The Quiet American

You know you're getting old when...

2009-01-04T20:43:00.001-08:00

you buy your first bottle of Scotch.

Happy 2009 from the Quiet American!

The Quiet American

2008-09-14T20:52:00.000-07:00

This blog has lain dormant for a long time, but the interesting times we're living in have called it back to life.

Who is The Quiet American?

I'm a student in my first year at a law school in the American northeast.

I grew up on the west coast, and I still think of it as home.

I worked for a couple of years in East Asia, and I hope to return before too long.

I used to run this blog with Bien Pensant, a friend of mine since childhood. BP, wherever you are, you're welcome back any time.

I care a lot about the future of this country, often to a fault.

And most people who know me would probably say I'm really not very quiet at all.

The King Across the Water

2007-10-31T21:51:00.000-07:00

One more thought to add to the previous mix:

I have a lot of reservations about Al Gore. He has been on the right side of virtually every major policy issue of the past quarter-century, but his policy brilliance is matched only by his political incompetence. He is tone deaf, patronizing, and his political instincts are atrocious. He talks down to people and makes no attempts to hide his vast intelligence behind a facade of humility. I think that he is living his dream now, is aware of his political limitations, and does not want to risk going from punchline to hero to punchline again. So I do not think that he will run.

Nevertheless...

If you believe, like I do, that Al Gore rightfully won the 2000 election, that it was stolen from him by five shamefully partisan members of the Supreme Court, and that George W. Bush ascended to the presidency without popular legitimacy and commenced to rule through fear and war, then I think it is a moral obligation to support Gore if he decides he wishes to fight for Restoration.

That said, I've always been a bit taken by the Jacobites, so take all of that with a grain of salt.

Some thoughts... in no particular order

2007-10-31T21:12:00.000-07:00

I was just talking to BP recently and we were both commenting on a particularly frustrating blog-related phenomenon: the half-finished post draft. You get all riled up thinking about some issue or another, you start formulating the perfect post, and then by the time you hit the keyboard you just don't have the juice, or you realize there's some snag in your theory you hadn't thought of before, or you want to start drinking early, or whatever... And so you hit the "save" button and figure you'll get back to it, and of course you never do. I've had a lot of decent ideas die this way; same, apparently, for BP. So I wanted to get a few thoughts out right here and right now - each would justify it's own post, but I'm thinking if I went down that road none of them would see the light of day. The good news is that I'm actually supposed to be writing something else at the moment, so of course it's the perfect time to be working on the blog. With no further ado, a few shallow thoughts...

1). If I'm Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and his inner-circle of Republican Guard cronies, what am I really looking for? For these guys, reinvigorating the Revolution is everything. Sure, they'd love to get nukes eventually, but if you believe everybody but Israeli intelligence that's still pretty long term, and the ayatollahs probably won't let an unpredictable hothead like Ahmadinejad anywhere near the launch codes. These guys would like nothing better than to goad the US into bombing. It would rally the people around them, and they'd get to let loose with the toys they really dig: Hezbollah, the Shiite militias in Iraq, international terrorism. They'd rather not have a nuclear stalemate; their preference would be asymmetrical warfare. A US strike would loosen all restraints on getting that started. So I'm thinking that Ahmadinejad and the people close to him in Iran are pushing hard on the nuclear program precisely because they want a conflict, not risking a conflict to build nuclear weapons. Dick Cheney, of course, would be more than happy to comply, at least right after he gets back from hunting.

2). I think it says a lot about the modern day Republican party that there's more collective sanity in a room full of Batman villains than there is among Giuliani's foreign policy advisors, and yet he's leading the field. And to think that the GOP used to be the party that people trusted to run a responsible and competent foreign policy... This is a weapon if Hillary Clinton knows how to use it.

3). I like Chris Dodd a lot. He got a bit of Jed Bartlett to him...

4). And, oh what the hell, I like Fred Thompson too. I've always had a weakness for actors turned politicians, though (see, e.g., the Gubernator).

5). I think Mitt Romney is a very dangerous general election candidate, much more so than Rudy. Americans haven't elected somebody with a personality as obviously nasty as Rudy's since Nixon, whereas Romney has this (disgustingly) wholesome thing going, will say anything to get elected, and can break to the center pretty easily. He's pretty moderate, and will appeal to a lot of independent voters queasy about Hillary.

6). Barack Obama is a very smart guy, so I'm sure he understands this: There are a lot of us out there who have strong reservations about his general election potential because we do not believe he is tough enough. Hillary has completely taken advantage of his holier-than-thou crap, and the Republican attack machine looks like it would pretty much have his way with him. Say what you will about Hillary, but she would rather die than lose to a clown like Giuliani or a phony like Romney. Democratic voters are thinking about Giuliani vs. Obama, and worrying on the latter's behalf, like some mom who's afraid to let her kid go out and face a bully, and that is not a good situation for Obama as he tries to make the case that Hillary is unelectable.

Poem/Song of the Day: A Utopian Vision?

2007-10-26T17:02:00.000-07:00

Fils de, by Jacques Brel (click here for a live performance)

Fils de bourgeois ou fils d'apôtre
Tous les enfants sont comme les vôtres
Fils de César ou fils de rien
Tous les enfants sont comme le tien
Le même sourire, les même larmes
Les mêmes alarmes, les mêmes soupirs
Fils de césar ou fils de rien
Tous les enfants sont comme le tien

Ce n'est que qu' après, longtemps après ...

Mais fils de sultan, fils de fakir
Tous les enfants ont un empire
Sous vôute d'or sous toit de chaume
Tous les enfants ont un royaume
Un coin de vague, une fleur qui tremble
Un oiseau mort qui leur ressemble
Fils de sultan, fils de fakir
Tous les enfants ont un empire

Ce n'est qu' après, lontemps après ...

Mais fils de ton fils ou fils d'étranger
Tous les enfants sont des sorciers
Fils de l'amour ou fils d'amourette
Tous les enfants sont des poètes
Fils sont bergers ils sont rois mages
Dans les nuages pour mieux voler
Fils de ton fils ou fils d'étranger
Tous les enfants sont des sorciers

Ce n'est qu'après, lontemps après ...

Mais fils de bourgeois ou fils d'apôtre
Tous les enfants sont comme les vôtres
Fils de césar ou fils de rien
Tous les enfants sont comme le tien
Les mêmes sourires, les mêmes larmes
Les mêmes alarmes, les mêmes soupires
Fils de césar ou fils de rien
Tous les enfants sont comme le tien

An English interpretation: (click here for a non-literal version that appeared in the English-language variant of the song)

Sons of the bourgeois or sons of the saint
All children are like your own
Sons of Caesar or sons of nothing
All children are like yours
The same smile, the same tears
The same alarms, the same sighs
Sons of Caesar or sons of nothing
All children are like yours -

It was only until after - until long after...

But sons of the Sultan, sons of the fakir
All children have an empire
Under a vault of gold, under an ordinary roof
All children have a kingdom
A corner of a wave, a trembling flower
A dead bird that resembles them -
Sons of the Sultan, sons of the fakir
All children have an empire

It was only until after - until long after...

But sons of your sons, sons of the stranger
All children are sorcerors
Children of the lover or beloved
All children are poets
They are shepherds, they are magicians
In the clouds to fly better
Sons of your sons, sons of the stranger
All children are sorcerers

It was only until after - until long after...

Sons of the bourgeois or sons of the saint
All children are like your own
Sons of Caesar or sons of nothing
All children are like yours
The same smile, the same tears
The same alarms, the same sighs
Sons of Caesar or sons of nothing
All children are like yours...

Shameless self-promotion

2007-10-16T23:06:00.000-07:00

The radio program I worked for just did an interesting show on internet policing and other forms of information control in China. Give it a listen at KQED Forum online.
Apparently the Chinese government has been locking up every dissident it can find for the duration of the National Party Congress. I've never had much time for Bush, but good show inviting the mother of all dissidents to the White House tomorrow.

After science and love-robots, a touch of the irrational

2007-10-16T13:53:00.000-07:00

Der Erlkönig
by Goethe (click for Schubert's version of the poem)

Wer reitet so spät durch Nacht und Wind?
Es ist der Vater mit seinem Kind;
Er hat den Knaben wohl in dem Arm,
Er faßt ihn sicher, er hält ihn warm.

"Mein Sohn, was birgst du so bang dein Gesicht?"
"Siehst, Vater, du den Erlkönig nicht?
Den Erlenkönig mit Kron und Schweif?"
"Mein Sohn, es ist ein Nebelstreif."

"Du liebes Kind, komm, geh mit mir!
Gar schöne Spiele spiel' ich mit dir;
Manch' bunte Blumen sind an dem Strand,
Meine Mutter hat manch gülden Gewand."

"Mein Vater, mein Vater, und hörest du nicht,
Was Erlenkönig mir leise verspricht?"
"Sei ruhig, bleibe ruhig, mein Kind;
In dürren Blättern säuselt der Wind."

"Willst, feiner Knabe, du mit mir gehn?
Meine Töchter sollen dich warten schön;
Meine Töchter führen den nächtlichen Reihn,
Und wiegen und tanzen und singen dich ein."

"Mein Vater, mein Vater, und siehst du nicht dort
Erlkönigs Töchter am düstern Ort?"
"Mein Sohn, mein Sohn, ich seh es genau:
Es scheinen die alten Weiden so grau."

"Ich liebe dich, mich reizt deine schöne Gestalt;
Und bist du nicht willig, so brauch ich Gewalt."
"Mein Vater, mein Vater, jetzt faßt er mich an!
Erlkönig hat mir ein Leids getan!"

Dem Vater grauset's, er reitet geschwind,
Er hält in Armen das ächzende Kind,
Erreicht den Hof mit Müh' und Not;
In seinen Armen das Kind war tot.

English Interpretation

Who rides here so late through night and wind?
It is a father with his small child.
He holds his son firm in his arms
He clasps him safely, he keeps him warm.

"My son, oh why do you look so afraid?"
"See Father, don't you see the Erlking is there?
The Erlking, Erlking with crown and cloak?"
"My son, it's a wisp of mist."

"My dearest child, come, go with me!
all kinds of games I'll play with you;
such lovely flowers bloom on the bank,
and my mother has many golden clothes."

"My father, my father, and do you not hear,
What erlking promises sweetly to me?"
"Stay peaceful, oh stay calm, dearest child;
In leaves so dry there rustles the wind."

"Will you dear boy, will you come with me
My daughters soon they will wait on you;
My daughters lead in the nightly dance
And cradle and dance and sing you to sleep."

"My father, my father, and do you not see,
The Erlkings daughters in that dark place?"
"My son, my son, I see it so clear:
Tis only the ancient willows so grey."

"I love you, your fine figure attracts me so much;
And if you're not willing, I'll take you by force."
"My father, my father, he's grasping me now!
Erlking has hurt me, has hurt me!"

The father shudders, he quickens his pace,
He holds in his arms the groaning child.
He reaches home with haste and dread;
In his arms, the child was dead.

"Darling, I have a headache, why not use your robot?"

2007-10-15T21:59:00.000-07:00

Researchers are expecting sex with robots to be a reality in five years. And, by 2050, robot-human marriage legal in Massachusetts.
Those of you who are familiar with my reactionary anti-robot views will not be surprised to hear that an icy chill passed down my spine upon reading this dire prediction.
And for those of you who are thinking, hey, sex and marriage with a robot could have its perks, well, don't go thinking that your sweetheart will stand in the way when the metal ones come for you...

All talk, no Games

2007-10-07T14:00:00.000-07:00

Here's a great Steve Clemons post on the idiot brigade that wants to threaten China with an Olympic boycott. The whole idea is just a perfect example of Washington myopia and complete disconnect with any conception of how we are actually perceived in the wider world. Lord knows I'm no staunch supporter of the Party boys in Beijing, but this kind of saber-rattling is just crazy.

Signs of the apocalypse

2007-10-07T13:07:00.000-07:00

Sports Illustrated used to have this great feature called "Signs of the Apocalypse"; I don't know if it still exists because I haven't been an SI reader for a long time. But the whole idea was they'd find something that occurred that week that was so egregiously insulting to the most basic tenets of reason and logic, without even the barest hint of self-conscious irony, that one might be forgiven for thinking that the end was truly nigh.
That's just by way of saying that I was watching a network evening news program this past week (I think it was NBC), and Brian Williams was leading with Marion Jones and steroids. Nothing intrinsically wrong with that, of course, but after we get the report on her teary press conference, Brian Williams and the woman covering the story get into this exchange which is basically, "Say it ain't so, Marion." The reporter says something to the effect of, I remember watching her win those gold medals in 2000 and being so proud, and now it's like she's thrown it back in our face, and then Williams countering with something along the lines of, How incredibly disappointing, she's let us all down, she's let her country down, etc.
This was also the day that the New York Times had broken the story of the torture memos written by the Office of Legal Counsel after Gonzales took over the DOJ that basically said you could use various combinations of head-slapping, temperature manipulation, food deprivation and waterboarding on terrorism suspects and it would not violate legal prohibitions against "cruel, inhuman, and degrading" treatment, let alone torture. One of the implications of the story was that the Bush Administration had made sure to kick a lot of good people out of the DOJ who had tried to stop them from doing this. So NBC went to footage of Bush's reaction to the Times story. As far as I could tell, he was reclining on a couch, and because he's never been able to speak in complete paragraphs he did his typical thing of saying something and then repeating it several times for effect with the grammar altered. It was something along the lines of: "We are using all legal means to protect the American people. That is our priority, the protection of the American people. And we use the means that are legal to protect them in this war on terror."
Maybe the whole Marion Jones thing didn't hit me as hard as most people, and I can understand being disappointed in her and saying, well, she's setting a bad example for young athletes. But let's put things in perspective: she's an athlete who cheated by using performance enhancing drugs. Bush ordered American intelligence officers to practice torture techniques taken directly from Lubyanka prison or the security services of our putative "allies" in the Middle East, and then stacked the DOJ with cronies and idealogues to make sure it would be deemed "legal". And network news is saying that Marion Jones is the one who let America down?

Speech after Silence

2007-09-02T18:11:00.000-07:00

Though silent for a time, the voice of the Quiet American was not lost. We writers have returned from many adventures and entreat our gentle readers to pardon our reticence.

For our grand re-opening, in the spirit of encouraging good taste and romantic notions, we offer a short well-known poem by Nizar Qabbani, in the original Arabic and in translation:

لان حبي لك فوق مستوى الكلام
قررت ان اسكت
و السلام

Because my love for you
Is higher than words
I have decided
To fall silent.

