revolutionary." There's nothing axiomatically pejorative about it, and some passages of history have made it a term of honor. At a minimum, though, it must mean "rising up." These fascists and hirelings are not rising up, they are stamping back down. It's time for respectable outlets to drop the word, to call things by their right names (Baathist or Bin Ladenist or jihadist would all do in this case), and to stop inventing mysteries where none exist.

LGF:

Jihadists have slaughtered another helpless hostage, but al-Reuters still labels the killers with the relatively innocuous word "insurgents".

Austin Bay:

And "reactionary" is a much more apt description for these thugs than "insurgent." Words matter, and insistently describing the murderers in Iraq as insurgents distorts the aims and true nature of these enemies."

Roger L. Simon:

In the wake of the Iraqi election, the use of the term "insurgents" by the mainstream media -- a conscious/unconscious attempt to cloak a rag-tag amalgamation of fascists, jihadists and common criminals in the romantic mantle of Pancho Villa -- should now be placed in the junk pile. "Insurgents," in most historical uses, has referred to groups trying to upset an illegitimate or semi-legitimate regime. That is no longer the case, if it ever was. It's time for the mainstream media to start calling the terrorists by their true names and ideological identities, such as they are. There is no justification any longer for the use of the euphemism "insurgents," unless you are writing pro-fascist propaganda.

My favorite is Simon's. Remember, there is no reason at all to use the term "insurgents" unless you are writing pro-fascist propaganda.

Ready for the irony? ARE YOU READY?

George Bush: "I think the Iraq government will be up to the task of defeating the insurgents."

Dick Cheney: " Today, as our coalition fights Taliban remnants in Afghanistan and insurgents in Iraq, Air Force jets are flying 24 hours a day, on combat air patrol and intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance missions."

Condoleezza Rice: The Syrians also need to be responsive on questions of their support for -- their support or the support of their territory -- for insurgents who are fighting in Iraq to deny the Iraqi people a better future."

Donald Rumsfeld: And the closer they get to success -- of having a constitution, of having an election on that constitution -- the greater the loss for the insurgents."

[Emphasis mine.]

See, you probably thought the irony was going to have something to do with the fact that conservatives hate postmodernism but have adopted it completely - the word "insurgent" is more than just a noise that represents something, it becomes an act itself that shapes thoughts and behaviors, blah blah blah.

No! The irony is that a lot of people cannot stand it when the media uses the term "insurgent" - because, as well all know, there is no reason to use the word unless you hate freedom and want to open-mouth kiss terrorists - but that our buddies Bush, Cheney, Rice, and Rumsfeld all use the term themselves. So either they're pro-fascist, or...

IRONY STRIKES AGAIN!

I've said it before and I'll say it again: I think the key difference between liberals and conservatives is that the former appreciate irony and the latter don't.

Wunderbar!

2005-06-07T18:49:00.000-05:00

Only two days old and my blog already has actual, real-live people reading it. Huzzah! Welcome every one, whether from Totten's comments section or from DPU's most gracious plugging of my blog on his own.

I welcome everyone! Agree with me, disagree with me, whatever. If, by the end of the day, I haven't enraged at least one of you, I'm not doing my job.

Bush's Message Machine

2005-06-07T08:53:00.000-05:00

Fortunately, the Bush administration has seen the wisdom and importance of a strategy based around public diplomacy. According to The Washington Post:

The Bush administration has launched a high-level internal review of its efforts to battle international terrorism, aimed at moving away from a policy that has stressed efforts to capture and kill al Qaeda leaders since Sept. 11, 2001, and toward what a senior official called a broader "strategy against violent extremism."

...

Another key aspect is likely to be the addition of public diplomacy efforts aimed at winning over Arab public sentiment, and State Department official Paul Simons said at a congressional hearing earlier this month that the "internal deliberative process" was broadly conceived to encompass everything from further crackdowns on terrorist financing networks to policies aimed at curbing the teaching of holy war against the West and other "tools with respect to the global war on terrorism."

This a good thing, and considering the emphasis placed on strategic communications by Bush, Rice, and Rumsfeld, we're probably going to see increased funding and a more dynamic strategy.

