The Republic of Dissent

Islamism and Irony

TF Lane argues that Islamists are 'ironists':

Irony tends to be used in one of two ways: as an ideology or a tool. Used as a tool, it is possessive of a deeply affirmative power: that individual refusal to be coerced or to submit to tyranny – what WH Auden calls the “Ironic points of light / [that] Flash out wherever the Just / Exchange their messages”.
Islamists believe this is the way they employ irony. The car bombs and beheadings, the audiotapes and jihadist websites, the curers who kill and the vocal opponents of free speech – all of them are “points of light”. Each is a message from the Just, piercing the obscure lies of liberalism.(...)
Many secular commentators talk of Islamism as a radical ideology. But jihadists believe there is nothing idea-listic about it: to them, there is a moral map beneath their feet as ordered and patterned as a well-spun rug. It is a code written down more than a thousand years ago, the unchangeable words of God, and a glimpse into a higher realm. What we engage with as reality, they view as an elaborate fiction.

The only question that I have is whether the use of irony here isn't common to all religious fundamentalist groups, which want to merge the religious with the political and needs enemies in this militant conquest. Are Islamists a particular breed of fundamentalists? I don't think that they are, but I could be wrong.

Terrorism and wimpish politics

I agree with Sean Collins on this:

But this ‘Republicans strong, Democrats weak’ discussion obscures a more fundamental consensus between the two parties. Both establish anti-terror polices on the premise that the country is vulnerable and at risk. And both therefore overplay the threat posed by possible terror attacks.
The common assumption is that the American people are afraid, worried about the next explosion, and therefore in need of heavy state protection. And since, therefore, all it takes to traumatise the masses is an isolated bomb, it is taken as a given that any party in office at the time of an attack would be severely damaged in political terms. In this, both parties have agreed to allow the terrorists to define success, and have collaborated in reorganising US life around tiny groups.
When American politicians talk about getting ‘tough’ on terrorism, about pursuing a ‘war’ on it, they are actually using code-words for saying ‘we are scared shitless’. And in that respect, both parties are wimps; in fact, if anything, the noisier Republicans are the biggest wimps of all.

The frightening thing is that the question is never asked whether tough talk on terrorism followed by bad policies is effective because it is assumed that it is better to talk tough and to fail rather than to talk softly and to success. In short, tough talk sells because it is flashy and wimpish politics is prevalent because the worst fear of an American politician is our age is to perceived as girly and therefore unwilling and unable to protect Americans.

'Muslim' hearts and minds

Flashy,  but problematic assertions from Roger Hardy

Much of the talk about winning Muslim "hearts and minds" is shallow and misguided. The issue is often seen, especially in the United States, as a matter of public relations – as if America has an image problem in the Muslim world, and dollars can buy it a better one. Or it is seen, in a facile way, as a matter of bolstering "good Muslims" while clobbering "bad Muslims". Without a surer grasp of Islamism and its discontents, the battle for Muslim hearts and minds will be lost.

What bugs me about Hardy's assertions is that they are full of air and not much else because he tied together awkwardly and dangerously the issue of discontent with the so-called West and its foreign policies and the one of "identity." Talking about Muslim hearts and minds is as dumb as talking about a "western" identity for we know that an American is different than a French and has different sensibilities. The point is that too many people tend to homogenize groups of people when they want to make an ideological and grand point that fits their world-view, but does not reflect the realities. In short, I'm rebelling here against the notion that "Muslims" are so different from other people that policy makers trying to appease tensions and address apprehensions while dispelling misunderstandings should forget about the simple fact that people just hate being stripped of their individuality and being told that they matter less than anybody else because of something that they haven't chosen. It seems to me that by claiming that Islamism is different and misunderstood, Roger Hardy just reinforces the old and dangerous stereotypes that values and reality are relative and that some people are allowed to be barbarian and that the rest of the world should accept it.  What bothers is that Roger Hardy would never make the same point about Christian fundamentalism and that's the problem.

The global war on crime

I agree with this:

America must recognise that not all the terror its suffers from abroad is the work of terrorists. Since the destruction of the twin towers in 2001, the West has been so consumed by terrorism that it has focused insufficiently on criminality. Somalia, Afghanistan, Pakistan’s lawless tribal regions,North Korea, Albania, the Balkans — these and other failed or failing states demand at least as much of our attention. If oil-rich but tottering Nigeria, for instance, were to tumble, the impact on both Africa and the world would be catastrophic.
These are not necessarily terrorist havens, but their actions can have terrifying consequences for the West none the less. It is time the war on terror was matched more rigorously by a global war on crime.

I think that the single-minded focus on terrorism has been to the detriment of the fight against so many crimes, which have also dangerous consequences. The point is that single-mindedness is never an effective way to ensure security and political stability in a world that is too integrated, too complicated, too interdependent for its ills to be solved solely by the 'war on terror.'

Waterboarding Jesus

I'm have to admit that I'm speechless after reading's Garry Wills's post on torture and Jesus:

Our recent torture techniques seem directly linked to the treatment Jesus received. Our prisoners were stripped, subjected to head bangings and face slappings. This was not torture, according to torturologist John Yoo. It may have been painful but it did not inflict permanent damage—except to human dignity. And making prisoners wear women’s underwear on their faces, or smearing them with what they were told was menstrual blood, was breaking down their deepest ideas of worth in their own culture and their own pride. It was a derisive “crowning.”
I do not know what went through the minds of secular or non-Christian torturers. But Christian torturers might have reason to have tortured consciences themselves when or if they remember what Jesus said in the gospel of Matthew (25.31ff). Asked who will enter the Kingdom of Heaven, he says those who comforted him in prison. Asked who will be excluded from the Kingdom of Heaven, he says those who would not comfort him in prison. His listeners ask, “When were you in prison, that we came to you or did not?” He answers: “Whatever you did to any of my brothers, even the lowliest (elackistoi), you did to me.” Christians should face this sobering fact: in their treatment of the lowliest of men, they were torturing Jesus, renewing what the Roman soldiers did to him.

This is why I've always be bothered by the religiosity of American politics and about the fact that too many American politicians and policy makers seem to wonder "what would Jesus do" when facing important dilemmas. The trouble is that it is a stupid question to ask for Jesus, assuming that he existed, wasn't about governing and policy and more importantly it is a petty tentative to place the responsibility for their actions on a force/being in order not face their conscience and to answer tough questions about the consequences of their decisions.

