The Missing Element in Islamic Society

Bret Stephens argues that the war of the Islamists against the West has been overtaken, to some degree, by the war of Muslim against Muslim. In particular, the turn of the Sunni tribes in Anbar province, Iraq, was due to the campaign of al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia against tribal authorities and traditions. Stephens identifies three "significant blocs" in Muslim societies: "A 'pre-modern' element, consisting mainly of tribesmen, peasants, and the like; a 'modern' element, typically urban, educated, and, by the standards of their societies, middle-class; and an 'anti-modern' element, consisting mostly of Islamists but also of members of the Baath party and other fascistic groups."

This tripartite analysis is quite interesting, and, with one exception, useful in an analysis of the rifts within Islam today. The exception is that, in my opinion, Stephens has misplaced the Baathists and "other fascistic groups" in the anti-modern category. Fascism, like communism, is a relatively modern ideological creation, and one which depends upon a modern industrial society to flourish. The Baathists are modern types - murderous and authoritarian moderns, certainly, but moderns nevertheless.

I would ask the reader to compare this article to the analysis of British and American religious (and political) positions by Walter Russell Mead, in his fine book God and Gold: Britain, America, and the Making of the Modern World. Mead contends that the forces of scriptura sola (embodied by the Protestant and evangelical movements), tradition (both folkways and the Christian traditions embodied in the Catholic Church), and reason (Enlightenment modernism) balance one another, so that society doesn't fall of a precipice of monism. That short description does not do justice to Mead's book, which is well worth reading, but it does set up a nice comparison with Bret Stephens's article.

The Muslim world can indeed be divided into three groups, and those three correspond to Mead's three forces:

• The "pre-moderns" are representative of tradition
• The "anti-moderns" are equivalent to the scripturalists (with the Quran replacing the Bible as the relevant scripture)
• The "moderns" are more involved with what we understand as reason.

The problem in the Muslim world is that only two of the three sides have any substantial political force. The moderns, far from being the strong force so often decried from American pulpits, are weak, few in number, and too much identified with foreign influences. And that sets up a nice dilemma: It would be good for America and the West to have the forces of modernity and reason strengthened throughout Islam, but any visible attempt to strengthen them will rather weaken them, by validating the accusations that they are foreign ideas which must be rejected.

The Economist's "Pick of the Pile" - 7

Here is the seventh and last section of The Economist’s best of 2008.

Fiction and memoirs

Sea of Poppies: A Novel. By Amitav Ghosh. Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 528 pages; $26. John Murray; ₤18.99.

Breath: A Novel. By Tim Winton. Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 224 pages; $23. Picador; ₤14.99.

Lush Life. By Richard Price. Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 464 pages; $26. Bloomsbury; ₤12.99.

The Secret Scripture. By Sebastian Barry. Viking; 304 pages; $24.95. Faber & Faber; ₤16.99.

Fishing in Utopia: Sweden and the Future That Disappeared. By Andrew Brown. Granta Bookes; 352 pages; ₤16.99.

The Ayatollah Begs to Differ: The Paradox of Modern Iran. By Hooman Majd. Doubleday; 288 pages; $24.95.

Palestinian Walks: Forays into a Vanishing Landscape. By Raja Shehadeh. Scribner; 200 pages; $15. Profile Books; $7.99.

The Three of Us: A Family Story. By Julia Blackburn. Pantheon; 313 pages; $26. Jonathan Cape; ₤16.99.

Are the Brits Wishy-Washy on Terrorism?

The author of the attached article starts off by saying that the British are being wishy-washy in the war on terror. First they're tough on Muslim extremists, then they go all soft and fuzzy.

But the facts, even as laid out in his own article, don't support that thesis. First, the British tried some Muslim extremists and decided to kick them out of the country. Then the European Court of Human Rights accepts and appeal from the Muslims. So, the first thing to say is that the British don't control the European Court of Human Rights, which isn't even in Britain, and it isn't a sign of British weakness that the defendants appealed their sentence to a higher court. After all, is the State of Texas any less bloodthirsty because of its death row prisoners pursue appeals through the Federal courts?

The second thing to say is that there is process and there is outcome. One of the problems with the Bush/Cheney attitude toward terrorism was that they didn't trust any process they could not control. Since you can't have a fair trial and guarantee the outcome, the past administration decided to do without trials. That isn't a sign of strength; it's a sign of unreasoning fear of legal process.

The author of this article seems to have confused British compliance with sort of due process that has made Britain worth fighting for, with some sort of weak-kneed pandering to the extremists.

A Phony War on the Economic Crisis?

On March 12 of this year, a friend sent me (and some other friends) an article by one David Ignatius:

A 'Phony War' On the Crisis
By David Ignatius
Thursday, March 12, 2009; A19
For all the legislative commotion surrounding the economic crisis, we are still living in the equivalent of "the phony war" of 1939 and 1940. War has been declared on the Great Recession, but it's basically politics as usual. The bickering and mismanagement that helped create the crisis are continuing, even though we elected a president who promised a new start.