Thoughts on Mohammed Faiz

2007-05-29T06:06:00.000-07:00

The bombings in Casablanca on 14 April have long since faded from headlines, but Mohammed Faiz, the young cyber club manager responsible for preventing a far greater tragedy, remains severely injured and underreported. For those who do not know the story: two would-be suicide bombers entered Faiz's cyber club in the slums of Sidi Moumen (near Casablanca), bombs hidden under their clothes, and proceeded to check various jihadi websites for final instructions regarding which cafe or thoroughfare in which to murder dozens of people. Faiz felt that something was not right. At this point, he could have stepped back and done nothing. Instead, he shouted for everyone else to get out of the cafe, locked the doors, and phoned the police. In that moment, Faiz put his customers, his family's livelihood, and his own life in jeopardy. The two jihadis realized that they were trapped; one of them detonated his bombs, killing himself, destroying the cyber cafe, and injuring the other jihadi and Faiz. The police arrived to find smouldering wreckage, a dismembered body, and two injured young Moroccans.

Who saved the day here? As the above linked post observes, it was neither detectives nor spies nor police commandoes - just an ordinary citizen who noticed that something was suspicious and decided to act on his suspicions. (This is, of course, exactly the sort of thing that the Council of American-Islamic Relations would like to criminalize via its cooked-up lawsuits against the American counterparts to Faiz - see my earlier post.) This incident is further proof that without popular involvement, anti-terrorist efforts are far less likely to succeed.

I was amazed that no Western newspaper took up the story of Faiz. It seems that he would make a perfect human-interest story, an excellent example of a Muslim opposed to terrorism (the news is generally full of those who support or condone it), a shining example of civic spirit and individual selflessness. Was it ignorance? The Moroccan papers covered him; the King visited him in his hospital ward (though he was not given money to repair his wrecked cyber cafe, to the best of my knowledge. A few weeks ago he went on record saying that he felt that the Moroccan authorities had abandoned him when he most needed help. One wonders whether he would be inclined to repeat his heroism.)

Instead, we get reports like this: "Terrorist Networks Lure Young Moroccans to War in Far-Off Iraq Conflict, Recruiting Tool for Al-Qaeda Affiliates." (As early as July 2006 US intelligence operatives were traveling to Tetouane to investigate, though this article did not get written until February 2007.) Granted, there is a large pool of angry young men, who are, for a variety of reasons (the materialist/economic vs. ideological debate over primary causes remains unresolved), willing to kill for religious or political goals. But it is the people like Faiz who deserve more press coverage, whose example ought to be remembered.

The Stranger

2007-05-29T06:05:00.000-07:00

A provocative poem for TQA readers, to be read in light of Hitchens' commentary on "Londonistan":

THE STRANGER within my gate,
He may be true or kind,
But he does not talk my talk
I cannot feel his mind.
I see the face and the eyes and the mouth,
But not the soul behind.

The men of my own stock
They may do ill or well,
But they tell the lies I am wonted to,
They are used to the lies I tell.
And we do not need interpreters
When we go to buy and sell.

The Stranger within my gates,
He may be evil or good,
But I cannot tell what powers control
What reasons sway his mood;
Nor when the Gods of his far-off land
Shall repossess his blood.

The men of my own stock,
Bitter bad they may be,
But, at least, they hear the things I hear,
And see the things I see;
And whatever I think of them and their likes
They think of the likes of me.

This was my father's belief
And this is also mine:
Let the corn be all one sheaf
And the grapes be all one vine,
Ere our children's teeth are set on edge
By bitter bread and wine.

- Rudyard Kipling

I also invite readers to enjoy this poem and the associated song - it captures a single moment and feeling rather beautifully.

Measuring Performance and Other Illusions

2007-05-29T06:04:00.001-07:00

Blogger Joel Spolsky has argued that it is not possible to meaningfully quantify performance in knowledge-based professions because the measuring system can be "gamed" by workers to create the illusion of improved productivity while in reality increasing dysfunctionality. As Spolsky puts it,

Software organizations tend to reward programmers who (a) write lots of code and (b) fix lots of bugs. The best way to get ahead in an organization like this is to check in lots of buggy code and fix it all, rather than taking the extra time to get it right in the first place. When you try to fix this problem by penalizing programmers for creating bugs, you create a perverse incentive for them to hide their bugs or not tell the testers about new code they wrote in hopes that fewer bugs will be found. You can't win.

Similarly, Spolsky observes, rating customer service representatives by the number of calls taken leads to frequently disconnected calls as employees try to maximize the measurement criterion. (This happened to Amazon.com, among others.) Stock options for CEOs lead them to work to inflate the stock price even at the cost of corporate profits (Enron is only the most egregious example of such abusive "gaming.") As Robert Jackall (a professor at Mark's alma mater) described in his Moral Mazes: The World of Corporate Managers, plant managers for major chemical corporations will often "milk" the plant, cutting costs by avoiding needed maintenance, hoping to get promoted before everything collapses.

Is Spolsky right? Is it impossible to measure knowledge-based work? If not, how is it possible?

The Burning of the School

2007-05-29T03:10:00.000-07:00

The other day I recalled a popular elementary-school parody of "The Battle Hymn of the Republic." It went something like this:

Mine eyes have seen the glory of the burning of the school
We have tortured all the teachers and have broken all the rules
We have barbecued the principal and have killed the PTA
And the janitors are on our side!

Glory, glory hallelujah
Teacher hit me with a ruler
I hid behind the door with a loaded .44
And teacher don't teach no more!

Though bloody and cruel, the song was, as I recall, quite popular and enjoyed many variations (for example, "I met her in the attic with a semiautomatic.")

I've always thought that the poems and songs of childhood are interesting to examine, not the least for their frequently surprising subversiveness and perversity. "Greasy Grimy Gopher Guts" is a sillier example. Sometimes these songs are even political, as with the "Joy to the world / Saddam Hussein is dead / we barbecued his head / and what about his body? / We flushed it down the potty..." 1991 classic.

Unfortunately, I am not familiar with gruesome children's lore in foreign languages. The Arabic children's rhymes I've mastered are all rather innocuous, such as this one, popular in northern Morocco:

Ash ta ta ta ta ta
Awlaidat al-harrata
Allem m'allem Bouzekri
Tayyeb li khozi bekri
Nakaloo ana w'khtee!

which roughly translates to "Rain (followed by what is an extended onomatapeia in Arabic), O children of the farmers, let's go to the wise Bouzekri, make me bread early, for me and my sister to eat!"

Hardly as impressive as slaughtering teachers and drowning them in their blood. But I wonder, perhaps Mark can contribute a Chinese rhyme that rivals the bloody-mindedness of US schoolchildren.

Also, why is it that such rhymes are tremendously funny for most children, but less funny to adults? (I remember that our teachers always got angry when we sang it; on the other hand, as an adult, I still find the songs funny.)

Irony

2007-05-09T09:16:00.000-07:00

Burning cars, rioting throughout Paris, French Muslims protested Sarkozy's election by chanting: "Fascist Sarko! The people will have your skin." These riots began on election night and three days later show little sign of abating.

Who is currently using violence as a form of persuasion and political participation? Who has forced the French government to designate vast swathes of its cities - hundreds of regions throughout the country - as lawless no-go zones for police and city services?

Who are the real fascists here?

Only in China

2007-05-05T03:57:00.000-07:00

Copyright infringement isn't really a problem in China; it's just a matter of a bunch of oversensitive Americans getting worked up over absolutely nothing at all. Take this perfectly innocent theme park near Beijing: any passing resemblance to a certain famous attraction in Southern California is strictly unintentional I'm sure. It seems like the kids really love posing with the cat with big ears, which is definitely not Minnie Mouse. Other fan favorites are the not-Cinderella's Castle, not-Donald Duck, not-Goofy, not-Great Thunder Railway, and the seven little guys with the very pretty lady. Oh, and the not-Doraemon and not-Hello Kitty, for some local Asian color.

(Hat tip to Scott on this one...)

Fear, Loathing, and RF Technology

2007-04-23T02:19:00.000-07:00

It began with the bees. Geoffrey Lean and Harriet Shawcross wrote an article in The Independent on 15 April arguing that cell phones were killing bees and thereby endangering the survival of the human race (since we need bees for pollination.) Somehow, according to Lean and Shawcross, "radiation" from phones interferes with the "navigation systems" of bees, leading to the death of entire hives (known as "Colony Collapse Disorder" or CCD.) The "evidence is increasing," the authors argue in increasingly hysterical language, that cell phones lead to brain tumors, senility, and male impotence.

The problem with this argument is that the authors have failed to distinguish between ionizing and non-ionizing radiation. Radio waves are many orders of magnitude larger in wavelength than sunlight, much less radioactive wavelengths (gamma rays are often a millionth of a nanometer, whereas radio waves are generally at least a meter.) Ionizing radiation produces cancer and other nasty things. Non-ionizing radiation produces heat. A cell phone, in terms of the radiation it produces, is little different from the radio sets that have been around for nearly a hundred years. (Light from candles is another form of non-ionizing radiation, yet somehow no one has claimed that those cause cancer, despite prolonged direct exposure for many humans over the course of millenia.)

A more plausible cause of CCD is related to mites that live on bees, although conclusive evidence remains elusive.

The Independent has a history of making spurious technology-related claims. In May 2006, its writers argued that electrical fields and radio waves somehow cause cancer in humans. This kind of hysteria has a precedent in the 1980s, when many fear-mongers argued that high-tension electrical wires caused cancer (there was even an Eddie Murphy film in which a major plot point involved little children getting cancer from power lines.) Unfortunately for the hysterics, the Earth's electromagnetic field is several orders of magnitude stronger than that emitted by the high-tension wires.

In other words, if cell phones or wireless signals harm the health of humans or any other living species, it is by some undiscovered mechanism (divine intervention?) If we are to base our reasoning on objective reality, however, it appears that non-ionizing radiation is not the cause of either cancer or CCD. It seems that the writers at the Independent saw or heard the word "radiation" and jumped to unreasonable, unscientific conclusions. (They could just as easily scream about 450-terahertz radiation coming from computer LEDs. Except that 450-terahertz radiation is equivalent to almost any variety of visible light, including the glow of candles.)

Ignorance of basic science is evidently in as common in England as America. Prince Charles, after all, recently advocated the use of magic to treat medical problems. One wonders whether these examples of science and rational thought being rejected in favor of irrationality and mysticism are a sign of the cultural dominance of postmodernism and anti-Enlightenment thought in the Western world.

We now interrupt this blog for some late-breaking news...

2007-04-19T09:11:00.000-07:00

The Warriors are in the Playoffs!

The Warriors are in the Playoffs!

The Warriors are in the Playoffs!

We now return to our regular blogging schedule.

Camus and Car Bombs

2007-04-19T06:05:00.000-07:00

On the same day that thirty-one students were gunned down at Virginia Tech, at least the same number fell in Baghdad. Days have passed with Virginia Tech at peace, and across the ocean men and women and children are still being kidnapped, shot, and dismembered and burnt by the shrapnel and flames of car bombs.

Yet the latest atrocities in Iraq received minimal media attention, while Virginia Tech made front-page news all over the world. In America, people argue about gun control legislation; meanwhile there is still no coherent strategy or clear long-term goal for America's most significant foreign policy venture of the decade, even after more than four years (or five, if one includes the extensive secret preparations in 2002.)

Yesterday I had a lengthy conversation with a prominent local businessman regarding the motivation of people who set car bombs. He was disgusted, to an extent: "Kill the Iraqi soldiers, fine! Kill the Americans or the Jews, fine! But don't kill innocent people!" (His comment is a reminder that "innocent" can be a weasel word; after all, according to some people I've spoken with, 9/11 victims were contributing economically to the (perceived) international crusade against Islam (cf. any of the al-Qa'ida recruitment tapes) and were therefore legitimate targets.)

But I also had a conversation with a local college student, who sympathized with the bombers. They were in revolt, he said, against an occupation; they were striking a blow for justice. He mentioned the battles of Badr and Yarmouk. When fighting an oppressor one cannot be merciful. (Mercy and turning the other cheek, in the Christian view, is a moral imperative. In Islam, one turns the other cheek only if it is just to do so. And it is never just to bow to a Pharoah or tyrant.)

"What is a rebel? A man who says no."

This latter viewpoint reminds one of what Camus wrote in his L'homme revolte: in a revolution, rebels do not die and kill because they are full of hate. On the contrary, they are inspired by a vision - a vision of justice, of beauty, of a better world just around the corner. Bathed in the light of this vision, convinced of its truth, everything is justified and nothing is forbidden. Saint-Just would not have hesitated to use car bombs against the monarchists. The Russian Communists were similarly driven. It is not that these people were without scruple, but that all scruples paled before the light of the ultimate scruple, the vision of perfection.

This same vision of perfection drove nobles across medieval Europe to abandon their material possessions and "take up the cross" (and their swords) when they heard the heir of the Apostles proclaim: "God wills it!" It is what drove the Turks to drive their gunpowder-laden boats straight into their Russian opponents during the Crimean war. It is what drove Cromwell's followers to turn against even their own family members if they were infidels. It is what led Hegel (and his intellectual descendant Marx) to imagine a utopia at "the end of history." And it is, one might argue, exactly the same combination of fanaticism, romanticism, love, and quixotic desire for perfection that inspires young men from Tetouan to Brussels to Baghdad to plot the mass murder of Iraqi citizens, day after day, week after week.

Camus also argued that the true rebel must never "demand the right to destroy the existence and the freedom of others." I find this viewpoint less convincing (as have most rebels) since the objective of a rebellion is often to replace one master or system of justice or beliefs with another, rather than to establish the kind of total freedom Camus has in mind. Most rebels do not even remain true to the vision of their ideal societies, as these usually do not involve mass murder as a matter of course; the rebel instead "claims for himself the relative freedom necessary" to achieve the unachievable. (Camus praises the Russian anarchists because they felt bad about their murders, which, in theory, would have prevented murder from being acceptable in their ideal future society.) The customary failure of rebels to remain true to their principles partly explains why most rebellions against dictatorship and injustice end in dictatorship and injustice (French, Russian, Iranian, etc.)

For those in Iraq behind this week's car bombings, surely, the promised world of justice will arrive. Until then, many, many more people will have to die.