Attacking the lawyers

Debra Burlingame and Thomas Joscelyn have a op-ed in the Wall Street Journal this morning, which I find despicable and demagogic. Sugary excerpt:

In the last several days, the debate has taken a detour about what some have called a "shameful attack" on the "noble attorneys" who have chosen to defend "unpopular people." A national security organization, Keep America Safe (of which Ms. Burlingame is a board member), used the phrase "Al Qaeda 7" in an Internet ad to describe seven unnamed Department of Justice political appointees who previously represented or advocated on behalf of terrorists.
The purpose of the ad was to prod Attorney General Eric Holder to disclose to the public which detainee attorneys he has hired to work on behalf of the American people, and whether they are involved in the policy-making decisions that will affect the nation's safety and security while we are at war. He was asked for this information by several members of the U.S. Senate, and he was stonewalling.
The attorney general has the right to select whomever he chooses to work in his department, and to set policy as he sees fit. He does not, however, have the right to do it in the dark. The policies he advances must face the scrutiny of the American people, his No. 1 client.
The public has a right to know, for instance, that one of Mr. Holder's early political hires in the department's national security division was Jennifer Daskal, a former attorney for Human Rights Watch. Her work there centered on efforts to close Guantanamo Bay, shut down military commissions—which she calls "kangaroo courts"—and set detainees who cannot be tried in civilian courts free. She has written that freeing dangerous terrorists is an "assumption of risk" that we must take in order to cleanse the nation of Guantanamo's moral stain. This suggests that Ms. Daskal, who serves on the Justice Department's Detainee Policy Task Force, is entirely in sync with Mr. Holder and a White House whose chief counterterrorism official (John Brennan) considers a 20% detainee recidivism rate "not that bad."

I find those arguments not only troubling, and ideological, but more importantly unconvincing. They are are made in a vacuum and with the implicit assumption that it is un-american to defend alleged or known terrorists and that there are times when the rule of law should become the rule of men especially if means shutting up or killing the lawyers who dare to question the actions of their government. The central issue of this whole debate isn't about a few lawyers who can easily be scapegoated as defenders of Al Qaeda, but rather whether, even in times of crisis and of great uncertainties, America still believes in its own laws and will view as normal Americans, its citizen, who hold the rule of law as sacred, and who choose to defend that principle above all else when their government isn't, . It's always easy to blame the lawyers when the politics of terrorism have become almost so one-sided and that thus, only radicalism can help score political points.

Missed opportunity for American-led multipolirty

I would like to agree with Nikolas Gvosdev on this:

The attacks of Sept. 11 created a second opportunity. In the wake of the collapse of the Twin Towers and the destruction at the Pentagon, governments around the world were stunned -- the fruits of globalization, which had so advanced the cause of prosperity, could also be utilized by those who would seek to bring down the state. What's more, all governments were vulnerable -- democracies and non-democracies, developed and developing states alike. The shock to supply chains around the world in the attacks' aftermath, when interruptions in air travel and new security procedures impeded the flow of goods and services, made many realize how vulnerable the international system really was. And because the rising and resurgent powers had harnessed their chariots to the horses of global economic growth, they were amenable to finding common ground.
As a result, the anti-terrorist coalition could have become the basis for a new concert of powers. But the give-and-take of the classic concert system, in which a series of quid pro quos set the basis for collective decisions, was a mindset largely alien to both the Bush administration and Congress. With a new concert not in the making, and with the U.S. making clear it would act unilaterally in order to secure its own interests, other states began to find ways not to openly challenge the United States (...)

Hum, I'm reluctant to buy Nikolas Gvosdev's arguments because I'm wondering if power can really be shared when it hasn't be earned based on feel-good principles and charity. I'm starting to believe that the biggest failure for a hegemon is to use power in circumstances when it cannot help it and will therefore weaken it. Moreover, recent developments in international affairs have led me to question the concept of multipolarity. I don't think that the world can't ever be multipolar for it is always the powerful who make the decision not really in unison, but through real political bargaining, which reflects the reality of the day. Thus, the biggest mistake of the Bush administration wasn't really unilateralism, but ideology, incompetence, and a blindness to reality. It was so inflexibly ideological that in too many cases, it never took the steps that were required to win and to achieve its objectives because it as decided that reality didn't matter and was almost never going to get in the way of its ideology.When you are a Hegemon, failed demonstrations of strength will weaken you every time.

The rule of law after torture

I almost agree fully with this:

Even in imagining the best possible outcome–a decision by the president to stop torture, close Guantánamo, get our soldiers out of Iraq, shift the trials of detainees to federal courts–the rule of law will not be restored until those officials who licensed torture are prosecuted. A country that tortures when it has a president who believes he is permitted to torture and then abstains from torture when it has a president who recognizes that torture is unconditionally prohibited continues to be a country living under the rule of men, rather than the rule of law; for it is allowing its moral fate to be determined by the personal beliefs of its rulers.
Righting a wrong is especially difficult if the wrong has been initiated by a president. Any occupant of the White House has tremendous charisma, and therefore a tremendous capacity to miseducate.

I agree that the assertion that when a country, which believes that it is a nation of laws not of men, has broken that principle by legitimating torture for egotistical reasons, the restoration of the rule of law must begin at the top and cannot mean sweeping the recent and disturbing past under the rug. The trouble comes from the fact that the past here hasn't passed and that Obama doesn't want to do what has to be done because he doesn't want to find himself with fewer choices than Bush if another terrorist attack happens on  American soil. My point is that most Americans are more grateful about the fact that 'nothing' followed 9/11 than they are outraged by the fact that the rule of law was superseded by the need to keep America safe by all means necessary and even if it meant sacrificing its values. My guess is that apologies and restoration will come after Obama and his successor when the ones responsible and most of us will be either too old to understand what's going on or dead.

Killing all lawyers

Quote of the morning from Sabin Willett, a lawyer who represented Gitmo detainees: 

(...) as the years went by, the right did learn one thing useful about Guantanamo detainees. The public can’t distinguish one from another. If imprisoned endlessly, the detainees will furnish an endless source of scaremongering — that rich mulch in which votes will grow.
And so Cheney and Grassley beaver away to Keep America Scared. Some Americans will see the rule of law as a threat, and lawyers as the enemy. Small men with loud voices will exploit their fears on cable television. Petty politicians will mine them for votes. It’s been this way since Shakespeare’s famous policymaker Dick the Butcher said, “The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers.’’

Criticizing lawyers

Quote of the day from David Luban:

There is simply no parallel between criticizing lawyers for violating the law and assassinating their characters for representing the "wrong" clients.

Authorizing torture

I agree with David Cole on this:

Responsibility for the illegal brutality inflicted on CIA and Guantánamo detainees cannot be limited to Yoo and Bybee. It extends to all those who approved the tactics—even those so eager later to condemn Yoo’s reasoning. And unless we as citizens demand that these lawyers be held to answer for the wrongs done in our name, responsibility extends to all of us, too. We must continue to insist on accountability—whether in congressional hearings, citizens’ commissions, civil lawsuits, or the marketplace of ideas. The essential lesson must be that torture and cruel treatment are not policy options—even when a lawyer is willing to write an opinion blessing illegality.

It is too easy to put the blame on Lawyers and to ignore the ones who approve the opinions by framing the issue in such a way that they got the advice that they wanted to receive and that gave them so political covers. As much as I dislike John Yoo's lawyering, I recognize that he was the tool of an administration who needed ideological lawyers to justify a serious break with international law in order to avoid having another 9/11 on their watch. After all, the fact that the Obama administration is still unable to break completely with the Yoo-Cheney tactics to fight 'the war on terror', tells us all we need to know about where one should look to ask for some accountability.