The problem is that Bush & Co. seem to have been doing everything in their power to undermine their own efforts. Bush calls the war on terror a "Crusade" and the Muslim world thinks America is out to destroy Islam.

In 2003, then-Deputy Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence William Boykin said that America had been attacked "because we're a Christian nation, because our foundation and our roots are Judeo-Christians. ... And the enemy is a guy named Satan." This is the same guy who, back in 1993, said about a Muslim in Somalia "I knew my god was bigger than his. I knew that my god was a real god and his was an idol." And instead of publicly reprimanding him and disavowing his comments, Rumsfeld defended Boykin and Bush ignored the issue. And the Muslim world thinks America is out to destroy Islam.

Bush talks a lot about how he stands for freedom and against tyranny. Then Crown Prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia visits, and the two are photographed holding hands. People in the Middle East who suspect Bush of duplicity now have confirmation and will be that much harder to convince that hey, we're not so bad.

The worst, of course, is that while the US is trying very hard to portray itself as a liberator rather than a conqueror and occupier, the US is torturing to death Muslims in Iraq and Afghanistan. That torture has been used and that people have died as a result is something acknowledged by the US armed forces through the handful of courts marshal that have convicted some of the worst perpetrators of murder. Bush's response has been to punish the handful of "bad apples" rather than acknowledge that it was his administration that decided the Geneva Conventions did not apply to our prisoners and that torture was A-OK so long as it didn't feel like major organ failure. And, of course, instead of saying something like "we will no longer torture Muslims in the same prison in which Saddam Hussein tortured Muslims", Bush has more-or-less said "I am very unhappy that the media published photographs of Americans torturing Muslims - if only the media wasn't blabbing, everything would be fine!"

We're already spending lots of money and effort trying to convince Muslims that America is great. And Bush, who has vocally thrown himself into a program of winning hearts and minds, seems to be doing his damnedest to convince people that America really is as bad as they think it is.

As the Council on Foreign Relations noted in their focus groups in various Muslim countries, Osama bin Laden is popular among Muslims not because Muslims like the idea of radical Islam, but because he represents a chance to vicariously strike back against America's perceived crimes:

Bin Laden’s appeal was as an outlet for anti-American frustration, much more than for Islamic fundamentalist ideology: he “put America in its place.” In the focus groups, no one said they liked bin Laden because they wanted a Taliban-style state or to impose Islamic law. Instead, they admired his fortitude and skill against the dominant world power.

It's not like I'm suggesting we surrender to terrorists or kneel before Zod or anything like that. I'm suggesting that Bush not have photographs taken of him holding hands with a dictator. I'm suggesting that when
an American official portrays this conflict as a war between civilizations, Bush should come out and say "no, this is a war against extremism" instead of defending the official and, by proxy, his statement. I'm suggesting - and I know this might blow your mind, so be prepared - I'm suggesting that we stop torturing people to death and apologize for having done so.

Abu Aardvark has a post demonstrating what is possible when Bush says the right thing, after he criticized Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak for not following through on his promises for free elections:

Here is a sampling of headlines in the Arab press today:

Al-Sharq al-Awsat: "Egypt's referendum: 83% approve, and Bush criticizes the attacking of protestors."

Al-Hayat: "Egypt: Participation in the referendum represents limited numbers, and Bush calls for tolerance and freedom of opinion and assembly."

Al-Quds al-Arabi: "Washington condemns the attacks on the opposition in Egypt and Kifaya accuses the police of sexual atrocities against female protestors."

Al-Wafd (center-right Egyptian opposition paper): "International and American condemnation for the referendum scandal: Bush calls for free elections in Egypt.. and the White House calls for trials of those who attacked the protestors."

Al-Arabiya: "America calls for prosecution of members of the ruling party in Egypt for attacks on female protestors... Bush condemns the policy attacks against those protesting against the referendum."

Al-Jazeera: "Bush criticizes the Egyptian government and the opposition doubts the results of the referendum."

Moral of the story: if America does the right thing, it can and does get the benefit of the doubt in the Arab media.

This is good stuff. It costs us so little to say the right thing, and if we do, we have the potential to gain so much. So it remains a mystery to me as to why our leaders continue to make sure that the world thinks the worst of us.