To Veil or Not to Veil: Thoughts On Modesty

2007-04-19T01:03:00.000-07:00

I noted with interest a column in The Globe and Mail by Farzana Hassan and Tarek Fatah of the Canadian Muslim Congress arguing that what is today regarded as Islamic dress “has nothing to do with morality” or even Islam. The authors note that “[t]here is not a single reference in the Koran that obliges Muslim women to cover their hair or their face. The only verse that comes close to such a dress code (Sura 24, ‘The Light,’ verse 31) directs believing women to let their head coverings obscure their bosoms.” Hassan and Fatah lament the malevolent influence of “Islamists” who “have turned the hijab into the central pillar of Islam.”

The Legitimacy of the Veil

While Hassan and Fatah probably mean well and while many share their point of view, it is ultimately not credible. The authors’ argument hinges upon the fact that the hijab is not mentioned in the Qur’an. But the Islamic head covering is mentioned many times in the traditions of the Prophet Muhammad (hadith, pl. ahaadith.) To reject these traditions is to reject a fundamental element of Islamic theology and to effectively become an apostate. While some question this viewpoint, they are an eccentric minority with no following at major theological institutions from al-Azhar to Qom.

To counter the claims of Fatah and Hassan, here is just one example of contrary evidence:

Narrated Aisha, Ummul Mu'minin: Asma bint Abu Bakr, entered upon the Apostle of Allah (peace be upon him) wearing thin clothes. The Apostle of Allah turned his attention from her. He said: O Asma', when a woman reaches the age of menstruation, it does not suit her that she displays her parts of body except this and this, and he pointed to her face and hands.

There are many other examples.

The real debate is not whether the hijab is required, but whether it is required to cover the entire body or just everything except the face and hands. Hardcore Salafis believe the entire body must be covered (I have seen a lot of this in London and Saudi-influenced places in the USA) whereas moderates feel that the face and hands do not need to be covered.

Excerpt from an Indonesian textbook.

Hassan and Fatah are pretending that their own theology does not exist. In this they are just like the Saudi-subsidized John Esposito, whose Islam: The Straight Path similarly asserts (see p.98, for example) that the hijab is not part of Islam and that it was just a custom borrowed from the Byzantines. I can sympathize with these apologists; the Western world, with its comparatively liberal view on women’s dress code, would be far more accepting of Islam if it believed that the requirement is just to be “modest.” But for thinking believers, the hijab is not just modesty, but an act of obedience, purity, righteousness, a symbol of faith, bashfulness (“part of the nature of women”), and a shield against jealousy.

Thoughts on the Veil’s Psychological and Social Effects: The Case of the Australian Mufti

Because the hijab is regarded as central to female virtue, unveiled women are by definition less virtuous. Many young Muslim men regard unveiled women as fair game for verbal or physical harassment. In one example, Mufti of Australia, Sheikh Taj al-Din al-Hilali, gained notoriety when he stated that non-Islamic sexual activity is

90% the woman’s responsibility. Why? Because a woman owns the weapon of seduction. It’s she who takes off her clothes, shortens them, flirts, puts on make-up and powder and takes to the streets, God protect us, dallying…Then, it’s a look, a smile, a conversation, a greeting, a talk, a date, a meeting, a crime, then Long Bay jail. Then you get a judge, who has no mercy, and he gives you 65 years.

Al-Hilali was referring to the Sydney gang rapes of 2000, in which 14 Muslim Australian youths were convicted of sadistically and enthusiastically gang-raping 14-16 year-old Australian girls. The girls were told, among other things: "You deserve it because you’re an Australian." While calling for more friends to join in on the rapes, one of the assailants wrote in an SMS: "When you are feeling down ...bash a Christian or Catholic and lift up!"

Al-Hilali goes on to compare non-Muslim Australian women to “uncovered meat,” citing the writer al-Rafihi:

…if [he] came across a rape crime, [he said he] would discipline the man and order that the woman be jailed for life…because if she had not left the meat uncovered, the cat wouldn’t have snatched it... If you take uncovered meat and put it on the street, on the pavement, in a garden, in a park, or in the backyard, without a cover and the cats eat it, then whose fault will it be, the cats, or the uncovered meat’s? … If the woman is…wearing the veil and if she shows modesty, disasters don’t happen.

Al-Hilali is not part of any “tiny minority of extremists” – on the contrary, he was elected Mufti by the Australian Federation of Islamic Councils, serving in that role for almost twenty years. When some criticized Hilali’s comments he replied that he was only trying to protect women’s modesty.

British Muslim and Islamic scholar Abduljalil Sajid, prominent member of the Muslim Council of Britain, defended al-Hilali, saying that “his intentions are noble in order to make morality and modesty part of our overall society,” and that his words had been “taken out of context.”

Support for Al-Hilali also emerged from Denmark, where another mufti declared that women who do not wear headscarves are “asking for rape.”

Being unveiled is a symbol of moral corruption, a mark of whores and unbelievers. This view reasonates, in the words of Australian Muslim moderate Tanveed Ahmed, “with social conservatives in general, who see human freedoms, especially with regard to sexuality, as having gone too far.”

Some youths in Sweden are inclined to agree (translation courtesy of a friend.)

“It is not as wrong raping a Swedish girl as raping an Arab girl,” says Hamid. “The Swedish girl gets a lot of help afterwards, and she had probably fucked before, anyway. But the Arab girl will get problems with her family. For her, being raped is a source of shame. It is important that she retains her virginity until she marries.”

“It is far too easy to get a Swedish whore… girl, I mean,” says Hamid, and laughs over his own choice of words. “Many immigrant boys have Swedish girlfriends when they are teenagers. But when they get married, they get a proper woman from their own culture who has never been with a boy. That’s what I am going to do. I don’t have too much respect for Swedish girls. I guess you can say they get fucked to pieces.”

This Swedish girl wasn't veiled; obviously she was "asking for rape."

2007-04-17T07:11:00.000-07:00

(Evan Vucci/Associated Press)

I woke up this morning to the heart-wrenching news of the Virginia Tech shootings. Our hearts go out to the victims of this atrocity and their families. I can scarcely believe that eight years after Columbine, nearly a decade punctuated by school shootings against a backdrop of horrible, unrelenting gun violence in cities across the country, there has been virtually no action against this plague. The so-called "rights" conferred by the Second Amendment of the Constitution are nothing more than a scourge on the youth of our country; the almost limitless access to guns across the United States is a national scandal that we wake up to only intermittently, in the face of events such as yesterday's.

What happened at Virginia Tech makes me physically sick; it is hard not to be so affected so soon out of college, thinking of the bright, promising, decent people lost yesterday. It is hard, also, when one considers one's family and friends on campuses across the country, and the awful vulnerability of a place and a culture built so purposefully on openness, tolerance, and trust. And finally, one thinks of the spiralling gun violence in cities like Oakland and Richmond; the young lives lost almost daily in those communities are intimately tied to the dead of Blacksburg,Va.

The vision crystallizes at such moments as this. Would the Virginia Tech killings have taken place in a nation not so awash with guns? Quite possibly. Yet in the U.S. it seems the simplest thing for those intent on killing to arm their evil with terrifyingly powerful weapons.
It is unspeakable that eight years after Columbine, a truly clarion wake-up call if such a thing is indeed still possible in this nation, that we now have Virginia Tech. There have been no serious efforts at national reform of the legal foundation of our gun culture; indeed, during the past eight years the NRA and their ilk have made it their priority to expand this lethal franchise.

The NRA and their allies in our country's political "leadership" will no doubt respond to the killings at Virginia Tech in their typical fashion, which they have of course have had far too many opportunities to rehearse. They will wait a suitably respectful period in somber reflection, and then they will begin the pandering and the peddling of excuses. They will blame everything, everything, but the extraordinary ease that they have promoted for the legal attainment of firearms. They may even have the audacity, once the dust settles, to question whether more guns might have in fact been the very ticket in this situation. One shudders to think what they will do with Virginia Tech's thoroughly sensible prohibition against guns on campus.

I close with the caveat that if this seems an overly emotional reaction, then I find that it is hard to have anything but at present. There is much we still do not know about this situation, and surely we should wait to hear more information before jumping to any conclusions. Yet the pink elephant is sitting in the corner of the room, and it is one that we can be fairly sure President Bush, in his public reaction to the crisis, will ever-so-tactfully avoid acknowledging. But enough of that.

I am so deeply sorry to those who have lost somebody at Virginia Tech. Our thoughts and prayers are with you.

The Desert and the Arctic

2007-04-11T07:03:00.000-07:00

Today I offer two literary digressions: the first from the desert, the second from the Arctic.

Courtesy of Sahih Muslim's Kitaab al-Imara ("Book of Government") here is an anecdote that I have heard people use to justify the struggle against the forces of unbelief by any means necessary, even unto death:

"The tradition has been narrated on the authority of 'Abdullah b. Qais. He heard it from his father who, while facing the enemy, reported that the Messenger of Allah (may peace be upon him) said: Surely, the gates of Paradise are under the shadows of the swords. A man in a shabby condition got up and said; Abu Musa, did you hear the Messenger of Allah (may peace be upon him) say this? He said: Yes. (The narrator said): He returned to his friends and said: I greet you (a farewell greeting). Then he broke the sheath of his sword, threw it away, advanced with his (naked) sword towards the enemy and fought (them) with it until he was slain."

And next, courtesy of the Gutenberg Project, here is another inspirational anecdote from Shelley's "Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus." Context: the eloquent, thoughtful, but hideous and sociopathic creature Frankenstein created has killed his dearest friend and his newlywed bride, and the doctor has set off in murderous pursuit of the creature, chasing it even to the northernmost reaches of the Arctic, where he and his ship's crew become mired in ice:

I was roused by half a dozen of the sailors, who demanded admission into the cabin. They entered, and their leader addressed me. He told me that he and his companions had been chosen by the other sailors to come in deputation to me to make me a requisition which, in justice, I could not refuse. We were immured in ice and should probably never escape, but they feared that if, as was possible, the ice should dissipate and a free passage be opened, I should be rash enough to continue my voyage and lead them into fresh dangers, after they might happily have surmounted this. They insisted, therefore, that I should engage with a solemn promise that if the vessel should be freed I would instantly direct my course southwards...

I hesitated before I answered, when Frankenstein, who had at first been silent, and indeed appeared hardly to have force enough to attend, now roused himself; his eyes sparkled, and his cheeks flushed with momentary vigour. Turning towards the men, he said, "What do you mean? What do you demand of your captain? Are you, then, so easily turned from your design? Did you not call this a glorious expedition?

"And wherefore was it glorious? Not because the way was smooth and placid as a southern sea, but because it was full of dangers and terror, because at every new incident your fortitude was to be called forth and your courage exhibited, because danger and death surrounded it, and these you were to brave and overcome. For this was it a glorious, for this was it an honourable undertaking. You were hereafter to be hailed as the benefactors of your species, your names adored as belonging to brave men who encountered death for honour and the benefit of mankind. And now, behold, with the first imagination of danger, or, if you will, the first mighty and terrific trial of your courage, you shrink away and are content to be handed down as men who had not strength enough to endure cold and peril; and so, poor souls, they were chilly and returned to their warm firesides. Why, that requires not this preparation; ye need not have come thus far and dragged your captain to the shame of a defeat merely to prove yourselves cowards. Oh! Be men, or be more than men. Be steady to your purposes and firm as a rock. This ice is not made of such stuff as your hearts may be; it is mutable and cannot withstand you if you say that it shall not. Do not return to your families with the stigma of disgrace marked on your brows. Return as heroes who have fought and conquered and who know not what it is to turn their backs on the foe."

He spoke this with a voice so modulated to the different feelings expressed in his speech, with an eye so full of lofty design and heroism, that can you wonder that these men were moved? They looked at one another and were unable to reply. I spoke; I told them to retire and consider of what had been said, that I would not lead them farther north if they strenuously desired the contrary, but that I hoped that, with reflection, their courage would return. They retired and I turned towards my friend, but he was sunk in languor and almost deprived of life.

Vietnam As A Leader of the Right-Wing Conspiracy, and Fisk as Soviet Memebot

2007-04-06T10:36:00.000-07:00

Blood for Oil?

I have often heard the argument that the US invasion of Iraq was a ploy to gain control of regional oil supplies. I always found that point of view implausible; for starters, it is cheaper and easier to cut deals with dictators - witness Saudi Arabia and the Gulf rentier states, not to mention the arrangements between pre-2003 Iraq and Germany, France, and others. Moreover, oil producers do not control oil buyers. If a US oil company operates an oil field, this does not mean that the oil it produces will ultimately end up in the US. What is essential to remember is that oil, like any resource, will always be available at a price. (This is why predictions of doom from oil running out are absurd - as oil depletes, its price will rise; those who really need it will still be able to get it, and meanwhile huge economic incentives for alternative energy will stimulate growth in the non-oil-related energy sectors. Scarcity fuels innovation, as with the Green Revolution that began in the 1960s. But that deserves its own blog posting later.)

In any case, now that Iraq has awarded its major oil contracts to companies in China, India, Vietnam, and Indonesia - and now that experts predict other Asian firms are "well positioned to grab further contracts" - I hope that the "no blood for oil" crowd will finally abandon their fanciful red herring. (For a less fanciful take on oil strategy, consider this article.)

The Recent Iranian Affair

On another topic, I cannot resist joining Language Log in mocking Robert Fisk. The grammar-challenged anti-Western rhetorician, fresh from his condemnation of cartographers a few weeks back, predicted the following on 2 April:

Oh how pleased the Iranians must have been to hear Messers Blair and Bush shout for the "immediate" release of the luckless 15 - this Blair-Bush insistence has assuredly locked them up for weeks - because it is a demand that can be so easily ignored. And will be.

Fisk goes on to explain that if these hostages are held indefinitely, it's all our own fault anyway (or at least the fault of our evil leaders.) The non-Westerners, the "victims" in Fisk's view, as usual bear no responsibility for their actions. It is interesting that Fisk seems to be more anti-British than the Iranian government, which opted to release the British hostages fewer than 72 hours after Fisk wrote his words.

I recently read an essay arguing that many of the tropes that Fisk and others use have their origins in Cold-War-era Soviet disinformation campaigns. What do readers think? Is it plausible?