The Dutch, Afghanistan, and Srebrenica

Ian Buruma on the reasons for the Dutch retreat from Afghanistan:

Pacifism, however, does not really explain what happened in the Netherlands. The reason the Dutch are wary of carrying on in Afghanistan is not the trauma of World War II, but of a small town in Bosnia called Srebrenica. In the mid-1990’s, the Dutch volunteered to protect Srebrenica from General Ratko Mladic’s Serbian forces. Under United Nations rules, the Dutch, bearing only sidearms, could fight only in self-defense.
Air support, although promised, never came. Dutch hostages were taken and threatened with execution. The world then watched as the hapless Dutch allowed Mladic’s heavily armed Serbs to massacre about 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys.

It seems to me that the key iss5z is also that American presidentskand their administration tend to view wars solely from an American viewpoint or rather through the prism of American politics even when they need Allies to win them. In short, what I'm trying to say for all the assertions that the Obama administration was going to do more listening and going to be more multilateral, it  behaved in Bushlike manner on the Afghan surge without not so much finding a way to address the concern of its allies, but simply acknowledging them.

Troubling American contradictions

I agree with David P. Forsythe on this:

The American penchant for at least the rhetoric of freedom and democracy morphed into the modern human rights movement after World War II under the leadership of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, and Harry Truman. During the Cold War U.S. alignment with brutal authoritarians like Mobutu in Zaire, or the overthrow of even elected governments, as in Chile in 1973, or the supervision of torture in Latin America never destroyed the dream of America as moral beacon. In public we accepted the Geneva Conventions and the UN Convention Against Torture. In the shadows we played the game about as tough as anyone else.
9/11 accentuated this duality, perhaps schizophrenia. George W. Bush said al-Qaeda hated us for who we were, our personal freedoms in thought, including religious thought, and our gender-blind democracy. They hated us because we rejected their deferential and patriarchal theocracy. But in secret we engaged in forced disappearances, torture, cruelties arguably just below that level of abuse, denial of reasonable dues process in places like Guantánamo, Abu Ghraib, Bagram Air Force Base, and military brigs in South Carolina. In defense of our moral greatness we engaged in policies that undercut that greatness. As Winston Churchill paradoxically noted in World War II, truth was so important it had to be defended with a  bodyguard of lies. So for us after 9/11, the rule of law and personal rights were so important they had to be defended by secret detention and torture.

What is troubling me more than anything is that Bushism is winning by default, without any attempt by Obama to offer an alternative that doesn't involve solely giving a speech, changing the facade while performing the same acts. It was because for this reason, because I sense within Obama, a reluctance to be bold when it comes to policy not campaigning that I had couldn't force myself to get behind Obama during the election. I  have always believed that because Obama was thought to embody change, to epitomize it because he was part black,  that he was going to have no incentive, no effective pressure to change America for the better.

Exceptionalism and Solitude

I agree with Glenn Greenwald on this:

The U.S. -- first under the Bush administration and now, increasingly, under Obama -- is more and more alone in its cowardly insistence that special, new tribunals must be invented, or denied entirely, for those whom it wishes to imprison as Terrorists (...) . 

I guess Obama really does believe in American exceptionalism after all. I just have the feeling that clashes are inevitable for how long can a president grandstand about being far superior than his predecessor while imitating him? May be the answer is forever for it is starting to occur to me that Obama might actually be the son of God.

The Afghan Time paradox

Dexter Filkins on Afghanistan, the Obama's surge and the essential question of time:

The trouble with Obama’s deadline is that, in crucial ways, it appears to be at war with itself. If the intent of the president’s message was to convey to the American people that the end was in sight, then it was almost certainly untrue. In all likelihood, the end of America’s involvement in Afghanistan is not in sight. (...)The Afghan version of the surge was announced by Obama last December. And for all the talk of counterinsurgency, the real hope, clearly, is that the fresh infusion of troops will be able to bleed the Taliban enough to force them to consider some sort of political settlement. This is really the heart of the matter. But how likely is it? (...) But there is the time paradox again. With an eighteen-month deadline looming, what incentive does the Taliban have to make a deal? If you read the movement’s regular Internet communiqués, you will see that their morale is not that of an army on the brink of defeat. “With their own hands the Americans made the people of Helmand stand with the holy warriors, and all of them have entered the trenches of resistance to seek vengeance and jihad,” a recent Taliban missive proclaimed. “This will bear no fruit except the enemy’s defeat, Allah willing.” It appears the Taliban wholly expect the Americans to run out of will.

I'm willing to bet my left leg that America will still be in Afghanistan by the time of the 2012 presidential election. Obama will justify this decision by making the argument that although progress has been made, there is still work to be done, which is essential to America's security and national interests. The only reason for an American president to support a military surge is to find reasons not to leave and to make an omelet without breaking any egg by having it both ways: by making the point that you want desperately to leave to have on your corner those who believe that the war is not winnable and by demonstrating strength to those who believe that you don't have the stomach to use military might by saying that you do whatever it takes for a limited period of time.
I'm afraid that the Afghan Time paradox leads inevitably to a dead end because in wars, it is impossible to have it both ways and to please everybody.

Ridicule doesn't kill, but...

Kadhafi is taking himself for Ben Laden again surely because he misses the days when he was the  enemy number one of the US and of the West:

The masses of Muslims must go to all airports in the Islamic world and prevent any Swiss plane landing, to all harbours and prevent any Swiss ships docking (...)There is a big difference between terrorism and jihad.

I guess that all one can do here is to regret that Libya has enough oil to make its dictator able to buy anything including respectability and more importantly to have the World forget that he is a dangerous Putz with delusions of grandeur.

Afghanistan and the concept of just war

I agree in part with this, however I believe that it is impossible not only for Afghanistan to remain a just war, but also to be simply a winnable one because the losses will always outnumber the victories:

Every time civilians die in the conflict, the Taleban win a propaganda victory, which they exploit with some skill. General McChrystal’s strategy is to protect the Afghan people, to help to build a functioning Afghan state and to make as many friends as possible in order to isolate the extremists. That is why airstrikes have been drastically cut back — because indiscriminate, uncontrollable strikes on civilians destroy not only the lives of those victims and their families; they destroy the justice of the whole cause.
The cause in Afghanistan is one that we continue to support. But when mistakes are made, it is vital to acknowledge them and to shoulder responsibility for them. In order to defeat our enemies we must be seen to be better than them.

The destruction of Mogadishu and the Somalization of the world

Tristan McConnell on Mogadishu, the capital of Somalia and its permanent state of war away from the camera and thus from the gaze of the world that is destroying what used to be a beautiful city:

The current round of fighting is just the latest in Somalia's decades-old war. Al-Shabaab, an Islamist militia that recently confirmed its allegiance to al-Qaeda, is battling the Transitional Federal Government for control of the country. The TFG gets diplomatic support and money from the UN, soldiers from the African Union and military hardware from the US; take any one of these away and it would collapse like every other administration in the past 19 years. In 1991, the country's last functioning government - itself a venal dictatorship - was defeated by an alliance of clan militias. The warlords then turned on each other, fighting for economic and political control. Somalia has been a maelstrom of violence ever since.
There have been moments of respite. In 2006, the militias were defeated by the Islamic Courts Union - a political group of which al-Shabaab was the armed wing. But within months the union had been chased from power by a US-backed Ethiopian invasion.Now, al-Shabaab is back - stronger and more radical - and holds sway over much of Somalia. Mogadishu is a city of ruins, bearing testimony to the years of destruction. Roads are broken; buildings are shattered, concertinaed to the ground or lacking outer walls, like giant honeycombs.