Two-Faced Politicians? I'm As Shocked As You!

2005-06-07T08:43:00.000-05:00

Our leaders tend to laud, rightly, the men and women of our volunteer armed forces, and make lots of promises to them:

[W]e will do whatever it takes to support our men and women in uniform and give them the tools they need to prevail.

Let's set aside the fact that our soldiers have not, in fact, been given everything they need to succeed, as soldiers continue to die because their vehicles have not been armored properly (well, I suppose it's possible they were given what they need to succeed, but not to succeed and come home alive).

No, what I'd like to discuss this time is the fact that our men and women in uniform continue to be treated pretty badly by the government. Check out the DoD pay tables. An Army sergeant is probably earning under $28,000 a year. A Captain can earn as little as $37,500 a year. Most of my peers who graduated at the same time I did have started out earning more than that, and none of us are, you know, getting shot at or blown up in order to bring democracy to the Middle East. I'm sorry, this just isn't right.

And, I see from Stars and Stripes (via Atrios), that there are already hundreds of veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan who are homeless.

Is this right? I'll answer my own questions, in the style of a "blogger": no! This is not right at all! The people who risk death to defend our country deserve better than this.

The Republican Party controls Congress and the White House. Since it is completely and utterly within their power to rectify this situation, I'd like to see some action on this. Our leaders enjoy the political support of many in the armed forces and frequently use them as a political prop. I really can't understand how this situation can be tolerated - if the Republicans really cared about these men and women, as they have said they do, you'd think they'd, you know, actually take real action to help them, instead of sending them to die for less than spoiled yuppie undergrads (like myself!) earn.

I wouldn't hold my breath if I were you.

Get it? Because if you held your breath that long, it would be bad for your health. You'd probably pass out and hit your head on something if you held your breath that long. Get it? It's not going to happen.

Strategic Communications

2005-06-06T13:25:00.000-05:00

Strategic communications, public diplomacy, winning hearts and minds: call it whatever you want, but it really boils down to convincing people that they don't want to blow us up.

Of course, it's broader than that: it's convincing people not to blow us up, yes, but also convincing them to ignore people telling them to hate us, convincing them not to tacitly or actively support our enemies, and convincing them to help us in our efforts to fight our enemies and help their countries reform.

And it's vitally important. We can and should continue to capture or kill terrorists, deny them safe havens, cut their funding, and so forth. This will not be enough, however, to ensure our safety or defeat our enemy (to the greatest extent we can ever really do either). Out of over a billion Muslims in the world, only a very small number are radical extremists actively fighting against us. A much larger number of Muslims are actively or passively supporting them, or at the least are sympathetic enough to them or hostile enough to us in order to make our fight more difficult. We can arrest or kill al Qaeda's leaders, but can we spend the rest of eternity fighting and killing the new recruits who continue to fill their ranks? We can invade Afghanistan to deny them safe haven, but can we then invade Pakistan, where al Qaeda seems to have regrouped, or every other country they flee to next? Our fight only gets harder if radical Islam spreads and the al Qaeda franchise network continues to spread and grow.

So, the goal then becomes influencing the behavior of Muslims in order to limit support for our enemies. There are lots of people who believe that this effort is pointles because these people are implacably hostile to us already. But this isn't about trying to convince the people who desire and plan mass murder; this isn't about trying to convince extremist terrorists. This is about trying to convince the vast majority of Muslims who are in a position to swing either way, towards helping us or towards helping our enemies. Richard Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations, believes that skepticism of strategic communications is "due to two widespread views about Muslim anti-Americanism: that 'they hate us for who we are' and thus cannot be persuaded otherwise; and that 'they hate us for what we do,' such that attitudes cannot shift without major policy changes." But, he continues: "Both of these views are partly true, but neither comprises the whole truth."

And that's the important part. There are many, many Muslims out there who actually like the US. For those who don't, there are things about the US which they like. Muslims like modernity. They want freedom and democracy and economic growth brought about by liberalization, education, and rule of law. These people can be won over, if we just do it right.