The Flying Imams, Part Three: Reviewing the Police Report

2007-03-31T18:02:00.000-07:00

America loves "grievance theater," especially when it affords an opportunity to take a stand against The Man. The Duke lacrosse rape case comes to mind. In the much-promoted "flying imams" case, CAIR and its opponents have sensationalized the issue. Mark and I both discussed the case (Mark in this post, and I a few days earlier in this one), but we did not refer to the police report, citing primarily journalistic accounts. I maintain that in light of the police report my characterization of the imams as political and legal provocateurs is appropriate. (I will use "CAIR" and "the imams" interchangeably, since most of the imams are members of CAIR or its sister organizations, since they had just attended a CAIR-sponsored conference, a conference that coincidentally dealt with media manipulation (topics included "Imams and Politics" and "Imams and the Media"), and since CAIR is orchestrating the lawsuit against the passengers who dared to speak up about behavior I will outline below.)

1) The question of prayer.

The police report cites several witnesses who said the imams were "praying very loud." After they had finished their prayers, when it was time for boarding, they began "chanting 'Allah, Allah, Allah'" together. Once on the plane, they again prayed loudly.

My reaction:

1.1) Islamic prayer should not be ostentatious. It is almost never done loudly. As I mentioned in my earlier post, it is unheard of for a large group of people to collectively pray in an airport departure lounge in loud voices. In public places from mosque to market, in the private homes of the princes and paupers, in countries ranging from Morocco to Oman, I have never witnessed loud, ostentatious Islamic prayer. Therefore, if I saw a group of men praying loudly and ostentatiously at the airport, I would think they were trying to make some sort of point. It is highly abnormal for Muslims to act in such a way. Indeed, it is worth noting that other Muslims on the flight were among those who tipped off the flight attendants, helping by translating the imams' increasingly inflammatory comments.

1.2) Salat (prayer) does not consist of chanting "Allah, Allah, Allah," as witnesses reported the imams chanting together. One recites the Sura al-Fatihah (think of it as the Lord's Prayer in Islam) along with another sura of one's own choosing while performing one's prostrations in the appropriate way (there are many discussions of the topic; see this site, for instance.) This is repeated a variable number of times, 3 in the case of the maghrib prayer. I have yet to read or hear a sura that repeats "Allah, Allah, Allah" - this, while permissible, is unorthodox, and frankly provocative in the context.

1.3) The flight was scheduled for takeoff at 5:15PM. Given that this took place at the end of the year, the sun would have been setting around boarding time. Therefore the imams would be praying the maghreb (sunset) prayer. This consists of 3 raka`a (prayer cycles.) Well and good. BUT the third raka`a is to be said silently. The imams spoke throughout, by several accounts.

1.4) The imams prayed both at the gate and on the plane. The 'isha (night) prayer generally takes place before going to bed, not a few minutes following the maghreb. I do grant that it would be permissible to do so (the sun had set, after all) but again it is highly unusual and unorthodox.

To summarize, the imams' prayer activities alone suggest a provocateur's agenda. They were loud and ostentatious, as no Muslim should be in prayer. They chanted the name of God, without any Islamic reason for doing so. They spoke throughout, when 1/3 of the maghrib prayer is meant to be performed silently. Finally, they either prayed the maghrib twice or they prayed the 'isha abnormally early. These actions have little basis in Islam. But they have a huge basis in Islam as a politicized ideology and what the Becket Fund rightly refers to as "legal terrorism." The imams' behavior is extraordinary from an Islamic perspective, but becomes less so if CAIR and the imams were intending to create an "incident" as with Mr. Scopes and the ACLU.

2) The question of political commentary.

2.1) The police report establishes that the men were angry, agitated, and in heated discussion. They were cursing. As with the un-Islamic "prayer", the problem with the imams' behavior is its form rather than its content. The form is suspicious. Having been to many airports, I do not generally see people rant and rave about political issues. The one time I saw someone behave in such a way (in Casablanca, incidentally) the offender was taken into police custody, and we all laughed and joked (in Arabic) about the person's lack of sense and provocative actions. The problem is not that they were discussing politics but that they were behaving in ways that were highly unusual for normal airline passengers, whether Muslim or not. Bear in mind that "erratic" behavior is normally the security officer's only chance of catching a potential terrorist (recall the way that the Millenium bombings at LAX were averted, thanks to a Canadian border guard who was aware of this fact.)

3) The question of the manner of boarding and seating assignments.

3.1) One of the imams had a first-class seat (he was upgraded, I believe.) The rest did not. Nonetheless, they all boarded together during the call for first-class boarding. Once on board, they ignored their assigned seats, and fanned out throughout the craft in a precise imitation of the 9/11 hijackers.

3.2) Several of the imams, not just Shahin (their somewhat rotund spokesman) asked for seatbelt extensions. None of the imams used them. Witness testimony confirms that "they were not overweight" (several of them, anyway) and that, worse, they left the extensions on the floor. These extensions can be used as weapons, and the flight attendants noticed. (I should note that the normal seat belts are capable of wrapping around very fat people. I have personally witnessed people whose rolls of fat were spilling over the seat rests (substantially heavier than any of the imams) make do with the normal belts. That said, it can still be unpleasant to sit next to them.)

3.3) The imams were asked by flight attendants to return the seatbelt extensions and return to their assigned seats but refused to cooperate.

What does this prove?

None of these actions, individually, would be cause for suspicion. Together, however, the imams' actions form a pattern of unusually suspicious behavior. They prayed in non-Islamic fashion; they angrily argued politics; they ignored their assigned seats, sitting instead in suspicious ways; they made requests for potentially dangerous equipment that they did not use for its intended purpose; and they refused to cooperate with flight attendants. This is what the police report tells us. The truth lies here, in the witness testimony, not "somewhere in between" the Rush Limbaugh show and CAIR's public relations rhetoric. Everything that the imams did screams "grievance theater." But more at issue is:

4) The question of the aftermath.

Mark says that it "boggles the mind" to think that CAIR would want to soften aviation security. I may be proven wrong, but the evidence currently brought to light supports that thesis. Softening aviation security is probably not CAIR's primary goal - that may be to promote their own importance (and their self-proclaimed right to speak for all Muslims) through a high-profile case. But to sue an airline for responding to the highly unusual and suspicious behavior outlined above - and, more importantly, to sue the *individuals* who noticed the behavior and informed flight attendants - has the direct consequence of weakening aviation security. John Doe is far less likely to tell a flight attendant about suspicious behavior if he knows that CAIR and its Saudi backers are going to sue him for it. If it is shown that CAIR planned the event, then my (admittedly inflammatory) "fifth-column" accusation will be borne out.

Other Subjects

Mark mentioned my favorable quote of Karl Rove in my critique of Fisk's recent column on maps. To clarify, I hold Rove and Robert Fisk in equally low regard. I also think Rove's quote aptly describes Fisk's attitude. The problem is not that Fisk lacks affection for or attachment to the West, or that he has compassion for people he sees as victims. The problem is that his writing, like that of Edward Said, is all too happy to ignore or misrepresent facts if they do not serve his political agendas. Fisk's writing is generally self-righteous, indignant, and hostile, positing a world of innocent non-Westerners forever menaced by Western bogeymen. Life is not so black and white.

In the future, I think, I shall perhaps stay clear of American politics (Mark seems to have a very good grasp of that) and instead offer more anthropological observations. Stay tuned.

Torture and American Freedom

2007-03-30T08:55:00.000-07:00

Some of the work I’ve been doing in the past few days has brought me back to an exchange we had on this blog several weeks ago on torture and interrogations. I’m a TA for a Human Rights Law course here at the university, and we’ve been preparing material for the upcoming unit on rights issues arising from the war on terror. The professor I work for asked me to take a look at a PBS Frontline special from late 2005 that he’s thinking of showing for the students (you can watch it online here).

The episode shows how torture metastasized from a tactic intended to be used against the most hardened al-Qaida types in the urgent name of national security to a practice used widely at Guantanamo and secret CIA interrogation facilities worldwide, and then finally to an extremely widespread behavior used across the Iraq theater of operations, where the Geneva Conventions very explicitly apply.

In our exchange on this blog earlier (here and here), I think we focused on the purely tactical shortcomings of torture. But while watching the episode, it struck me that what is truly important is to state unequivocally, once again, and on as many fora as is possible, the sheer moral gravity of this issue.

I guess it’s fair to ask why anybody should go around saying something that is pretty much self-evident. Everybody knows the act of torturing another human being is a horrible and egregious crime, right? And yet…

It has been more than a year since this episode was made, and the slowest among us began to put the pieces together and realize that the torture photos from Abu Ghraib were not merely an issue of an out-of-control “night shift,” but were rather the direct outgrowth of a concerted policy that favored intimidation and torture in fighting the war on terror. You can wrap it up in whatever newspeak you like (“coercive interrogations”, “gloves come off,” etc.), but it is clear that the Administration’s legal policy on detainees and interrogations tolerated and even encouraged practice amounting to torture. Yet what has been striking is the lack of reaction from the American people. There was revulsion, sure, when we were confronted with irrefutable photographic evidence of barbarism. By and large, however, we have not raised an outcry, have not sought to force a change in Bush Administration policies on this matter.

Indeed, the common attitude has been one of tacit acceptance. One senses even that in certain circles there is more than that. I hear that “Jack Bauer for President” t-shirts are selling quite briskly back home; if television’s proto-torturer were to emerge from the screen to stake his claim on that office, I have little doubt that he would win a large chunk of the vote from the younger male demographic. Jack Bauer, one could say, is not afraid to “get his hands dirty”, “take the gloves off,” or shoot a dirty terrorist in the kneecap to save American lives and defend American freedoms.

It’s not hard to see where this is coming from. The U.S. was caught off-guard badly on 9/11, and we suffered for it. The Iraq War has just compounded that sense of anger and frustration. With the detainees we think we see the answers we’re looking for, the vital clues we need to win this war; we have them in our power, and we want them to feel our power, to yield to it. Torture has become an expression of that.

In fact, going back to the Jack Bauer example, torture has become shockingly hip, the litmus test for the metaphorical manhood of our political leaders. Do they have what it takes to breach the ultimate taboo to save American lives? Rudy Giuliani (the logic goes)… yeah, he’d have Khaled Sheik Mohammed beaten to a bloody pulp if he thought American lives were at stake. John Edwards… that pretty boy doesn’t have it in him- he’d sissy out, and pretty soon Boston is a radioactive crater. And on and on.

I hope I’m just completely misreading the mood of country. It’s hard to argue, however, that the response to the Bush Administration’s quite wanton use of torture has been muted. I guess I’m just still among those who believe that the use of torture should be anathema in a liberal society, that it is entirely antithetical to the principles that we claim uphold our government and direct our daily lives. I want to quote Andrew Sullivan at length, who in a tremendous article in The New Republic (also in late 2005) answered those who believe the U.S government should in some limited circumstances sanction the use of torture:

“Torture is the polar opposite of freedom. It is the banishment of all freedom from a human body and soul, insofar as that is possible. As human beings, we all inhabit bodies and have minds, souls, and reflexes that are designed in part to protect those bodies: to resist or flinch from pain, to protect the psyche from disintegration, and to maintain a sense of selfhood that is the basis for the concept of personal liberty. What torture does is use these involuntary, self-protective, self-defining resources of human beings against the integrity of the human being himself. It takes what is most involuntary in a person and uses it to break that person's will. It takes what is animal in us and deploys it against what makes us human. As an American commander wrote in an August 2003 e-mail about his instructions to torture prisoners at Abu Ghraib, "The gloves are coming off gentlemen regarding these detainees, Col. Boltz has made it clear that we want these individuals broken."

What does it mean to "break" an individual? As the French essayist Michel de Montaigne once commented, and Shakespeare echoed, even the greatest philosophers have difficulty thinking clearly when they have a toothache. These wise men were describing the inescapable frailty of the human experience, mocking the claims of some seers to be above basic human feelings and bodily needs. If that frailty is exposed by a toothache, it is beyond dispute in the case of torture. The infliction of physical pain on a person with no means of defending himself is designed to render that person completely subservient to his torturers. It is designed to extirpate his autonomy as a human being, to render his control as an individual beyond his own reach. That is why the term "break" is instructive. Something broken can be put back together, but it will never regain the status of being unbroken--of having integrity. When you break a human being, you turn him into something subhuman. You enslave him. This is why the Romans reserved torture for slaves, not citizens, and why slavery and torture were inextricably linked in the antebellum South.

What you see in the relationship between torturer and tortured is the absolute darkness of totalitarianism. You see one individual granted the most complete power he can ever hold over another. Not just confinement of his mobility--the abolition of his very agency. Torture uses a person's body to remove from his own control his conscience, his thoughts, his faith, his selfhood. (TNR subscribers can see the full article here.)

I don’t think you can put it any better than that; and it’s pretty much why, up until the past few years, the idea of the American government sanctioning torture as a deliberate policy would have been completely unthinkable. It is simply stands in complete opposition to the values we purport to defend.

There is, however, and argument to be made that, yes, torture is abhorrent, but under some circumstances it may be justified. What if, to take a common hypothetical, you are dealing with an imminent nuclear explosion, and you have one of the terrorist gang at your mercy. He knows where the bomb is, but he’s not talking. In this situation, millions of innocent lives hang in the balance. You are dealing with a twisted killer who surely deserves nothing better than the most relentless torture until he submits.

I might, I think, personalize this scenario a bit to illustrate further. Let’s say I am the chief interrogator, and I know there is a nuclear device set to explode somewhere in the San Francisco Bay Area. I have, oh, say, Khaled Sheik Mohammed, and I know he knows where it is. Am I morally justified in torturing him to extract the necessary information?

First, it’s a bit silly to talk about what KSM “deserves.” I think The Onion got it right on pretty much day one, so no point in pursuing it any further. And frankly, depending on what sort of balance you use, yeah, I probably am morally justified in this imminent nuclear explosion/very evil man hypothetical to use whatever means of torture I can come up with to get him talking.

The problem is, the next time I talk to my parents, my girlfriend, my friends, everybody I care about, I am doing it as somebody who has physically tormented another human being. That is an experience I hope never to have to undergo; no matter how “justifiable” it may be given the circumstances, I do not think the blood washes off.

How, then, can I as a citizen of a democracy ask another man to commit these acts in my name? Not just once, mind you, in the excruciating hypothetical sketched above, but repeatedly, and under circumstances that are far murkier. If our policy in the war against terror is that torture will be an implicit weapon in our arsenal, then that will necessitate the creation of people whose duty it is to carry out that policy. Those people will spend half their time carrying out monstrous acts in the name of freedom, and the other half will struggle to be loving husbands, wives, fathers, and mothers. And if I acquiesce in this, then their burden is mine as well.

As Sullivan puts it, “Any polity that endorses torture has incorporated into its own DNA a totalitarian mutation.” One might add that any state that sanctions its citizens to commit acts of torture has ceased to be free.