When reading McConnell's description of the chaos in Mogadishu, I'm reminded of André Glucksmann's prediction that the world is going to be somalized, meaning that we would be seen more cities been destroyed and torn apart without much international concern and especially without any coverage in the media.Unfortunately, I fear that most of those dark holes will happen on the African continent for we know that it is easier to succumb to fatality, resignation and to  the grotesque idea that Africa is cursed  when the inconceivable and the unacceptable is happening within its countries.

The Others

No comment necessary to discuss this "it is US against Them" mindset illustrated by Marty Peretz's comments except a brief one to wonder about its policy implications and its usefulness, well maybe those are just foolish/wimpish considerations:

Why are so many liberal Democrats reluctant to concede that there is an intricate international network of ideological gangsters who recognize each other as ikhwan? These brothers do not define themselves by nation. They define themselves by religion, although there are many hundreds of millions of Muslims who are defined out--and define themselves out--of the bloody fraternity of the faithful. Sometimes, they too are stigmatized as enemies, which means they are also targets. And, of course, there are the boundaries of sect, in which Sunnis commit mass murder of Shi’a at prayer (and vice versa).
Then there are the other designated victims: outsiders … us. Not just Westerners and certainly not just Americans. Or Jews, for that matter, although they have a very special place in the demonology of Islam, and particularly in the armed demonology of Islam. Jihad.

The depth of a trap

I agree with Patrick Cockburn on this:

In Afghanistan incidents like the bombing of civilians in Uruzgan will inevitably be highly publicised, not least because the government of President Hamid Karzai is seeking to burnish its nationalist credentials by protesting volubly against the loss of civilian lives. This is in sharp contrast with Iraq where, at the height of the fighting between 2004 and 2007, the Iraqi government would happily confirm that civilian dead were insurgent fighters.
The fact that these airstrikes took place in Uruzgan, from which the 2,000-strong Dutch contingent is being withdrawn, shows that no Nato power contributing forces can keep itself politically and militarily on the margins of the escalating conflict.

The impossibility to avoid "collateral damage" who are killed in a violent and indecent manner shows that the Afghan war is unwinnable for both the US and its allies. The crux of the problem is that they need to fight the war ruthlessly for a long period while seeking to win the hearts and the minds of the Afghans. The not too far past shows that occupation forces cannot be welcomes in a country where it kills a large number of civilians even if its excuse is that it is fighting a greater evil and that in those cases, excuse my French, shit is bound to happen.

Building sand castles

Quote of the day from Juan Cole on the surge and other recent development in Afghanistan:

Obama's Afghanistan escalation among the sullen Pashtuns is a desperate policy, as dangerous as attempting to build a series of sand castles on the beach at high tide.

Beckism and fascism

This line of reasoning from Sandy Levinson against Glenn Beck troubles me:

We are indeed in a true moment of cultural and political warfare, in which Glenn Beck has made very clear that he has no regard whatsoever for the most basic notions of civility (which begin by granting the possibility that one's opponents simply disagree rather than are "cancers" to be ripped out of the body politic).
What "Beckism" presages is more terrorist violence like that conducted in Austin, Texas, where a demented citizen flew into an IRS building and killed a true American "hero" a/k/a known as a public servant who had dedicated his life to tax collection. One might remember that Justice Holmes called taxes "the price we pay for civilization." Part of our move toward fascism is to view as "heroes" only those who carry guns and are prepared to risk their lives while preparing to inflict fatal violence on others. We must recognize that all public servants are, in their own ways, "heroes." The Republican Party for the past generation has systematically viewed all public servants, save for the military, as chumps, who if they had any real talent, would be working in the private sector (perhaps in Goldman Sachs, etc.). I truly fear for our country.

As despicable as I find Glenn Beck, I don't think he is Mussolini or Hitler. Beckism isn't a prelude to fascism or nazism, but simply a symption that in America, faux populism whether it comes from the right or the left works because it designates scapegoats for the increasing number of people who feel marginalized by the system. What surprises me is that many such as Levinson are voluntary becoming victims of historical amnesia  because they don't know how to fight Beckism. They don't have any answers for people who follow him precisely because they are angry about the fact that America no longer works for them and that he gives them answers that comfort their "conspirationist" world view. An analysis of the recent history of these types of angry popular/populist/fundamentalist movements show that branding them as fascist doesn't work for it doesn't confront the underlying issue which is that increasingly the American political system is seen as not dealing with pertinent issues. What Levinson ought to fear isn't the rise of "Beckist terrorism", but the widening gap between the elected and the electorate that would force people to turn to opportunistic figures such as Beck in order to explode the system. In one sentence, Beckism is just one of the symptoms of a more potent disease, which is ailing America.

The ticking bomb scenario

I'm yet to see someone address the ticking bomb scenario used by too many to justify torture as well as Paul Sagar does here:

The ticking bomb scenario is a fantasy dreamed up by philosophers to test-out our intuitive and/or reasoned responses to a bizarre situation, to tease out exactly where our moral sensibilities lie. It is certainly not supposed to be the basis for legislative policy decisions, for example.
But let’s suppose, for the sake of philosophy, that we are in the (impossible) ticking bomb scenario. Is it wrong to torture our suspect? Yes. Because torture is a morally horrific thing to do to another human being, regardless of the well-intentioned motives that may (but usually don’t) lie behind it.So, should we therefore not torture the suspect? No. Because in this situation torturing one man is the lesser of two evils: letting the bomb go off and hundreds of thousands dying is morally more repugnant and unacceptable than torturing one man. But the point is precisely that this is a situation of choosing the lesser of two evils. Just because in this situation preventing the bomb going off is morally more important than not torturing our suspect, it doesn’t follow that the torture therefore becomes OK. It’s still a terrible thing to do. It is still morally wrong.
That’s a very important point to recognise: even when – under highly idealised, utterly abstracted non-real world conditions – we concede torture may be required, it’s still wrong. And that’s the tragedy of ethical existence: sometimes one simply has to do wrong things. “Here I stand, I can do no other”.

John Woo and others damaged severely (and I hope not irreparably) the moral compass of America and of all the others who believed that they were fighting "evil" by arguing shamelessly that they should apply situational ethics when their security is at risk  Sagar's points show that the goal of ethics is precisely to stop people who are making the argument that they are moral from using particularities either real or imagine to justify the abject.. 