On page 99 of The Century Foundation's Defeating the Jihadists, the basis for this is laid out:

In the March 2003 Telhami/Zogby poll, respondents were asked whether their “attitudes toward the United States are based more on your values as an Arab or on American foreign policy in the Middle East?” In each survey country, a plurality indicated that their opinion was influenced more by foreign policy considerations. In short, these results confirm that much like the American public, Arabs care mostly about facts on the ground. There is nothing incongruous about life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness and the values and aspirations of Arabs, but large majorities of those living in the Middle East and North Africa do evaluate U.S. foreign policy as out of step with their own worldview.

This gives rise to the hope that by shaping the perception of American policy (or by altering policy itself in some way) we can shape opinions of the US.

A report from the Council on Foreign Relations, A New Beginning: Strategies for a More Fruitful Dialogue with the Muslim World, expands upon this. After conducting a series of focus group interviews in Morocco, Egypt, and Indonesia with a number of people over several years, the authors conclude:

Perceptions matter: most Muslims do not hate America for “who we are” or “what we do.” This study shows that they are angry at what they perceive America to do. Many of the focus group members once admired America and regret that their feelings have soured. They do not hate America’s freedom and wealth; they envy them. They do not project repressed rage at their governments onto ours; their views of America have worsened while their attitudes toward their own rulers have improved and their societies have grown freer. It is more accurate to say they hate America for what the country has done, but it is most accurate to say they are hostile to American policies as they perceive them. They are angered by what they have heard about Iraq, the war on terror, Palestine, and post–September 11
American views of Muslims, filtered by largely hostile television stations and print media. They are ignorant of U.S. aid programs that address national priorities they hold dear, despite massive increases in such aid in recent years. Ironically, when asked what they want from America, they request respect and aid—things America can provide.

Good stuff, read the whole thing if you get a chance.

Anyway, the point is that the image of the Muslim world as one seething with rage and hatred at the United States, modernity, democracy, freedom, and all that is good and right in the world is, well, wrong. The people who hate America for its freedoms and what it represents are a tiny, if dangerous, minority. The majority of people have many concerns which would seem very familiar to people anywhere in the world, the average American included - jobs, economic growth, education, opportunity, honest politicians, health care, and so forth. As the report emphasized over and over, the problem was one of perception of actions, rather than hatred of the actions or a hatred of what American represents.

This has been discussed before, as by Barry Rubin in a 2002 Foreign Affairs article - The Real Roots of Arab Anti-Americanism:

Over the years, the United States has also spent blood and treasure saving Muslims in Afghanistan from the Soviets; in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia from Iraq; and in Bosnia and Kosovo from Yugoslavia. It has supported Muslim Pakistan against India and Muslim Turkey against Greece. Washington has courted Damascus, even tacitly accepting Syria's control over Lebanon. The United States supported Arab Iraq against Persian Iran during the Iran-Iraq War and also refrained from overthrowing Saddam Hussein after pushing him out of Kuwait in 1991.

Surely, considering America's vast advertising industry, which exists solely to convince people to do something they would not have done otherwise (in our case, to give our money in exchange for a product, service or - more commonly - a brand which makes us feel better about ourselves), we have the capacity to produce a better, more compelling message which incorporates this history. We need to rebrand America.

There are issues which will continue to generate a lot of hostility towards America, regardless of how we shape the message: I'm thinking of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but I'm sure there are others. There are people who will hate us no matter what we do or say, and I'm not talking about these people. There are people who dislike us or are ambivalent because they think we're doing terrible things, or are suspicious of us, and these are the people we can win over. As the CFR report noted, attitudes towards America became significantly less hostile in Indonesia after we began tsunami-relief efforts, and attitudes towards America were most positive among older women in Morocco where the US has long supported reform and women's rights programs.

Let's not forget that there are whole countries full of Muslims who already like America. In Kosovo Muslim men carry photographs of Clinton in their wallets. In Bosnia candlelight vigils are held each year for the victims of September 11. Or Iran, which has one of the most pro-American populations in the region. Hatred of America is not a characteristic of Islam, nor is it unchangeable. Unless we want our children's children to be fighting radical Islam the way we are now, a systematic program of strategic communications is necessary to shift public opinion in the Muslim world.