Re: The Strange Case of the "Flying Imams"

2007-03-29T07:37:00.000-07:00

Normally I cede this sort of turf to you, BP, but you got me rankled with your favorable (favorable!) quotation of Karl Rove a couple of posts back. At least I think it was favorable; you're welcome to take me to task if I'm reading you wrong there.
But now all this talk of a "fifth column?" I'm perfectly willing to believe that the group did not act as perfectly "innocently" as their leader insists. But really, what exactly did they do that was so provocative? The passengers who cheered their removal obviously reacted not so much to their appearance as to their behavior (based on what I've read, I'll cede that). It seems that, objectively speaking, they did the following:

-They prayed at the gate, audibly. Among the Arabic words that came up repeatedly in the prayer and discussion was the eminently recognizable "Allah."
BP, you're more the expert here, but just from my layman's perspective, that would come up quite a bit during typical Muslim prayer, wouldn't it? Apparently they were not courteous enough to take their prayer to the "non-denominational chapel" that is considerately provided for such use; I'm pretty sure they tuck these into the farthest corner of most airports these days, so basic human laziness might be cited as a mitigating factor here. And in terms of the "suspicious" timing: even I say a little prayer before flying these days.

-They were cursing George Bush and criticizing the Iraq War. They mentioned al-Qaida and terrorism a few times during conversation in Arabic.
Well, I've been out of the country for a while now, but as far as I know discussing politics is still legal. Even in a foreign language. Shoot, if they weren't talking about this stuff, now that might be a bit suspicious.

-A couple of them asked for seat-belt extensions.
Apparently the leader weighs a deuce and a half. He's a big fella. The others aren't exactly small. 'Nuff said.

-They sat in a suspicious configuration.
The leader claims he was upgraded to first. Should be easy enough to check out. Okay, so I admit the two up front-two in the middle-two in the back configuration might justifiably raise some eyebrows. That said, if they did book tickets separately, as they claim, it might very well have worked out this way randomly.

-Some of them got up to walk around at various points while the plane was sitting on the tarmac, stopping to check in with their buddies.
Okay, so you've just been sitting there, it's been like an hour, and the plane still shows no signs of taking off. The captain periodically gets on the radio to announce that there's been some trouble with the "paperwork" (while unbeknownst to you, the captain, flight crew, US Airways, the Minneapolis PD, and the local FBI are all debating whether to cuff you and kick you off the plane). Meanwhile, your fellow passengers are looking at you in the nastiest ways. Since lord knows you're not going anywhere for awhile, you get up to clear your head, walk over to your friend's seat, and mention how paranoid everybody seems to be since 9/11.

Now, as is mostly the case in these situations, I'm guessing the truth lies somewhere in between how the imams insist they behaved and how they are accused of behaving by the usual online/talk radio suspects on the reactionary right. It's perfectly plausible that the imams quite inadvertably acted in a manner that perhaps not unjustifiably freaked out some of the flight crew and their fellow passengers. And if that is happening, then of course it is entirely reasonable and advisable for the captain to make the decision to have them removed.
And I can also understand that the imams may believe they were treated incredibly callously, that they have been convicted of no crime other than "flying while Muslim", and that their civil rights have been thusly violated. Suing US Airways doesn't strike me as so absurd under those circumstances, if only to draw attention to the shabby treatment you felt you received. I do, however, agree that dragging the "John Does" into this is both extreme and unwise.
What I don't understand is this "fifth column" business. The idea that the imams staged this as a provocation purposefully to get kicked off the plane so they could then sue to either a). draw attention to "discriminatory" practices in the aviation industry, or, even more absurdly, b). attempt through litigation to soften American homeland security defenses to pave the way for the next 9/11, plain and simply boggles the mind at the moment. If this goes to trial, then by all means let's hear the evidence, but I think imputing the most malign, conspiracy theory-caliber motives to the "flying imams" at this point seems highly premature.

The Case of the Flying Imams: CAIR's Campaign to Criminalize Scrutiny of Muslims in Airports

2007-03-29T05:02:00.000-07:00

In November 2006, six Muslim clerics were returning from a Minneapolis meeting of the North America Imams Federation when they suffered racial profiling. They said their normal evening prayers; suspicious passengers called more suspicious airport police; the imams were taken off the plane in handcuffs, interrogated, and denied boarding for additional flight. This is the narrative, according to the imams themselves, and according to representatives of the Council of American-Islamic Relations (CAIR). "As Americans, we deserve security based on intelligence and evidence - not paranoia, false reporting, bigotry and witch hunts at 32,000 feet," wrote CAIR's national legal director. The SF Chronicle and other defenders of human liberty jumped on the CAIR bandwagon. The imams first called for a boycott of US Airways and then, in partnership with CAIR, lauched a lawsuit against US Airways as well as the "John Doe" passengers who complained of "suspicious behavior." CAIR called for "Congressional hearings on religious profiling." The imams' spokesman, Omar Shahin, declared: "We did nothing."

But US Airways, the Minneapolis airport authorities, and the passengers on the plane tell a different story. It seems that the imams angrily cursed the US at the gate before boarding. They then engaged in their evening prayers and at high volume.

This sort of ostentatious behavior, incidentally, I have never seen at any prayer time in any airport in any Muslim country. (When traveling, Muslims may "make up" missed prayers at the beginning or end of the day; most do so, or else pray discreetly in their seats.) Once on the plane, the imams did not go to their assigned seats. Instead, they fanned out in pairs to the front, middle, and rear of the plane, exactly as the 9/11 hijackers had done. Next, the imams began to walk back and forth, speaking in Arabic. They asked for seat belt extensions, which were provided, though none of them needed them or used them. At this point, passengers quite rightly became suspicious.

Flight attendants asked the imams to return to their assigned seats and return their seatbelt extensions. They refused. The flight attendants then asked the imams to leave the plane. Still they refused. Then airport police boarded, and the imams walked off the plane with them, chanting "Allah" loudly as they did. (Later, the imams were to claim they were handcuffed and attacked by dogs; the police report says otherwise.)

The evidence is highly disturbing. It is worth emphasizing that CAIR's lawsuit is not only against US Airways but also the individual passengers who alerted flight attendants to the imams' suspicious behavior. Should the lawsuit succeed, it would have a chilling effect on the ability of average citizens and law enforcement officials to report or react to suspicious behavior. One could not dream up a better scheme to coerce airports into looking the other way when suspicious behavior takes place. One could not dream up a better way to prepare the ground for the next 9/11.

The Becket Fund for Religious Liberty has condemned CAIR's lawsuit:

"In its 12 year history the Becket Fund has represented clients from Christian, Jewish, Hindu, Muslim and other traditions. This is, however, the first time they’ve ever opposed someone’s claim of religious discrimination. The Becket Fund will also promptly seek leave to file a brief in the case urging the trial court to keep secret the identity of the John Does. Hasson said they were driven to such action by the outrageousness of the Flying Imams’ tactics. 'We know religious liberty. Religious liberty is a client of ours,' Hasson says in the letter. 'And this claim is not about religious liberty.'"

Meanwhile, in a reassuring reminder that not all US Muslims support CAIR's terrorism-enabling actions, the American Islamic Forum for Democracy, led by Zuhdi Jasser, has volunteered to raise money for the defense of US Airways and the John Does. The House of Representatives voted to protect the John Does in a largely symbolic gesture. But Democratic politicians protested that to oppose the imams would "encourage racial profiling." To which I reply: How exactly is Islam a race? And why should people be discouraged from awareness of suspicious behavior?

CAIR, of course, has a checkered history. It has been involved with many terrorist organizations over the years, such as Kind Hearts, a "charity" that funneled money to Hamas bombmakers. It has defended people like Sheikh Omar Abdel-Rahman, the Al Qaeda operative and orchestrator of the 1993 World Trade Center attacks. It is generously funded by the the same Saudi government that brought us the Pakistani indoctrination schools. It has, quite rightly, been called "the PR machine of militant Islam."

What is disturbing is that CAIR has managed to pass itself off as a civil rights organization, even as it seeks to undermine US security by criminalizing any scrutiny of Muslims in airports.

As Emilio Mola of the pro-Franco Spanish Nationalists once said, "I have four columns with me, and a fifth column [of sympathizers] inside Madrid." Bin Laden might well say the same about CAIR and its flying imams.

Some Hong Kong humor...

2007-03-22T19:03:00.000-07:00

Pretty phenomenal cartoon today in The Standard (not posting the full image here because I don't want to get sued, but click on the link).

2007-03-19T08:12:00.000-07:00

I've been trying to read as much as I can recently about the Iraq War, to try and get a handle on things- why it happened, how it went so wrong, what will be the consequences... It's been four years now since the invasion, and given that most of 2002 was spent getting ready for this thing, that means nearly half a decade we've been living with Iraq. In all that time, I'm not sure I've read anything that's left me so disturbed and disgusted as George Packer's latest article in the New Yorker. It's long, but everybody should read it. It's just about the capstone on every previous account illuminating the damage done to good people by the arrogant ideologues and fantasists who have presided over this catastrophe.

Maps and Magical Thinking

2007-03-14T05:05:00.000-07:00

In a recent article, the always-interesting Robert Fisk asks: "Why are we trying to divide up the peoples of the Middle East?" He accuses Westerners of encouraging sectarianism, "divisions...suspicious...[and the] capacity for mutual hatred." How have we accomplished this feat?

Maps.

All this time, writers have been debating the impact of politics, history, economics, and theology on sectarian differences. But it seems that these factors pale compared to the malevolent influence of cartographers. In fact, Fisk writes, the color-coded demographic maps of Iraq and Lebanon found in the news media reveal not only Western "casual racism" but a "wish to promote civil war." Such maps are biased, Fisk explains, because neighborhoods, cities, regions, and nations are never demographically pure. A "Sunni" suburb of Beirut may have a substantial Druze minority; an "Ibadhi" quarter of Muscat may hide a great many Hindus.

To be sure, demographic maps may ignore minorities. Certainly, the real world generally lacks sharp boundaries. I have seen fences that zig-zag and climb wildly along cliffs and ravines, all to conform to a straight line on a map. But it seems far-fetched to argue that a map can be normative, or "Hitlerian" as Fisk puts it. Are we oppressing Republicans when we say that Berkeley is generally Democratic? Is it racist to say that Fruitvale (in Oakland, California) has few whites but many blacks and Hispanics? How can a demographic fact be anything but descriptive?

Fisk proposes that we refer to particular neighborhoods in Baghdad as "mixed." This would be as analytically fruitful as calling Berkeley "politically diverse." Is it "imperial" or "racist" of me to state that Sadr City is mainly Shi'a or that Berkeley is mainly Democratic? Fisk attempts to obscure his conflation of the descriptive with the normative by bringing up the issue of double standards, arguing that Western newspapers would "never" publish maps showing racial or religious demographics within major Western cities. Regardless of the merits of this claim, it is distinct from Fisk's contention that divisions in the Middle East were somehow invented, imposed, or developed by Western nations.

And since Fisk is so eager to accuse "we Westerners" of racism for drawing sectarian maps - what is "racial" about being a Sunni or Shi'a? It seems that "our potential enemies" - like people of all nations - are perfectly capable of dividing themselves.

Fisk's essay is of interest because, like much of his work, it has attracted popular attention and acclaim among many in the Middle East. (Bin Laden once referred to Fisk as one of the West's few "neutral" reporters.) It is also of interest because it is symptomatic of a general body of thought.

There are many, like Fisk, who eternally seek a Western bogeyman. Such bogeymen are easy to find, as Western governments and industry do not hesitate to pursue their interests. However, the extent of such groups' influence tends to be vastly overrated, as Jean-Francois Revel argues in his incisive "Anti-Americanism." Many intellectuals give national or corporate influence unique normative weight when it originates in the West. This is both a double standard and a form of magical thinking.

As Karl Rove once said, "Conservatives saw the savagery of the 9/11 attacks and prepared for war; liberals saw the savagery of the 9/11 attacks and wanted to prepare indictments and offer therapy and understanding for our attackers." By making everything "our" fault and denying agency to non-Western actors, Fisk continues to fight the good fight.

An Observation

2007-03-11T07:30:00.000-07:00

"When a true genius appears in the world, you may know him by this sign, that the dunces are all in confederacy against him." -Jonathan Swift

Barack Obama and the Fox News peanut gallery.

Remembrance of Blogs Past

2007-03-09T20:09:00.000-08:00

Since it's been a bit of a slow news week, I think I'll take a moment to comment on a topic close at heart. There are of course millions upon untold millions of blogs up and running on the web, most started by ordinary people like you and me with something (or even nothing) to say and a bit too much time on their hands. A tiny number of these blogs actually acquire some degree of prominence and readership; a single grain of sand on a beachful of blogs, as it were, actually becomes successful enough that the blogger can write full time and live off the ad revenues. As I said, however, we're talking really tiny numbers.
If you'll allow me to wax lyrical for a moment: Picture a night sky full of tiny, flickering stars. When one of those stars suddenly blinks out, who notices? Who misses its presence? And indeed, in the galaxy of blogs, this sort of thing happens all of the time. A blog starts, there's a flurry of creative energy devoted at the outset, and then, perhaps inevitably, the posts begin to flag. Weeks go by with nothing. A year later you check the url, and the blog is frozen in the past, a time capsule telling you what the creator thought about some obscure issue or life event that now exists as only a vague memory. Lord knows this has happened to me, twice now in fact, although perhaps in my defense I do seem to keep coming back.
I want to bring up one blog specifically, as an example of this phenomenon. This past fall, I was excited to see that an old friend from college had begun blogging. Vishal called his blog "Restless Ruminations", and I particularly enjoyed his focus on two disparate topics both of which I find fascinating but know very little about: India and Texas politics. Throw in a dash of legal commentary (he's a future law student), and the sort of center-left Bush bashing that is the bread and butter of this and many other blogs, and you had a blog that I think you'll agree was extremely diverting reading.
And then, after posting in early November on the midterm elections and Texas A & M President Robert Gates's appointment as Defense Secretary, Vishal mysteriously stopped. Nothing more was heard; the blog fell silent. And my own knowledge of India and Texas politics suffered an irreparable blow.
Vishal, if you ever by chance happen to read this, then heed these words. Forget law school. You have a gift, man. Resuscitate "Restless Ruminations" and get back to blogging.