The Ethnicization of terrorism

Thought-provoking point from Paddy Hillyard in his long essay on the difficulty of defining terrorism, which advocates the replacement of terrorism, bu the term "political violence":

By defining many different and disparate politically violent groups together under one label, a relationship is established where none may have existed in the past. The label itself enhances the status of every minor group and encourages the further use of political violence. The enemy, “Al-Qaeda,” has been constituted as “the other,” making it easy to capture under its umbrella a whole range of acts of political violence which have very different motivations and contextual features, but all supposedly coordinated by a man in a cave who gave up using a cell phone years ago. The term “Axis of Evil” has extended the umbrella to include the PLO, Fidel Castro, the Sandinistas and more recently Iran and Yemen. A further discursive turn occurred with the use of the adjective Muslim or Islamic in front of the term creating dozens of suspect nations, thousands of suspect communities and millions of suspect individuals.
There is nothing in new appending an ethnic or racial description to terrorism. During the troubles in Northern Ireland journalists and some academics used the term “Irish terrorism.” The detention process for many started with a form stamped with the words “Irish Suspect” — a term sufficiently ambiguous as to which is the noun in the phrase — that a police officer could either consider the individual in racist terms or the whole of the Irish race. At UK airports and ports Irish people were separated out from other passengers for checking with signs that stated “Northern Ireland and Republic of Ireland passengers this way,” further increasing the general public’s suspicion of Irish people. Security experts are now arguing that the same procedures should be introduced at all airports for Muslims.

The issue is that almost everybody stops to be rational when it comes to their safety. Terrorism is a term that is as popular as the use of the word "evil" in America because it is simple and because it appeals to whatever within our human nature that will always want to be safe rather than to be sorry. It just happens that the ethnicization of terrorism is about being safe and will never stop as long as people believe that it works  and  that it is simply based on common sense.

Afghan war strategies

Mick Hume on the Afghanistan war and the total absence of a coherent and permanent military strategy :

From the first, the West’s latest adventure in Afghanistan has been a war without a clear casus belli, launched after 9/11 and sustained without a central strategic purpose – Anti-terrorism? Democracy? Women’s rights? Anti-drugs? – against enemy or enemies uncertain (...). It has long looked like a war fought as an end in itself, the only real aim of which is to reassert the authority of America and its allies and provide them with an ersatz sense of mission. Inevitably, it has done the opposite, exposing the absence of any coherent worldview or clue as to what they are doing in Washington or Whitehall.
Now the self-defeating mission-free military occupation of Afghanistan is reaching new depths of absurdity. First US president Obama announced a fresh ‘surge’ of American forces into the battle-zone – at the same time as floating plans for a withdrawal from 2011. Hence NATO simultaneously appeared to declare war and admit defeat (...). Now NATO has fanfared its largest Afghan offensive since 2001 – a campaign, according to reports, ‘to impose government control on rebel areas before US forces start to withdraw by [President Obama’s] self-imposed 2011 deadline’. So, it’s total war! Until, er, next year, then we’re off. In the meantime we have given the rebels fair warning we were coming, and a timetable to go away and think about….
Who needs the Taliban anyway when the West is evidently so capable of outwitting and defeating itself? We are left, not for the first time, facing the worst of all worlds – an occupation without purpose, a dangerous military offensive without goals, a war without causes but plenty of casualties.

The problem with the Afghan war for the US and NATO has always been that its only goal can only be nation building and that it is next to impossible to build a state as occupying powers in a country that has a history of resisting to the death occupation. i don't even think that Obama believes that in twenty years, there will be an Afghan that will be an ally of the United States where there will no longer terrorist threats. On the contrary, he is focused on the short-term and what the "defeatism" and weak image that he would give to Americans if he chooses to withdraw from two wars (Iraq included) by declaring that they are unwinnable, even though experience on the ground shows that they are more than likely or that decades of American blood and treasure to fight to even entertain of the possibility of victory, which seems to be a hollow term in this context.

The disappointment des imbéciles heureux

Reading Johann Hari express his disappointment at Obama’s foreign policy choices reminds me of the tourists who go to every market in Morocco or elsewhere to buy all the old lamps expecting one of them to be magical and who, later on, explain that they were duped when none are :

The revelations this week about how the CIA and British authorities handed over a suspected jihadi to torturers in Pakistan may sound at first glance like a hangover from the Bush years. Barack Obama was elected, in part, to drag us out of this trap – but in practice he is dragging us further in. He is escalating the war in Afghanistan, and has taken the war to another Muslim country. The CIA and hired mercenaries are now operating on Obama's orders inside Pakistan, where they are sending unarmed drones to drop bombs and sending secret agents to snatch suspects.

Colonial arrogance

It is because of statements such this one that I have never been able to know quite what to make of Wole Soyinka (I have always thought that his writings were too restricted and restrictive, but that doesn't mean that he isn't a good writer):

England is a cesspit. England is the breeding ground of fundamentalist Muslims. Its social logic is to allow all religions to preach openly. But this is illogic, because none of the other religions preach apocalyptic violence. And yet England allows it. Remember, that country was the breeding ground for communism, too. Karl Marx did all his work in libraries there.(...) Colonialism bred an innate arrogance, but when you undertake that sort of imperial adventure, that arrogance gives way to a feeling of accommodativeness. You take pride in your openness.

Why do I have the unsavory feeling that too many greater of certain epoch are incapable to accept that Africa got decolonized over 40 years ago because they cannot let go of a world were there has to be the colonizers responsible for all the ills of the world and the colonized, eternal victims of history?

Lies in political democracies

Interesting "stuff" from William Rees-Mogg:

We have been told by Sir John Chilcot himself that the Chilcot inquiry is not a trial, and that nobody will be either acquitted or found guilty; we all know that is not true. A public judgment is being made as each section of evidence is given. In particular a quiet judgment has been made of Tony Blair’s conduct. It may never lead to his being tried in any court, but there is nevertheless a public verdict of his responsibility for the British action in Iraq.
It was Mr Blair who was responsible; his evidence shows it. He was the Prime Minister who had won two landslide elections. He could cajole, coax, threaten, anger and flatter to get his own way, a war leader who was the nearest thing to a parliamentary dictator since the wartime Winston Churchill.

These assertions raise the essential point of accountability in a democracy. The electorate by electing/choosing its leaders should bear a lot of the blame for their mistake in judgment. It is too easy not to say what was not heard them or what didn't convince enough politics and media analysts to force a change of actions. The argument isn't that illegalities are justifiable in a democracy because political leaders get elected, but to make the point emphatically that when an act falls in that dangerous and frustrating gray zone, the people must turn the guillotine away from the elected and question their own judgment and the way their elective process and system of government work in those situation. I have the strong suspicion that in both Britain and America, the problem was that there stopped to be any counter powers when it was pompously declared that we were in the age of terror. At that moment, fear ruled and the populace and the elites who wanted to be protected at all costs stopped  caring about the morality of the means to achieve what was considered to be the most just of end: their survival.

Thus although it must feel good to hit on Blair, it is more instructive to realize and accept that there is a Blair inside of most of us, that is someone who becomes blinded by the necessity to fight just wars everywhere when they are potential dangers to avoid domestic catastrophes.

The gift of torture

Sugary excerpt of the week from Amitava Kumar, whom I'm liking more everyday:

Each one of us has received an education in the art of torture in recent years. That’s America’s gift to us, through this war on terror, that we’ve learned words like “waterboarding”. We have also learned that torture isn’t only about force: men lose their minds, not when beaten to within an inch of their lives, but when they are placed in solitary confinement with black-out goggles and noise-blocking headphones wrapped around their heads. We have learned that if terror by non-state actors relies on brutal killing of innocents, then state terror proceeds by making torture justifiable and routine.