Objectively Unserious About Defending America

2005-06-06T08:06:00.000-05:00

So, in my inaugural post, I do what I do best: complain about something over which I have absolutely no control!

Wonderful Slate has a great article about Army recruiting problems and the new directive to scrape the bottom of the barrel:

Now comes a new Army directive that attempts to alleviate the personnel crunch by retaining soldiers who are earmarked for early discharge during their first term of enlistment because of alcohol or drug abuse, unsatisfactory performance, or being overweight, among other reasons. By retaining these soldiers, the Army lowers the quality of its force and places a heavy burden on commanders who have to take the poor performers into harm's way. This is a quick fix that may create more problems than it solves.

Fair enough. Thanks to Iraq and Afghanistan, the Army is failing to meet its recruiting goals, so it’s lowering its requirements. This is something for which I’ve argued in the past – in order to deal with the problems we face, we need an bigger military, especially Army and Marine Corps, the two services doing most of the heavy lifting in our wars. In order to expand an all-volunteer force, the government can either lower its recruiting (or, in this case, retention) standards, or it can offer better incentives to join or stay, or it can do both.

Apparently, the Army has already expanded its incentives to stay, since it manages to reach retention goals while failing to get new recruits (it probably doesn’t help that pay isn’t so great - the lowest-ranked enlisted soldier will earn a whopping $14,000 a year – why exactly are our soldiers earning so little while their families are still on food stamps?). It is also lowering its standards for retention, to ensure at the very least enough boots on the ground.

The problem with this is that while the Army is focusing on retaining soldiers with problems – alcoholics and drug addicts – it is eliminating quality soldiers. Here’s the story (courtesy of Andrew Sullivan) of a decorated Army sergeant who wants to return to Iraq after having been wounded, but can’t. He’s been discharged because he is openly gay.

This isn’t the only case of this sort of thing: the military has been firing linguists trained in vital languages such as Arabic for years for being gay. In other words: at the same time that the Army is retaining alcoholics and drug addicts, because it needs more soldiers, it is firing decorated combat veterans and trained linguists who are, you know, vital to the war effort.

This is, to put it mildly, a very bad thing. We're putting lives at risk because people are afraid they'll catch the gay.

The armed forces are legally bound to fire openly-gay soldiers under the charming “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell" law (thanks, Clinton!), though the armed forces don’t seem to have any problem bending the law against women serving anywhere near combat units when they want to or when it’s necessary for the war effort. But let’s pretend, for a second, that it’s not their fault and they can’t bend this law. Who’s to blame? Why, that would be Congress, for not changing the law, and the Bush administration, for not taking the lead in demanding a change.

Anyone who says “I am serious about defending America against her enemies” yet does nothing while America bleeds vital, decorated soldiers in favor of drug addicts is utterly and totally unserious about actually defending America. Our leaders talk a good game about defending America, but when it comes to doing something to actually defend America - that is, retaining quality soldiers who have done nothing wrong - they do nothing. If the Republican Party wanted to repeal "Don't Ask, Don't Tell", it could, since it controls the White House and Congress. But it won't, no matter how much they talk about being serious about defending America. It's a rhetorical bluff.

The Bush administration and Congress - making sure they look like they care, and scoring political points off security threats, without actually caring about making Americans safer? Perish that terrible thought.

(The only comfort I take from this sort of thing - small though it is - is that every bigot out there who hates gays enough to bar them from the military, rallies to make it illegal for them to get married, stands around waving signs about how God hates them, or whatever, must think about gays and being gay a lot. It must be a lot of effort, all that organizing, rallying, writing letters to Congress, and making those signs. In fact, I bet the people who hate gays think about gayness more than gays do. So, I derive some small satisfaction from knowing that people who hate gays can't stop thinking about being gay. I just love the idea of all those bigots out there who can't stop thinking about butt sex. What a bunch of queers.)

Introitus

2005-06-06T08:01:00.000-05:00

Before I begin, a little about myself.