We Have Ways of Making You Talk: From Hanns Scharff to Jack Bauer

2007-03-04T21:08:00.000-08:00

"Much as a good hunter trains his hounds to bring the game to him rather than eating it, a good ruler has to restrain his henchmen from devouring the prey lest he be left empty-handed. Investigation is a subtle process, requiring patience and fine analytical ability, as well as a skill in cultivating one's sources. When torture is condoned, these rare talented people leave the service, having been outstripped by less gifted colleagues with their quick-fix methods, and the service itself degenerates into a playground for sadists."

- Vladimir Bukovsky, a former Soviet dissident imprisoned for over a decade (and often tortured himself), in 18 December 2005 Washington Post

When Bukovsky wrote that torture is "the professional disease of any investigative machinery," we might be inclined to say: this is just sour grapes from someone who enjoyed a few too many "Chekist handshakes." But it seems that people from the other side of the interrogation table are inclined to agree. Former CIA station chief (and excellent novelist) Milt Bearden argued in the LA Times on 23 May 2004 that torture is "as futile as it is brutal."

In works of fiction like Jean Larteguy's Les Centurions, on television shows like 24, and in the minds of many US interrogators and conservative commentators, however, torture is a brutal but sometimes necessary element of intelligence gathering. Gillo Pontecorvo's ostensibly anti-war Battle of Algiers similarly suggests that torture yields useful information; hence its popularity in private Pentagon screenings. (A flyer for a 2003 Department of Defense screening of the film said that the French "have a plan" that "succeeds tactically, but fails strategically." In other words, the problem was not that torture took place - it worked well, didn't it? - but rather that it radicalized the friends, families, and societies of those being tortured.)

Finding What You're Looking For, and the Logic of Perpetual Emergency

In one popular joke, the CIA is impressed at how many terrorists the Tunisian secret police have captured. Some case officers fly to Tunis to learn more. The CIA team arrives and compliments the Tunisians on their abilities. A Tunisian officer smiles and produces a rabbit. "Look at this rabbit," he says. "We'll release him and he will vanish. Just try and find him. If you can't do it in 24 hours, we'll show you how." He lets the rabbit go. The CIA team puts a trained dog on the rabbit's scent, but 24 hours pass without success. The Tunisian team then takes the dog and puts it in a basement. They suspend it in the air, pull out its claws, burn it with cigarettes, and beat it senseless. "Where's the rabbit?" demands the Tunisian interrogator. "I don't know," the dog sobs faintly. The Tunisian takes two electric wires and crosses them. They crackle, spitting sparks. He then presses the exposed wires onto opposite sides of the dog's body, which convulses wildly. The wires are removed and the dog howls in agony. "Where's the rabbit?" the Tunisian asks again. The dog yelps: "I am the rabbit!"

Torture is an excellent tool to extract confessions. Anyone can be tortured until he admits that he shot JFK or that he was Osama bin Laden's personal barber. But meaningful facts and operational details are different. You cannot torture someone into giving you my bank account PIN. Worse, even if he knows my PIN, he can give you a false one, buying me enough time to withdraw my money.

In his article, Bearden described how "the ticking-bomb scenario" has become many interrogators' North Star. Lives may be on the line; to get actionable information, then, the interrogator must do, as a popular television character often says, "Whatever it takes." Bearden describes the result: "every detainee became a 'high-value' subject, and...every intelligence question became a 'ticking bomb' case." Consequently, torture becomes the norm, rather than the exception.

Pain and death do not deter a committed ideologue. The Romans asked early Christians to recant or die; thousands chose to be crucified, burned at the stake, and fed to the wild animals of the Coliseum rather than betray their principles. Many others - from Jeanne D'Arc to William Wallace - similarly refused to make concessions to their torturers until the end. Though not all criminals are so self-righteous, the ones who join al-Qaeda-inspired organizations tend to be.

Interrogation Alternatives

Many professional interrogators argue that violence can be counter-productive, that "patience and cunning" could be more effective. Nazi interrogator Hanns Scharff is frequently held up as a model, since he had a well-deserved reputation for always getting actionable intelligence from his prisoners. To Sharff, intelligence was a like a mosaic or jigsaw puzzle. An investigator had to know the outline and some of the details and leverage them to fill in the rest. Sharff's "interrogations" would often consist of a friendly dinner, a philosophical conversation, or a walk through the woods. Sharff would profile his subjects and manipulate them into revealing information in the course of seemingly insignificant small talk. Many never realized that they had betrayed sensitive information to the Nazis until much later. For a long time, recounts a former interrogator, "the interrogation course at the US Army Intelligence Center and School...[was] based on the techniques that Sharff developed...All that seems to have gone out the window in favor of torture now." When the Pentagon invited Scharff to the US for a lecture tour (comparisons to Werner von Braun come to mind), the OC Weekly reports that "Scharff told his military audiences that camaraderie, fair treatment and respect are the indispensable keys to extracting information from the enemy." The contrast is stark between "Scharff's wine-with-dinner technique" - which got results - and "Lynndie England gleefully forcing Iraqi prisoners to masturbate while screwing her Army buddies in front of them" - which did not.

An anecdote from contemporary Iraq is also suggestive:

"Faced with finding the exact location of a minefield in an approximate area, U.S. servicemen lined up some 100 Iraqis next to the field. Off in the distance was a playground of children. 'You may think it’s U.S. soldiers who will die because you won’t tell us where the field is,' Nelson [the interrogator] recalls his colleague saying. 'But it’s the children over there who will die if you don’t tell us where it is.' Six of the 100 stepped forward to locate the mines. 'You actually get better, more accurate intelligence information when you comply with the law,' Nelson reiterates."

A similar methodology known as The Reid Technique was popularized for US law enforcement interrogators. The interrogator is asked to present plausible rationales for a suspect's alleged crime, drawing out confessions through non-leading questions and appeals to an alleged criminal's sense of self-righteousness.

Most criminals feels that their crimes are justified. For example, a criminal may say to himself: It wasn't arson - I just wanted to prove that the fire department's response time is too slow, to cause smoke damage to my rude neighbor's house, or perhaps simply to see how my he would react. It wasn't child abuse - I was toughening him up so that bullies wouldn't hurt him when he was older, or I touched her there to show my love and affection. I didn't kill anyone - I put her out of her misery, I only shook the child to get him to stop crying, I only intended to cut her slightly with the knife. And so forth. Most people firmly believe: "I didn't do anything wrong." This distortion of reality occurs because people do not want to experience guilt and anxiety. The suspect is then led to confess to a self-justifying version of events - that is, a more socially acceptable but equally prosecutable version of his crime.

Interestingly , torturers exhibit tendencies similar to other kinds of criminals. As presented in the Washington Post ("The Psychology of Torture", 11 May 2004), "torturers usually feel that they are carrying out the will of their societies...the torturers were not sadists, but perfectly normal people." As in the infamous Stanford prison experiment, you can "put good people into a bad barrel and they come out bad apples."

More to the point, however, is the fact that Reid and Sharff used psychological measures to get results. Their methodologies do not involve violence. On the contrary, they demand a keen rapport between interviewer and subject. An interrogation is a conversation. Torture is anything but.

Reid, in fact, shares much with the famed Lieutenant Columbo, whose technique, as Changing Minds puts it, was to: "(a) Get them talking, and (b) Slip in the real question." Once a subject is relaxed, Columbo

slips in a question about what he really wants to know. One of the tricks he uses is to phrase the question indirectly. If he wants to know whether a person drives a red car, he picks up something red and talks about a car he used to have that was the same shade of red. The conversation might go something like this:

Columbo: "This is a nice clock. You know, I used to have a car exactly the same color as this. Chevvy, it was."
Suspect: "Hey, I've got a red Chevvy!"
Columbo: "Have you? Well, you know mine was a pretty good one."
Suspect: "Well mine's a '56. Special convertible!"
Columbo: "There aren't too many of those around."
Suspect: "Yeah, I got it from a guy down on 52nd Street."

Columbo now has a vital clue. His informant, like Sharff's prisoners, does not even realize that he is informing.

Sharff, incidentally, shifted from mosaics of military intelligence to literal mosaics. Some of his works are on display at Cinderella Castle in Disney World as well as the floor of California's capitol building in Sacramento.

An interrogator's story and the antecedents to torture

2007-03-04T06:08:00.000-08:00

One of the things that really characterized the Bush Administration's, and in particular the Defense Department's response to 9/11 was the idea that we were going to succeed by intimidating the enemy into submission. The corollary, of course, was that it was perhaps regrettable but in the end perfectly justifiable when innocent people were caught up and harmed; that a demonstration of power would make these people less likely to aid and abet terrorists.
BP has already drawn our attention to the connection between the war on terror and a sort of worldwide counterinsurgency campaign. The trouble is that in counterinsurgency, the strategy of massive force and intimidation is utterly wrong. Time and again we have seen how it backfires.
And within that context it is harrowing to read the story of an Army interrogator in Iraq and the methods he used. It is particularly awful in light of his own argument that almost all prisoners tortured were either completely innocent or lacking in any important information.
In the aftermath of the Abu Ghraib scandal, the DOD tried to portray the problem as one of a few "bad apples". It is very obvious now that the Administration's much-vaunted "gloves off" approach led quite directly to the abuses committed on the ground. It is also excruciatingly clear that the bias towards excessive force inflamed rather than extinguished the insurgency. As we draw further from the initial stages of our response to 9/11, it is vitally important that we recognize what impulses led directly to abuses committed later, and also that we acknowledge the ideas that informed those now-bankrupt strategies.

Mitt Romney in action...

2007-03-04T05:46:00.000-08:00

Boy, what a jerk.

Obama/Nunn?

2007-02-25T01:39:00.000-08:00

In a later post I hope to do some justice to the singular political phenomenon that is Sen. Barack Obama. Suffice it to say for the moment that I've been a bit of a skeptic in the past, but I may be starting to reconsider. His Achilles' heel is quite clearly his inexperience- in the general election a Mitt Romney or Rudy Giuliani could really go to town on his lack of executive-level credentials.
If Obama does emerge victorious from the primaries, he may need to find his own Dick Cheney to win the general election. That would be the Dick Cheney of 2000, the experienced, steadying hand on young W's shoulder, not the power-drunk ogre we've subsequently come to know and despise. For the equivalent sort of influence, Obama could do far, far worse than Sam Nunn. Frankly, he could do no better.

Re: The Anthropology of Insurgencies

2007-02-25T01:33:00.000-08:00

If memory serves, the first place I ran across the argument presented in the George Packer article highlighted by BP, about how the war on terror should really be conceptualized as a global counterinsurgency campaign, was a couple of years ago in Michael Scheuer’s excellent Imperial Hubris. In general terms, I certainly agree with BP that it’s a far better way to think about our vendetta against al-Qaeda et al than the Bush Administration’s initial response, which was to try to smash or cow all states that might aid terror networks.

There was a catch, however. Scheuer argued, very persuasively I thought, that we are not under attack because of the values we represent, but rather for the specific policies we have followed. In a very dark conclusion, he warned that unless the U.S. fundamentally alters its policies towards the Middle East, we are in for a long and bloody war of attrition. I won’t go into specifics here about what changes he advocated, but you could probably guess at them. The point is that our image in the Muslim world stems directly from the policies we follow. No cosmetic tinkering, not the best propaganda from even our most skillful spinmeisters can mitigate the consequences of policies that alienate an enormous chunk of the world’s population. If, as in the case of the invasion of Iraq, our own policies become more radical, then we are digging ourselves an even deeper hole.

In a recent study, published by NYU’s Center for Law and Security, terrorism analysts Peter Bergen and Paul Cruikshank attempt to calculate what effect the Iraq War has had on global terror. The results are sobering. Even discounting for Iraq and Afghanistan, there has been a sharp rise in terrorist attacks from the period between 9/11 and the Iraq invasion to the period between the invasion and late 2006. There has also been a rise in fatalities, and an increased rate of attack on U.S. and Western allied targets. The situation will likely worsen when foreign fighters begin to slink out of Iraq, bringing their newfound skills home with them.

As BP put it quite rightly, the only metric that counts in a counterinsurgency campaign is convincing the local population that its security depends on cooperating with your forces. There was a time in Iraq when a smart counterinsurgency campaign might have turned the tide. That time, it now seems likely, was late 2003, and by early 2004 the future had practically written itself. In the face of insurgent intimidation, the Iraqi population found it could not count on American forces to protect it, and began the fateful turn instead to sectarian affiliations. The vilest of the insurgent groups, of course, are willing to turn Iraq into a charnel house to force the U.S. to leave. They will do this to the entire region if they can.

Any troop surge at this moment in time is nothing more than sticking one’s fist into a bowl of water; the water will be displaced, but it will come rushing back in when the fist is removed. The most important thing the U.S. can do now is quite obvious but incredibly difficult. It must act without delay to ensure that when the Iraqi civil war does break out, it does not drag Iraq’s neighbors into the maelstrom. It is also incumbent on the U.S. to work with all Middle Eastern governments in formulating effective countermeasures against the many terrorists operating in Iraq who will one day seek to return home or emigrate to the West. We cannot afford to be caught unprepared.

The Anthropology of Insurgencies

2007-02-19T23:17:00.000-08:00

I discovered in an old New Yorker a fascinating essay by George Packer concerning the ways social scientists working with the US government have attempted to redefine the war on terror as a global counterinsurgency. "Terrorists" cannot be persuaded, can operate in isolation, and can only be dealt with coercively. Because the US government has defined the conflict as a "war on terror" its strategies have emphasized military action. But an insurgent, as Packer writes, "has a mass base whose support can be won or lost through politics." This means that "political, economic, and informational operations" are just as important as organized violence.

This seems to be a superior way of framing world events. To argue, as the Bush administration has, that Iraq, Iran, Aceh, Chechnya, Palestine, the bidonvilles of Rabat and Paris, and the suburbs of Manchester and Hamburg are all part of the same "war" is to distort reality. In fact, such an argument is in the interest of Al Qa'ida and its colleagues. The propaganda strategy of jihadists like bin Laden consists of trying to persuade "we Muslims" (all lumped together in an imagined unity) that "we" are under attack from "them" (that is, the "Jews and Crusaders") all over the world. Fortunately, such a view is demonstrably false. Different conflicts have different histories, different dynamics, and different solutions. This is why the sorts of things that interest anthropologists - like subjective motivations, the structures of and rivalries within groups and network, or the roles of tribal and kinship ties - also ought to interest policymakers. Anthropological details can be used to detect and exploit opportunities.