The media and Haiti

I agree with Colin Murphy on this:

There were other anomalies and inadequacies in the reporting from Haiti. The US military was prominent in news reports: footage of heavily armed soldiers distributing bottles of water, of airdrops of food, and of US helicopters landing in front of the ruined presidential palace, was widely used to accompany reports on the humanitarian response. These efforts may have been laudable, but they paled in comparison to those of the United Nations and charities on the ground in Haiti. The UN’s World Food Programme said it had distributed three million meals to 200,000 people by late this week, and estimated that a further 100,000 people had been fed by charities. There were plans to scale this up to reach two million people, with four key distribution sites identified. By contrast, the US Southern Command reportedly made two air drops during the week of some 17,000 meals each.
Of course, some of the most prominent stories in the days since the quake have been good news stories: those remarkable images of people being pulled alive from the rubble by international search and rescue teams. Dozens of teams from all around the world helped rescue over 120 people. Yet even this creates a misleading impression. As anyone who has worked in a crisis zone knows (I spent two years in Angola, working on emergency relief programmes), the most important “rapid response” always comes from the people themselves. Early footage after the quake showed ordinary Haitians desperately sifting through rubble, searching for, and no doubt rescuing, family and neighbours – their successes, though, remained uncounted and largely unreported.The media is a vital part of the response to any crisis such as this, and there has been much outstanding reporting coming out of Haiti; Twitter, meanwhile, has proved valuable for getting some sense of the voice of ordinary Haitians. But too often, reporters and their editors have led with glib headlines and poorly sourced information. The courage of those on the ground deserves more.

The end of American exceptionalism

I would like to be able to disagree vehemently with Nick Cohen on this, but I cannot because experience has shown me that he is, alas, in part right when he makes the following point although it takes him to another direction than I because I don't make the mistake of confusing a symptom with the disease:

Pride in American exceptionalism ran through Obama's Nobel peace prize acceptance speech. "In many countries, there is a deep ambivalence about military action today," he told his doubtless deeply ambivalent Norwegian audience. "At times, this is joined by a reflexive suspicion of America." He would take no notice of it. "Make no mistake: evil does exist in the world. A non-violent movement could not have halted Hitler's armies. Negotiations cannot convince al-Qaida's leaders to lay down their arms." Obama drew a map of a pacifist Europe, unwilling to face reality, and a tough-minded but idealist America ready to defend civilisation with "the blood of our citizens and the strength of our arms".
Nowhere has American satisfaction with its uniqueness been more noticeable than in the applause it awards itself for its treatment of immigrants. Articles contrasting the success of the US in integrating Muslims against the failures of Britain have been a regular feature of the American press. Liberals emphasised that immigrants who wanted to leave their old identities behind were helped by a constitution and bill of rights that accepted them as equal citizens.
Conservatives claimed that immigrants could not sit resentfully at home living on welfare payments and developing sectarian grievances, as they could in corrupt Europe, but had to find jobs that inevitably brought them into contact with Americans from other cultures.
(...) Depressingly, Americans seem to be as bad as the British are at recognising the differences between Islam and Islamism. They can no longer, however, get away with pretending that Islamism is an un-American disease. Trying to explain the rise of religious hatreds and identity politics, Obama said in Oslo that "given the dizzying pace of globalisation, and the cultural levelling of modernity, it should come as no surprise that people fear the loss of what they cherish about their particular identities", which was true enough in a platitudinous way.
I wonder if he yet understands that Americans are not exempt from the manias of our time and that his formerly special country is not looking so exceptional any more.

Insight

Valuable insight from Juan Cole on Obama, his latest great speech and his possible futures:

Obama implied that peaceful conflict resolution is preferable, but that challenges do arise that require a military resolution. But he has unwittingly stacked the deck in favor if the military-industrial complex by adopting Bushian rhetoric at key junctures--speaking of enemies as 'evil,' militarizing the response to terrorism, and asserting false equivalences that help make war seem inevitable.
Obama has yet to decide whether he is a visionary or a technocrat. The prize committee hoped for the former. In this speech they got the latter.

I'm starting to believe that Bush changed America or that at the very least he comforted its belief in Messianic leaders and its responsibility not to be good, but to fight evil and the evil doers. It may not be possible for Obama to reverse the trend in great part because doing so means taking the risk to become a midget president. Obama will always benefit from the comparison and from the presumptions that being cultured, worldly (in the American sense of the terms), and less abrasive give him. It is bitingly ironic, but not too surprising that the Change president has became the do not rock the boat president, but again can you change profoundly a country who needs Disneyland and who has to believe in evil, almost as much if not more, than it believes in purity and the good?

Revelation

Well, Maya Angelou still has enough guts and lucidity to say provocative things such as this, I guess we have to burn her at the stake now :

The terrorist action of 9/11 gave birth to President Obama's entry to the White House

Speechless

I don't know what to say/feel or even how to react when I read this although I know that something isn't quite right, however I'm still thinking about Mary-Kay Wilmers's words and I have to find more about her (hat tip: Norm Geras) :

I just think we get worked up about the wrong things, and there is more wrong on one side. What Cherie Blair said about being a suicide bomber if she’d been brought up in Gaza, I can absolutely see that point.

War, Afghanistan, and politics

Reluctantly and thus sadly, I agree with this:

Why then is U.S. President Barack Obama hesitating about committing new troops to Afghanistan? Why has Canada apparently decided to leave the struggle while it is still in the balance? Why has Australia not agreed to replace the Dutch in Uruzgan province? The answer is simple: Everyone is playing politics with the war in Afghanistan.
Playing politics with wars is supposed to be a “bad” thing. We expect our political leaders to play politics with employment insurance, or tax concessions for donations to political parties, or how slowly or how quickly infrastructure money is flowing. We expect political parties to use public issues to gain a march over their opponents, as they have since parties first began to appear about 500 years ago.
But we are repelled by the very idea that political parties play politics with war, which, after all, involves killing lots of people and laying waste to vast areas. Surely war is far too serious – and its results far too solemn – to be played for political advantage.
No, it isn't.

It has become painfully clear that it is easier to start a war than to end in great part, alas, because losing a war costs political points because it gives the enduring illusion that seen and unseen enemies will take advantage of the loser's exposed weaknesses. To be clear, I don't think that America, Canada, and all the other nations can impose their seal on Afghanistan no matter how noble and attractively or shadily naïve their motives are.

In need of a sexual revolution

I love the idea that what Islam needs is a sexual revolution as Seyran Ates argues, but still I'm wondering if sexual revolutions have ever had any other results than the reassertion of the privileges of the few to do what they please and the duty of others to romanticize/moralize their sexuality to avoid becoming objects:

I believe that the Islamic world must grapple with the consequences of rigid sexual morals, not unlike the way, as he describes, the Soviet Union dealt with its own circumstances. It must pursue the path of change, just as any totalitarian system must do when it wants to become a democratic society. Part of the process is that sexuality has to be recognized as something that every individual determines for himself or herself. Institutions like moral and religious police must be abolished. People who have sex before marriage cannot be punished or ostracized by society. Parents must be confronted with the question of why they do not allow their 16-year-old daughter to have a boyfriend, while their sons can brag about how many girlfriends they have. Sex education must be taught in the classroom. Parents shouldn't have to do it, but they should accept it when the schools do it. Young and old people who are already living a self-determined sexuality in the Islamic world have to be more confident and make their voices heard.