I am, as of writing, twenty-three years old. I am originally from New York State, a Yankee through and through, but I currently live in Washington, DC. For me, this is the South, and summertime feels like a tropical rainforest for someone raised in a land that closed school when it got so cold that waiting for the bus was dangerous

I have an undergraduate degree in History and in International Relations. Starting in the fall I'll be working on a master's degree in security studies. I would like to concentrate on the Middle East and political psychology. I am learning to speaks Farsi. I am doing my best to dedicate my career, in my own small way, to defending America and all that good stuff for which it stands.

I am employed by the federal government and currently work on a project dealing with strategic communications. Ideally I'd be working for the intelligence community, or have a nice job at State or Defense working on public diplomacy, or have a cushy writing job (hint hint).

I am old enough now to have voted in two presidential elections. In 2000, I voted for Al Gore. In 2004, I voted for John Kerry. I am comfortable calling myself a liberal, with all that entails, in the classic sense - I am pro-choice, pro-free trade, pro-decriminalization, pro-separation of church and state, pro-free speech, pro-gay marriage, and so forth. I believe that the Democratic Party, flawed as it is, represents the best opportunity to achieve most of these things, and as such I can be quite the partisan when I need to be - though I like to believe that I worship at the altar of reason, logic, and objectivity. I will allow the rest of my political leanings to unfold through my ~~vitriolic uninformed tirades~~ careful analyses of politics and other current events.

I am uncomfortable discussing personal details in a forum as public as this, and I prefer to remain anonymous for now (see career goals). I'm sure you can coax some more out of me. If you, reader, actually exist. And are nice.

That is all.

Das Blog

2005-06-06T07:55:00.000-05:00

This isn't my first attempt at writing a blog, nor will it (likely) be my last. But my previous attempts were pretty lame, and no one read them, so I abandoned them like so many frozen embryos in a fertility clinic, and along the way I acquired the notion that blogs actually make you dumber for having read them. Short posts prevent in-depth analysis; most blogs are run by bloviating blow-hards (such as myself!) who are experts in nothing but their own opinions and biases; the proliferation of blogs means that people spend more and more time cycling through a hyperreal nightmare of hyperlinks rather than actually reading anything of substance written by anyone who knows anything of substance. They increase the velocity of information, which is inversely related to fact-checking and anyalysis.

So why am I hypocritically attempting to write a blog again? Well, a journalist by the name of Michael Totten, on whose blog I comment fairly frequently (though it's not too late for you novice blog readers, I cannot escape the obsessive pull of the blogosphere), told me that I should get a blog and that if I did, he would read it.

Flattery, Mr. Totten, will get you everywhere.

I have no real goal or direction in mind with this blog, except to help my writing get good. Please forgive any initial stumbles, boredom, and so forth.

Plus, my job is really boring and, with Mr. Totten's encouragement, if I could actually get people to read what I write, maybe I could, you know, finagle my way into a writing job. That would be, to put it mildly, wonderful.

So let's give this a go, shall we?

Uninformed Opinion

On Blogging

Can We Officially Bury Flypaper Now?

Media Bias

Resilience

HVC: Hippie Vs. Communist

Terror in London

Enuii

Who, Exactly, Did bin Laden Want As President?

The Withdrawal Option

More Thoughts on the Insurgency

Things Change...

Looks Like I'm Not the First One to Think What I Think

Faulty Logic

More Weblogs I Like

God is Love Wrath

Deterring Terrorism

All Hail the Spaghetti Monster

Rose Madder

Iraq: What Do We Do?

Sorry

Iraq: What Is Wrong?

Morning Roundup

Religion and Ethics

Al Qaeda as Vanguard Party

George Bush Gets Something...Right?

Why I Am an Idiot

Morning Roundup

Things That Make You Go "WTF?!?"

Morning Roundup

And Now for Something Completely Different

Blogroll

Morning Roundup

Understanding to Win

A Note on the Name

Odds and Ends

Friday

The Beginnings of an Understanding

A Lack of Understanding

A Request

Button-Pushing Ethics

Hypocrisy, All Around the World

Viva Cuba Libre

No Press Is Bad Press

Epistemology, Part Two

Epistemology, Part One

Irony

Wunderbar!

Bush's Message Machine

Two-Faced Politicians? I'm As Shocked As You!

Strategic Communications

Objectively Unserious About Defending America

Introitus

Das Blog