Packer also argues that "winning hearts and minds is not a matter of making local people like you—as some American initiates to counterinsurgency whom I met in Iraq seemed to believe—but of getting them to accept that supporting your side is in their interest, which requires an element of coercion." Whether you are feared or loved is irrelevant. Incentives matter more. Building a school in Kandahar may win the US Army friends during the daylight hours, but what are locals to think when the Taliban shows up at night and says "Support us or we'll kill you"? The subjective cost to a local population of working with your opponents must be less than that of working with you.

Meanwhile, for those beyond the Taliban's reach, propaganda and the information war become paramount. As Packer writes, insurgents in Iraq do not destroy a Humvee to reduce the number of Humvees in Iraq by one. On the contrary, they destroy it so that they can acquire spectacular footage of a burning Humvee, post it on the Internet, and solicit support for their cause. The objective is to generate influence. Insurgents do not expect to win by destroying the enemy but rather by destroying his will to fight. Thus, Packer's sources refer to the Taliban's activity as "armed propaganda operations...[alternating] guerrilla activity and terrorist activity as they need to, in order to maintain the political momentum, and it’s all about an information operation that generates the perception of an unstoppable, growing insurgency."

Perception is key. The Algerian insurgents never defeated the French army; by 1962, the reverse was true. But they were able to create the perception that the French were immoral and losing. Once that impression was fixed in the global imagination the outcome was not in doubt.

Packer's article emphasizes the power of ideas. If we disagree with Tawhid wa Jihad's ideas, we should promote persuasive alternatives. For example, we could co-opt, create, or sponsor groups with counter-messages. Moreover, a thorough understanding of how such groups recruit and operate could help us subvert them from within.

New media such as satellite television and the Internet have revolutionized communication. Propaganda is more accessible and powerful than at any time in the past. Consequently, founding schools or subsidizing educational exchanges can be far more effective than dropping bombs.

Similarly, with mass persuasion in mind, it is counter-productive to regard one's current opponents as evil. How are you going to have a productive conversation with someone you regard as a "totalitarian" or "Islamofascist" or "infidel"? It is impossible to persuade someone if you are incapable of understanding and sympathizing with his perspective. If persuasion is central to victory, a lack of empathy could spell defeat.

Matters of Interpretation

2007-02-16T20:50:00.000-08:00

The Atlantic Monthly informs us that Rudy Giuliani has been learning "evangelese" to reach out to Southern Christians, a sharp departure from his earlier public rhetorical style. Here in an unspecified country I noticed an Arabic-language tafsir (exegesis) of the Qur'an written for elementary students. Early on, the book addressed the verse "Al Kafiroun" ("the infidels", or "those who deny the truth"):

"Say: O you unbelievers, / I do not worship what you worship / Nor do you worship what I worship / And you will not worship what I have worshipped / And I will not worship what you have worshipped / To you your religion and to me - [true] religion."

In English and in the West, Islamic apologists cite this verse as evidence of Islam's inherently tolerant, easygoing nature. (I have provided a literal translation; the last line is usually freely translated as "To you your Way and to me mine," implying an non-sectarian attitude.) But I found a different interpretation in the books for schoolchildren: "Here God explains that in matters of truth we can make no compromise." In the book's view, believers should be aware of the vast difference between unbelief and belief, between true religion and lies.

Different words are used for different audiences. Adult English speakers read about tolerance. Muslim schoolchildren read about the need to have the proper attitude towards those who reject Faith. Which audience is the more discerning, and which interpretation the more convincing?

With those thoughts in mind, I came across Francis Fukuyama's commentary in Prospect Magazine regarding identity politics. The article, clearly inspired by the proliferation of trans-national and violent Islamic supremacist organizations in Europe, considers the origins of such extremism. Fukuyama argues that anomie, a conflicted identity, and a sense of rootlessness makes people susceptible to "radical" thought; it is an "open question" whether there is anything specific to Islam that might exacerbate such psychological tensions. But Fukuyama closes the question by proceeding as though the answer were negative.

A comparison might shed some light on the question. Hindus from India and Buddhists from Thailand and atheists from China also experience anomie and feel torn between cultures. There are millions of them living in America and Europe. Yet the Hindus, Buddhists, and atheists tend not to follow international, chauvinist, supremacist, and separatist ideologies or organizations. There is no Hindu, Buddhist, or atheist equivalent to Hizb at-Tahrir or al-Ghurabaa' and its successors. In the climate that the latter groups cultivate, religiously-inspired violence is a flower that grows easily.

Could Fukuyama be discouting intolerant Islamic ideology on the grounds that it must be outside of the mainstream or theologically illegitimate? In the first place, regardless of whether it is legitimate, such ideology exists and is persuasive to many. Were it not, the British security services would not be monitoring dozens of serious active plots; nor would their French counterparts would not be worried when al-Zawahiri commands Algerians to strike "infidel" France.

Fukuyama's problem, like that of so many Westerners, is that he does not take his opponents' arguments seriously. Instead, he retreats into the Western political thought with which he is already familiar, considering non-Western philosophies exclusively through the lens of Western philosophy. This train of thought, however, takes Fukuyama to a rather provocative destination:

"Liberalism cannot ultimately be based on group rights, because not all groups uphold liberal values."

Some thoughts on Hillary Clinton and the Iraq War

2007-02-12T08:03:00.000-08:00

Interesting article today in the Times on the trouble Iraq is giving Hillary Clinton on the campaign trail in New Hampshire, and conversely how Barack Obama's consistent opposition to the war is at the moment looking like a huge advantage in the battle for the Democratic nomination. Interesting also to note that though he merits several mentions in this story, John Edwards doesn't really figure in here; he is chiefly invoked to cite the precedent of a politician publicly acknowledging that their vote to authorize Bush to use force if necessary to disarm Saddam Hussein was indeed a mistake. The question, therefore, is why hasn't Hillary done the same; in other words, gone for the cathartic mea culpa with the possible effect of galvanizing her candidacy among the Democratic base.

Perhaps she privately believes that she made the right decision in the circumstances, and that her vote was indeed not a mistake. That, of course, would be a perfectly plausible explanation for why she has not gone the Edwards route. She may believe that the threat posed by Saddam in October 2002, based on what most of the West’s intelligence services believed at the time, justified aggressive moves aimed at disarming him, and that a resolution authorizing force was warranted. At the time, she may have believed that the Bush Administration was not hell-bent on war, and that a Congressional resolution could play a role in convincing members of the UN Security Council to agree to highly intrusive inspections. If that was what she believed, then on the first count she would have been dangerously wrong, and on the second she would have been generally correct. She would certainly have realized that the resolution would make it far easier politically for Bush to go to war if he did come to that conclusion; yet in October 2002 the political climate heavily favored conservative hawks, and Democrats were under pressure to demonstrate solidarity with a very popular Commander-in-Chief.

Regardless, Hillary might certainly have believed that the Bush Administration would handle the invasion’s aftermath with a baseline level of competence. Her rhetoric at present is heavily focused on blaming the Bush Administration for the all-around miserable handling of the war, from conception to what is now looking like a bloody endgame, and while I happen to believe that she is correct in taking this approach, it does have the added benefit of minimizing the significance of the support of moderate Democrats like herself at the outset.

It is also quite possible, perhaps even likely, that she does privately believe her vote was a mistake. There is of course an enormous distinction between wars of necessity and national survival and wars of choice. The Iraq War, even to its most fervent supporters, was always an example of the latter; indeed, it was embarked upon in part in a misguided attempt to demonstrate that the U.S. could fight wars of choice pretty much at will. Yet even in the first year after 9/11, it had to have been clear to Hillary Clinton that Iraq would be a war of choice, and furthermore, had her husband still been president at the time, it would not have been a war of his choice. He might have threatened force to gain resumed inspections, but that would have been the scope of the policy. Indeed, there must have been something about this war of choice and its particular architects that would have proved quite troubling to Hillary Clinton in late 2002. Al Gore, nursing his wounds in political exile, nevertheless sensed it: it seemed unwise to put such trust in a president and his advisors who wished to divert resources from a job still unfinished in Afghanistan to carry out what seemed suspiciously like an old vendetta. What did this instinct say about the prospects for an orderly post-war occupation?

Hillary, however, perhaps because she believed strongly from her years as First Lady, based on the intelligence Bill (and she) had been privy to, that Iraq still possessed a stock of WMDs and fielded a weak army, perhaps out of political expediency, and quite possibly for both reasons, chose to ignore that feeling of unease and give Bush her support. In retrospect, it is quite obvious he did not deserve it; but at the time Hillary Clinton and many others ignored or rationalized the multitude of warnings.

If that is the case, however, then why hasn’t she co-opted the base by going the route of John Edwards?

I think that the answer lies in the particular political calculus Hillary is utilizing as she charts her delicate course. The most potent challengers in the Democratic primary (at the moment, Obama and Edwards) look to be coming at her almost exclusively from the left; yet to win the general election she will be forced to appeal to the Reagan Democrat types that rejected John Kerry in 2004 but deserted the Republicans in droves this past November. These voters emphasize a strong national defense, and most, like Hillary, supported Bush on the road to war (Sen. Jim Webb is the exception that proves the rule). Yet they, like her, have by and large soured on it and its inept civilian leadership. In short, Hillary Clinton’s Iraq position is actually the most mainstream of any of the major candidates in either party at the moment, far more so than those of McCain, Giuliani and Romney.

She is also mainstream in her focus on the challenges of the present and future rather than re-fighting the battles of the past. Most Americans are far more concerned with how to get our troops out of Iraq while preventing states across the Middle East from mobilizing for war. Quite a bit of the Democratic base, however, seems most interested in cathartic admissions of past misjudgment from those leaders who are seen to have erred most grievously. Having been right about Iraq, or at least being able to admit one was wrong, may be evolving into the litmus test of the 2008 Democratic primary.

For Hillary to call her vote a mistake would of course be taken to represent honesty, and might give her a boost among the base. Yet it would also do two potentially highly negative things: first and most importantly, it would send a message to the moderate and conservative voters who will be decisive in the general election about who calls the shots in the Hillary campaign; and secondly, it will reverberate across the entire Democratic primary field, truly becoming the litmus test for serious consideration and having a chilling effect on debate about the serious foreign policy challenges that confront us in the future and may in the final recourse have to be dealt with by force. A primary that has as its foreign policy keystone a disavowal of the entire American effort in Iraq, no matter what other rhetoric accompanies it, will have the effect of convincing a plurality of Americans that the Democratic Party as a whole impulsively shies away from using force to defend national security.

In the case of Iraq, this was the right decision. It is also presently the case in Iran. But in the future it may not be, and at present it is absolutely the wrong posture for the Democratic Party if it wishes to retake the White House. Hillary Clinton understands this; Barack Obama has never been anything other than consistent in his opposition to the Iraq War, and I think he understands it too. Intellectual heterogeneity has always been a great strength of the Democratic Party, and hopefully activists in the base will understand that.

A good Hong Kong site

2007-02-11T06:15:00.000-08:00

A great site I've been directed to lately for pan-Asian (can I use that term for stuff other than food?) news is the Asia Sentinel. It's kind of like Slate but with lower production values and run by a bunch of gweilo reporters in HK. It's definitely worth checking out for analysis as well as reports on stuff you might have missed. They're also one of the only news sites I've yet seen which covers the English-language Hong Kong media beat; it's good to have somebody keeping tabs, because it seems like most days the SCMP and Standard are the reporting equivalent of tapioca.

Notes on a Crisis

2007-02-06T06:21:00.000-08:00

Over holiday I had an opportunity to pick up John Lewis Gaddis’s The Cold War: A New History (recently out in paperback), and I’d heartily recommend it to pretty much everybody. As a relatively short overview of the Cold War it’s peerless (come to think of it, I don’t know what its peers would be in this case), and Gaddis has always been a great history writer, the type who can elucidate a giant, global point and then without missing a beat zoom down to earth to illustrate it with the perfect individual example (his description of John Paul II’s first visit to Communist-ruled Poland after being elected pontiff is worth the price of admission alone).

I could go on and on about this book, but that may be grist for another post. I bring up Gaddis and his work here merely to state what may seem like an obvious point about the conduct of foreign policy. In his scholarship, Gaddis has focused on the question of strategy and how it is formulated and executed. In foreign policy, a wise strategy, grounded in reality and the possible and feasible, yet navigating towards a fixed and attainable point on the horizon, can survive the blunders of an incompetent captain or two. Yet when the stakes are high, a shoddily formulated or blindly utopian strategy is gambling with catastrophe. If I’m reading Gaddis correctly, one of the chief reasons he gives for why the world survived a 45-year standoff between two nuclear-armed superpowers is that the underlying American strategy of containment, formulated during the earliest years of the Cold War, was sound. None of the presidents that were left to implement it was perfect, and they all made mistakes; yet by sticking by the template we survived while the USSR eventually collapsed under the weight of its own contradictions.

Yet what we are seeing now from the Bush Administration is the utter collapse of this tradition, and the substitution of an approach that is characterized by its fantasist, ad hoc, and politically expedient characteristics. Simply put, there is no strategy the Bush team is consciously pursuing in any region of the globe, save a blind faith in the idea that American power trumps everything, including reality. I’m obviously not the first one to say this, and this is obviously not a new trend. The “Bush Doctrine” of preventive war gave way to the “Freedom Agenda” when it became clear that the neither of the criteria established for intervention under the Bush Doctrine, WMD and links to international terror networks, were present in the test case of Iraq. The Freedom Agenda, of course, fell largely by the wayside when it was established that American foreign policy in the Middle East was empowering extremists and emasculating moderates, rather than the desired reverse.

For everything there is a season, as they say, and this appears to be the season of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and the Iranian menace. The chatter now seems to be about the possibility of forming an American-Israeli-moderate Arab states alliance to counter rising and malevolent Iranian influence across the region. The focal point of all of this tension is the Iranian nuclear program, but Iranian activities in Lebanon, Syria, and especially Iraq could also serve as flash points. Iran is clearly a potent and worrying source of trouble, but at this point anybody who believes that Bush and his team have the requisite judgment and ability to contain Iran’s ambitions while navigating around a violent confrontation probably chugged the Kool-Aid long ago.

It is frightening the extent to which those in the know are frightened about the prospects and probability of war with Iran (the situation is similar in Israel, where a “1938”analogy has apparently become the conventional wisdom). James Fallows, the Atlantic correspondent whose pieces on the Iraq war were so illuminating chiefly because of the exemplary source network he has built up within the national security bureaucracy, writes in his latest piece that if Congress really wants to do the U.S. some good, it will lay down the Iraq issue and instead focus what power it has on making it exceedingly difficult for the Administration to launch airstrikes against Iran.