Losing the moral high ground

I agree with Glenn Greenwald on this:

I'm all in favor of applying disgusting political rhetoric and twisted political arguments to the purveyors of such tactics in order to demonstrate their hypocrisy and/or to neutralize those tactics.  If that's all that were going on here -- if it were made clear that these tactics are unacceptable and dumb but that the Rovians on the Right who have spent the last eight years wielding them should be hoisted on their own petard -- I wouldn't have any objections to it.  But, plainly, that's not all that is going on.  Instead, the DNC and these groups are clearly arguing that it's improper and unpatriotic to object to or even question Obama's award.
( ...)What's particularly bothersome about yesterday's attacks is the premise that it's improper, unpatriotic and even Terrorist-mimicking to do anything but cheer -- have a "national celebration" -- when Obama is awarded the Nobel Prize.  Whether Obama is actually pursuing policies of peace happens to be an extremely legitimate topic of debate.  The same is true for whether he's done anything meaningful yet to merit the award.  (...)  While there are arguments to make in his favor -- I even made some myself yesterday in the first two paragraphs of what I wrote  -- there is something unquestionably bizarre about awarding the Nobel Peace Prize to a leader who did not merely "inherit," but is advocating, actively prosecuting and escalating, a major war that is killing large numbers of civilians with no plans to stop, while at the same time building prisons to house people who will have no due process.
Unquestionably, those are and must be legitimate topics of debate.  Some smart people yesterday made some reasonable arguments for Obama's Prize.  But to insist that it's the patriotic obligation of every American to stand and cheer -- and that those who don't are "casting their lot with the Terrorists" -- is creepy and repugnant.  It's also a very dangerous game to play.

Forgetting 9/11

September 11 happened 8 years ago and it's incredible to realize what has changed and what hasn't. It's sad to admit, but I don't think that the US dealt well with 9/11 because all the attention went to the wrong things and that there was never any deep national reflection because we entered immediately in state of war where the goals were protection, retaliation, security, and punishment. The problem is when actions which have grave and long lasting consequences happened in the absence of  reflection, of opened dialogue, they undermine the cause that they are defending and make it difficult to ask people to sacrifice because a great cause has neither been contextualized nor explained despite savvy political speeches about the divinity of America can't become a personal one for every citizen. All one has to do is to look at the US efforts in Afghanistan and the current dilemmas facing the current administration to realize that few of the people in charge 8 years ago thought about the long term because they were so obsessed with the short-term and the possibility that they were going to be responsible for the end of America.

Standoffish equivocations

Important simple questions: Is there a difference between considering that women don't have the choice to decide whether to have or not to have a child and to decide that they should remain hidden behind their burkas/burqas? Assuming that they (women) do have those choices, how judgmental is society allowed to be? What level of misogyny is acceptable for a society to be civilized? Does invoking the so-called laws of nature and imperfections of the human spirit when it comes to gender, the biases and all the unacceptable stuff that it creates tell us that women are simply objects in the clash of civilizations that too many seem to want to have? Doesn't this fact tell us that the world doesn't really abhor misogyny, it just abhors the possibility that it might lead to something else that will  in turn lead to what it considers to be real obscurantist/terrorist and manly (because physically destructive) acts. Those are some of the questions that came to my mind when reading Nick Cohen's article on Misogyny (hat tip: Mick Hartley). I love it when people talk about the so-called women's rights (why is there always the temptations to separate women from men as if to say that since physical strength justifies better status or more rights), I just wish they would become fanatically consistent to emphasize the fact that patriarchy, to use an expression that feminists love, is never acceptable even if it is less obscurantist and less barbaric and being a little bit better than barbarians on the issue of misogyny is not acceptable especially when the argument is about values, morality, and hypocrisy.

International justice, politics, and money

Rob Lyons on the release of Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi, the sole convicted culprit of the Lockerbie bombing, international justice, and politics :

(...) from a political point of view, the release of al-Megrahi in this way seems the best option. The US and UK governments avoid any awkward revelations at an appeal hearing. The Scottish government gets to assert itself as an independent force in world politics, even though it has no foreign policy authority as such, while appearing to be principled and humane. The Libyan government is presenting the release of al-Megrahi as a diplomatic triumph, as yesterday’s welcome party for him shows.
The driving force behind every episode in this case has been the interests of governments, particularly the major Western powers, not the lives of the people unfortunate enough to get caught up in their machinations. Sadly, justice has got nothing to do with it.

I'm only wondering whether al-Megrahi would have been released if Libya was still viewed as a sponsor of international terrorism and if it wasn't an oil-rich nation. I don't think he would have no matter how sick he was.Unfortunately, the lesson of this case is that la raison d'état always prevails over much everything else especially when economical interests are at stake. It is hard not to be impressed over the way Qadaffi has been able to buy himself a new image.What does it say about our world if it is possible to buy respectability without ever fulling atoning or even acknowledging the mistakes of the past?

Distinctions and differences

Nadeem Aslam on Islam, Al-Qaeda and the West (hat tip: Seher Hussain):

Not everything that is wrong in the Islamic world is the West’s fault. We must understand this. Within all societies there are elements that will get out of hand. It is all coming from Pakistan, and the tribal areas. They have hijacked something very important. They have hijacked people’s core beliefs and they have somehow tried to link their brand of Islam to the true Islam. If you study Osama bin Laden’s speeches sequentially, and also those of al-Zawahiri [former head of Egyptian Islamic Jihad], al-Qaeda is, I think, tormented by the fact that the world, for better or worse, has managed to make a distinction between Islam and them, the Islamists. It is still way short of the ideal, but the world has understood that what al-Qaeda represents is not Islam. They want the West and the world to think that Muslims are all terrorists. But it is not going to happen.

Kids as weapons

 A Taliban commander on the role of children in their holy war:

If you're fighting, then God provides you with the means [to win]. Kids themselves are tools to achieve God's will. And whatever comes your way, you sacrifice it.(...)The kids want to join us because they like our weapons.

Total trust in power

Sugary excerpt of the day:

Even now, defenders of Obama's preventive detention policy (i.e., indefinitely imprisoning people with no charges) insist that this is necessary because those in Guantanamo are "too dangerous to release" and we cannot convict them in a real court.  What's their basis for believing that people who have been convicted of absolutely nothing are nonetheless "too dangerous to release"?  The Government -- our trusted leaders -- claim it's true, so it must be. 