The fear among the well-informed is not that there is an incubating plan to hit Iran, exactly. It is, rather, that the Bush Administration has resolved that to salvage Iraq and American influence in the region, it must demonstrate strength and intimidate Iran into backing down on the nuclear front and standing down in Iraq; that to do so, the U.S. will engage in a campaign of rhetorical and on-the-ground escalation, and that this will be mirrored by the Ahmadinejad and the Iranian mullahs. The truly frightening scenario is that in a desperate bid to save his presidency, or else as the result of a chain of blunders with tensions running high, Bush will decide that airstrikes against Iran are the only way out of the trap. And this, as has been aptly documented and speculated upon elsewhere, would be cataclysmic and seed a disaster that would eventually make Iraq pale in comparison.

We now receive news that an Iranian diplomat has been kidnapped in Baghdad, and the Iranian government has stated that it is holding the U.S. accountable. It is incidents such as this, surely not the last, which will tempt leaders of both countries into a spiral that they will not be able to control.

It is also excruciating to note that even absent a direct U.S.-Iran conflict, the collapsing Iraqi state and the incipient Iraqi civil war threaten to engulf the entire region, with Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Egypt likely to back Sunni proxies while Iran tends to its coreligionists. As the Baker-Hamilton Commission made abundantly clear, the U.S. must not hesitate a second longer in engaging in serious regional diplomacy, with all relevant actors, to prevent this scenario from becoming an inevitability.

It is terrifying to confront this situation with leaders in whose judgment we have lost every shred of confidence, and yet that is the situation we now face.

Tomorrow, perhaps, we shall leave together

2007-02-03T22:30:00.000-08:00

The South Arabian office is somewhat preoccupied. Having driven the rebels out of Moghazal al-Qoblat, our advisors are accompanying local teams to claim the mountain redoubt of Misfaat al-Khodhra. Cut off from their sponsors in Khaheshmikonam, their options will be limited. Once the operation is finished you will enjoy a full situation report. For now, more literary diversion:

"Flowers, tears (if you insist), departures, and struggles are for tomorrow. In the middle of the day when the sky opens its fountains of light in the vast, sonorous space, all the headlands of the coast look like a fleet about to set out. Those heavy galleons of rock and light are trembling on their keels as if they were preparing to steer for sunlit isles. O mornings in the country of Oran! From the high plateaus the swallows plunge into huge troughs where the air is seething. The whole coast is ready for departure; a shiver of adventure ripples through it. Tomorrow, perhaps, we shall leave together."

Albert Camus, "The Minotaur, or The Stop in Oran"

Who is Bien Pensant?

2007-02-03T08:02:00.000-08:00

Bien Pensant is a very old, very good friend of mine who, in what is perhaps a lapse in otherwise impeccable judgment, has agreed to join forces with me on this blog. He's working in a Middle Eastern country, after a stint in North Africa; any more information I'll leave to his discretion to provide.
Suffice it to say, I'm very excited to have BP on board. Our on-again, off-again collaboration dates back to junior high school and "Mark and BP ask the Big Questions," an attempt at investigative journalism that failed to clear the high hurdles for publication in "The Purple Crayon Express", and nearly earned us suspensions to boot.
But that's another story for another day. What's important at present is that BP's on-the-scene knowledge of the Middle East is intimidating, and he's a fantastic writer. I'm elated that he's opening up The Quiet American's new Middle Eastern bureau (if I may be so bold); there's no better man for the job.

Poetry of departures

2007-02-03T03:16:00.000-08:00

by Philip Larkin

Sometimes you hear, fifth-hand,
As epitaph:

He chucked up everything
And just cleared off,
And always the voice will sound
Certain you approve
This audacious, purifying,
Elemental move.

And they are right, I think,
We all hate home
And having to be there:
I detest my room,
Its specially chosen junk,
The good books, the good bed,
And my life, in perfect order:
So to hear it said

He walked out on the whole crowd
Leaves me flushed and stirred,
Like Then she undid her dress
Or take that you bastard;
And that helps me stay
Sober and industrious.
But I'd go today,

Yes, swagger the nut-strewn roads,
Crouch in the fo'c'sle
Stubbly with goodness, if
It weren't so artificial,
Such a deliberate step backwards
To create an object;
Books; china; a life
Reprehensibly perfect.

Say it ain't so...Gavin.

2007-02-02T06:35:00.000-08:00

I checked in for local news on Sfgate.com today, and was greeted by this bombshell: San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom apparently had an affair with the wife of his good friend and campaign manager, and on Thursday was forced to own up to it and beg contrition. What follows in the story, if you care to read it, is an analysis of what effect this may have on his re-election campaign for this year, as well as his hopes for attaining higher office in the future. Also some irrelevancies about how conservative commentators are going to pin this on "San Francisco values" and use it to make Nancy Pelosi look bad (I despair of the Chronicle sometimes).

The truth is, even though I grew up just across the Bay from San Francisco, in Berkeley, the city that even SF residents think is a bit loopy, I really don't know how this is going to play for Newsom's chances for re-election. Okay, so it's obviously not going to help matters, but there is some truth to the traditional “San Francisco values” smear. The counterculture winds blow strong there still, and in stark defiance to the conservative sexual mores that still dominate public life in much of the rest of the country (and there are of course other obvious exceptions beyond SF), there’s something that goes beyond simply tolerance for thumbing your nose at it all. Clinton, after all, is beloved in the Bay Area, and it’s not for the moderate, DLC-type policies he followed while President. He’s a free spirit, simply put, and we love him for it. (As a side note, that’s the political tradition I come from, and perhaps it’s no coincidence that the two presidents I admire the most are Kennedy and Clinton.)

But that said, and as the Chronicle rightly notes, what stinks here is not just that the mayor had an affair, but that he had an affair with the wife of his campaign manager and friend. The element of betrayal comes into play, of a real breach of honor that goes way beyond simply nookie on the side. That’s the idea, far more than the basic fact of the affair, which will not sit well with SF voters and may doom him down the road if he ever hopes to pursue the governorship or a Senate seat. What’s more, this all comes in the midst of what can be described charitably as a near-breakdown for Newsom as both a mayor and a man. There’s a several-car pileup on the highway, and into it comes plowing an 18-wheeler. Even San Franciscan tolerance has been tested by the Newsom’s behavior lately; as the Chronicle puts it, “…the scandal came on the heels of headlines that have put an unflattering spotlight on Newsom's personal life -- from coverage of a messy divorce to public displays of affection and dalliances with a series of girlfriends, including a 19-year-old restaurant hostess, to sightings of the 39-year-old mayor drinking at bars and bistros across the city.” Yes, you read that right. If this man isn’t the second coming of JFK then I don’t know who is.

Now, I haven’t been following San Francisco politics very closely for the past couple of years, but the comments in the Chronicle article about a general sense of drift and inattention emanating from the mayor’s office square with my own perception of recent events, particularly the ongoing saga of the Niners’ plans to move to Santa Clara. At the moment, Newsom does not strike me as a mayor who is effectively deploying the powers he has to influence events and shape the city agenda, to put it mildly. The focus, desire, and ambition just seem to be draining away.

I’m sure there are many people in the Bay Area and, for that matter, across the country who are welcoming this development. They come from across the political spectrum, primarily on the left in the Bay Area and on the right nationally. You may have guessed by now that I don’t share that sentiment: the truth is, Newsom is one of the few politicians that I’ve really admired and liked in recent years, and frankly, I’m willing to forgive him a lot. As I note earlier, I tend to forgive easily when it comes to the personal foibles of politicians.

What makes me like Newsom, even to the point that I’m still inclined to think well of him after this really, really lousy thing he’s done?

A bit of background: Back in 2003, Newsom, still a young Supervisor (the SF city council is the Board of Supervisors), was the heir apparent to Mayor Willie Brown, the gleeful imp who had dominated SF politics (and some years prior to that, California politics as Assembly Speaker) for two terms that many believed were plagued by corruption. Newsom hadn’t been born into money, but he had befriended a young member of the powerful Getty family, and the wealthy SF dynasty essentially became his patron as he moved up in the business world (he was a restaurateur), and then the political world. He was a moderate on the Board of Supervisors, and clashed repeatedly with the dominant progressive faction. Although he seemed to have a sound grasp of policy and a highly reasonable political outlook, economically moderate and socially liberal, I was still a bit skeptical back then about the circumstances of his rise to power and his tight relationship with the Gettys. I was nevertheless greatly relieved when he won a much tighter that expected victory over Green Party candidate Matt Gonzales, the kind of well-meaning San Franciscan of socialist convictions who would have reduced the city to irrelevancy in four years and economic insolvency in eight.

Almost immediately after his inauguration, Newsom made an infamous decision that will forever shadow his reputation and that personally made me prouder to have been born in San Francisco and to have grown up in the Bay Area than I have ever been before or will likely ever be again. Responding to Bush Administration attempts to push a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage in advance of the 2004 elections, Newsom decided to begin sanctioning single-sex marriages right on the steps of San Francisco City Hall, a very public flaunting of the national Republican Party and a highly questionable and probably illegal move in regards to the California state constitution. As the Bush Administration forced a confrontation in Congress over the gay marriage amendment, its allies pointed to San Francisco as evidence that altering the Constitution was indeed a step that was justified by a clear and present danger. Meanwhile, in San Francisco itself, thousands of couples, many of whom had been together in marriages in all but name for a decade or more, lined up at City Hall for a simple ceremony that they had hoped for but nevertheless had seemed to be the providence of a distant future. Mayor Newsom presided over many of the ceremonies himself.

There was speculation that Newsom had pursued this policy to outflank his opposition on the left at the outset of his term, and indeed the policy did have this effect. When asked what sort of impact this move was likely to have on his future political ambitions, Newsom demurred; he said he believed that San Francisco views on the issue were the template for national views a decade hence, and that in the long run his initiative would come to be seen as a harbinger of positive developments far beyond the San Francisco Bay Area. At present, it does not appear that Newsom’s prediction will bear out, and I do not think it will be seen as prescient in the time frame of the next decade that currently forms the horizon of Newsom’s political career. Yet given what we now know more clearly about Newsom’s personality and character than we did then, it seems to me more likely that his decision was an impulsive one, compelled by what he sensed was a despicable drift in national politics in early 2004.

That brings me to the reason why I admire Gavin Newsom as a political leader, and why the latest news strikes me as a tragedy on multiple levels. San Francisco and the Bay Area are proud to stand for some of the most attractive and enduring values of the American political tradition: freedom of speech and expression, openness, the desire to help the less fortunate, and above all, tolerance and acceptance of the multitude of differences among individual people. And yet it is also the case that in consistently standing for and espousing these liberal ideals, the people of the San Francisco Bay Area give the appearance of rejecting the values and institutions that form the heart of the conservative tradition in American politics, the tradition that speaks most powerfully to those in much of the rest of the country. The result, of course, is that people in these regions return the favor by denigrating San Francisco and “San Francisco values”. Sometimes, I must add, they have good reason to do so. The recent SF school board decision to terminate the SF JROTC program was pure lunacy, as disgracefully ideological as almost anything the radical right has come up with recently; Newsom, incidentally, vocally expressed outrage, although it seems he was powerless to stop the business from going forward.

As mayor, Newsom has not sold out the San Francisco liberal tradition; far from it, as his actions on same-sex marriage demonstrate. He has also not faltered under pressure from an increasingly reactionary and dogmatic left. What he has tried to do is demonstrate to both San Franciscans and the country as a whole that “San Francisco values” are not inconsistent with America’s most cherished institutions. As the couples who lined up at City Hall for their chance at marriage amply demonstrated, Newsom believes that San Franciscans and their values can at their best reinvigorate key institutions of American life, and that engagement rather than disdainful dismissal is the proper political posture for a San Francisco that wants to remain politically relevant in a nation where the conservative tradition is strong.

I hope to see Newsom carry this idea into a second term as mayor, and beyond to higher office. Yet I now worry that the recent reports of Newsom’s personal failings will not only destroy his promising political career, but will also irrevocably taint by association his public agenda and the beliefs he has espoused.

The (New) Quiet American

2007-01-28T06:27:00.000-08:00

For those of who in days gone by found your winding way to The Quiet American at its old digs (aldenpyle.blogspot.com), welcome the hell back. For those of you who are joining TQA for the very first time, well then, make yourselves at home. Not much to read yet, I admit, but I’m working on that side of things, and you should see the results shortly.

You may be wondering where The Quiet American has been, and why it’s now resurfacing at a new address with a catchy, “What is the Matrix”-type vibe. After all, the last significant issue I blogged on, if memory serves, was the notorious incident in which our Vice President shot a companion in the face while out hunting pheasant in the Texas scrubland. Remember that? Been a long year since then, I suppose (and it has been nearly a year, now that I think of it). Recap? Not the time or the place, as here at TQA we hold fast to the Faulknerian axiom that “the past isn’t dead; it isn’t even past,” even as we fix an unfettered gaze on the future. So anno domini 2006 was a pretty interesting one for me personally and of course by any rational calculation a calamitous one for our nation. Returning TQA readers will know well to expect me to focus more on the latter, and withhold on the former; my intent has always been for TQA to be a news blog with personal asides, and not the other way around.

So what’s on The Quiet American’s agenda? Expect to see commentary on the Hong Kong political situation, at least until mid-year, when I take my final bows and exit stage left (as Hanna-Barbara mainstay Snagglepuss used to say), to God knows where. By the same token, expect to see TQA taking on the “rise of China” meta-story and other news emanating from the Far East. The truth, however, is that I’m far more a political generalist than I am a regionalist, so expect to hear quite a bit about the biggest international stories as they are shaping up for 2007: endgame in Iraq, our impending confrontation with Iran, and America on the military, economic, and ideological defensive across the globe. There will be heroes and villains aplenty, and a whole lot of people just trying to get by. Finally, you know it wouldn’t be The Quiet American without a look back across the Pacific to the strange, rich pageant of American politics, where we find the 2008 presidential race already off to a hot start in the final, obsolescent years of the Bush era.

You can bet I’m excited to get started again. The Quiet American welcomes your comments and feedback (okay, so I’m practically begging for it), so leave a note and let me know what’s on your mind.

Consider all of the above the bottle of champagne broken on the bow of The Quiet American as it sets sail once more for points largely unknown. Godspeed, then. Now let’s get down to business…

-Mark-