Ze speech

I'm having an awful week. My anemia is back in full force and it is kicking my you know what. Nevertheless, I wanted to write on Obama's speech in Cairo today. My personal opinion is that it will matter not in the immediate future, but in the next decade if it is followed by change (there is that awful word again), by something more substantives than syrupy words and good intentions. Speeches matter in international relations when they are followed by actions and that they announced the beginning of a new era in a country's foreign policies. It is for that reasons that although George W. Bush speeches were criticized for their dullness, arrogance, and their simple-mindedness, they were meaningful. In simpler terms, Ze speech will matter if it is the beginning of something new, the first step in the creation of a new era in American foreign policy (I have my doubts, but hey, I could be). Reza Aslan has a more critical take on the speech, but I think that it is because he bought in the whole messianic mystique that came with Obama's election:

Obama should have chosen Indonesia, the world’s most populous Muslim nation, a moderate, pluralistic, wildly successful democratic country whose citizens just last month overwhelming voted for secular and moderate Muslim parties over the country’s more radical Islamist groups. Instead, by choosing Cairo as the backdrop to his speech, Obama has in effect rewarded Egypt’s president for life, Hosni Mubarak, for his bloody, blatantly anti-democratic, and dictatorial rule.(...) While it is becoming increasing clear that the new administration has abandoned the half-hearted and ultimately hypocritical democracy-promotion program of the previous administration, it is equally clear that the Muslim world has done no such thing. On the contrary, as I have written in these pages before, the overwhelming majority of people in the Middle East (78 percent, according to Gallup International) consider democracy “the best form of government” and continue to clamor for greater political freedoms, especially in countries like Egypt.
What the Muslim people want to hear is what kind of pressure America is willing to place on its dictatorial allies in order to force them to address their people’s aspirations for genuine political, economic, and social development. The truth is that, after four months of Obama in the White House, the Muslim world has had its fill of his platitudes about “mutual respect.” They want to know what actions the Obama administration is willing to take to fundamentally change America’s relationship with the Muslim world. Chiefly, they want to hear about Obama’s specific policy recommendations for dealing with the Israeli-Palestinian issue.

God as Commander in Chief

 Kathy Gilsinan reviews Reza Aslan's How to Win a Cosmic War: God, Globalization, and the End of the War on Terror:

In the author’s view, Christians, Jews, and Muslims have all fought cosmic wars of comparable viciousness throughout history and up to the present. “Lord, give us patience, make us stand firm… God [will be] victorious”—the words are Osama bin Laden’s, but they could have been uttered by almost any wartime American president. And when George W. Bush initiated what came to be known here as the War on Terror, and what came to be known elsewhere as the War on Islam, he announced that America would “rid the world of evil.” Nor did the theological rhetoric end there. In a flourish both apocalyptic and childish, Bush refused to mention Osama bin Laden by name for months after the September 11 attacks, referring to him only as “the Evil One.” All of which is to say that both sides in this “cosmic war” believed themselves to be reporting to God as Commander in Chief.

The perils of unrealistic ambition

The understatement of the day:

All in all, Obama’s goal of closing Guantanamo by the beginning of next year is beginning to look, well, a bit ambitious.

The dangers of mediocrity

Tim Rutten reviews Bruce Bawer's new book on his favorite topic of the West, Immigration, Islam, Dechristianization, De-westernization, and terrorism, Surrender: Appeasing Islam, Sacrificing Freedom:

A mediocre book on an important topic always is disappointing.
When the treatment also is shallow and vulgarly argued -- as is the case with Bruce Bawer's "Surrender: Appeasing Islam, Sacrificing Freedom" -- this reader is inclined to get up with a sour sense of resentment over time wasted, the sort of feeling that comes from being seated next to a garrulous bore at a dinner party.
A literary critic and writer for various neoconservative cultural and political journals, Bawer is also openly homosexual and has written extensively for a number of gay publications. He and his partner have lived in Europe for some time, and since moving there, Bawer has become one of those writers alarmed by what he sees as a cultural fifth column of Islamic immigrants gnawing at Europe's traditions of tolerance and democracy.
There certainly are dangerous, intolerant Islamists among Europe's immigrants, and their allies, he argues (not always inaccurately), are the dogmatic multiculturalists who find cultural equivalency between Magna Carta and sharia. The problem is that Bawer spins glancingly off that interesting, rather important point into descriptions of a vast, interlocking conspiracy of cultural, literary, journalistic and even entertainment elites he believes want to appease fundamentalist Islam and sell out the West's tradition of individual and civil liberties.
Why they're engaged in this betrayal is anybody's guess. That doesn't stop Bawer from enveloping one alleged case in point after another, rather like the rhetorical equivalent of a kudzu vine -- and with about the same logical structure.
Too often Bawer simply gets things wrong, both factually and by degree. For all his academic prominence, the late Edward Said never enjoyed anything close to the influence Bawer imagines for him; the notion that his debated book "Orientalism" changed the way the majority of Western writers and intellectuals perceived Islam simply is preposterous.

The past is alive!

Well so much for letting go of the past :

Mr. Obama sought Thursday to distance himself from the policies of the past — and ended up reliving it.

The greatest political gift

Quote of the day from Daniel Drezner:

Politically, Obama has inherited George W. Bush's greatest political gift -- having adversaries more boneheaded than himself.

Power, civil liberties and intellectual dishonesty

Glenn Greenwald on Obama, War powers and civil liberties:

Even if it's due to perceived political necessity, the more Obama embraces core Bush terrorism policies and assumptions -- we're fighting a "war on terror"; Presidents have the power to indefinitely and "preventatively" imprison people with no charges; we can create new due-process-abridging tribunals when it suits us; the "Battlefield" is everywhere; we should conceal evidence when it will make us look bad -- the more those premises are transformed from right-wing dogma into the prongs of bipartisan consensus, no longer just advocated by Bush followers but by many Obama defenders as well.  The fact that it's all wrapped up in eloquent rhetoric about the rule of law, our Constitution and our "timeless values" -- and the fact that his understanding of those values is more evident than his predecessor's -- only heightens the concern.
So now, we're going to have huge numbers of people who spent the last eight years vehemently opposing such ideas running around arguing that we're waging a War against Terrorism, a "War President" must have the power to indefinitely lock people away who allegedly pose a "threat to Americans" but haven't violated any laws, our normal court system can't be trusted to decide who is guilty, Terrorists don't deserve the same rights as Americans, the primary obligation of the President is to "keep us safe," and -- most of all -- anyone who objects to or disagrees with any of that is a leftist purist ideologue who doesn't really care about national security.  In other words, arguments and rhetoric that were once confined to Fox News/Bush-following precincts will now become mainstream Democratic argumentation in service of defending what Obama is doing.  That's the most harmful part of this -- it trains the other half of the citizenry to now become fervent admirers and defenders of some rather extreme presidential "war powers."

What bothers me is that politics has indeed become about good and evil since it is no longer about actions, but about personality, about who people think the person in charge is or rather how good/evil he is. The recent months have shown at least one thing and it is that Democrats would have had no problem with the Bush policies if they had been enacted by Al Gore or any good Democrats. In a strange way, Bush was right, everything is about good and evil, good guys and bad guys, those in power who are scared out of their mind to have another 9/11 happen on their watch and the public who doesn't want to ask question so that it can be outraged at the excesses committed in their name, for their security later.