History tells us that phony war doesn't last forever and that when it ends, all hell breaks loose.

First, don't even ask me why it has taken me almost a month to respond to this entry in the "panic-now-and-avoid-the-rush" sweepstakes. I've had other things on my mind.

Before we get to the propriety of Mr. Ignatius's reasoning by analogy from the phony war of 1939-40 to today's recession, I have to note that even as regards wars, history doesn't teach us anything like the lesson Mr. Ignatius claims that it does. I can think of two instances in which there was a longish pause between the declarations of war and the onset of hostilities, both of which were at least partly due to timing. One is the "sitzkrieg" alluded to by Mr. Ignatius, and the other is the period from the election of Lincoln until the firing on Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor. In both cases, part of the hesitation was due to winter weather. In the case of the Civil War, the South was not prepared to initiate hostilities until Lincoln actually took office (March 4, 1861).

On the other hand, there was the Potato War of 1777-1778, the War of Jenkins's Ear, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and any number of other instances in which the war looked like getting off to a good start, and then it just petered out. The War of the American Revolution, for example, had several periods of less than active hostilities, alternating with periods of frequent battles. The difference was usually marked by an attempt by the British to go somewhere in the colonies by an overland route.

Now, as to the analogy with the economy, Mr. Ignatius seems to be concerned about the deficit. Why, we'll spend our way into the poorhouse! The Chinese own half the country now, and the Arabs own most of the rest! The next thing you know, the financial structure will collapse and we'll all be doomed!

Walter Russell Mead, in his excellent work God and Gold: Britain, America, and the Making of the Modern World, points out that as soon as the British made their national debt a permanent part of the financial landscape, there were those who were sure this would be the ruin of the nation. Mr. Mead quotes Thomas Babington Macaulay as follows: "At every stage in the growth of that debt the nation has set up the same cry of anguish and despair. At every state in the growth of that debt it has been seriously asserted by wise men that bankruptcy and ruin were at hand. Yet still the debt went on growing; and still bankruptcy and ruin were as remote as ever."

Mead also points out that the British national debt was large by today's standards. "At the end of the American Revolution, the British national debt stood at 222 percent of BDP; at its peak in 1822 it was at 268 percent of BDP.

Actually, the national debt was a great source of strength, and the bigger it grew, the more closely it tied the nation to its government. As Mead points out, Alexander Hamilton did very well indeed to imitate the model of British finance when he nationalized the debt and set up the First Bank of the United States.

Before we decide to follow Mr. Ignatius over the cliff of despair at the lack of businessmen in the Obama administration, let us note that businessmen are the one who create crises and recessions. From time to time they have to be rescued from the consequences of their optimism.

Reviews and Opinions

I am going to share a secret with my readers: I don't have time to read all I wish to read, and then write reviews and commentary on all I read for use on this blog. If I try to read a great many worthwhile books, I can only produce reviews of them at rather long intervals. If, on the other hand, I try to write more commentary on events of the day, articles in the periodical literature, and so on, I won't have time to read enough books to provide subjects for my reviews. So it goes.

I posted a review of The Commission: The Uncensored Story of the 9/11 Investigation a few days ago. I would like for some of you to comment on the review (there are three comments so far, including my response to a reader.) I would like even more for some of you to read the book and then come back here to provide us with your own comments on it. Those of you who have read the 9/11 Commission Report might also tell us how Philip Shenon's account of the investigation and writing sorts with the report itself. (I have not yet read the report.)

I suppose I'd like to see more dialogue and debate here, and I'd like to have less of the feeling that I'm sealing messages into wine flasks and casting them into the sea. Perhaps book reviews are too much of a "closed" medium to attract a lot of comment.

This is the date of William Wordsworth's birth in 1770. Bertrand Russell said of Wordsworth: 'In his youth Wordsworth sympathized with the French Revolution, went to France, wrote good poetry, and had a natural daughter. At this period, he was called a 'bad' man. Then he became 'good,' abandoned his daughter, adopted correct principles, and wrote bad poetry."

Russell often preferred to be clever, rather than kind, and this may have been one of those occasions. I wonder if Russell was asserting that Wordsworth was a good poet (and a more sympathetic character) only when he was bad, and that good art is associated with bad behavior. Perhaps he was only suggesting that there is no correlation between one's morals and one's artistic abilities. It may come as a shock to some of you, but there doesn't seem to be any consistent relationship between one's "goodness" and one's skill at a given art or craft.

This may be because "goodness" is judged by society on the basis of conformity to standards of outward behavior, while artistic talent is judged by one's work product's conformity to standards of beauty.

I have been reading the book of Mark in the New Testament. My current reading plan has me reading a couple of chapters every day for a week, before going on to the next selection. In Chapter 7, Jesus rebukes the Pharisees for preferring their traditions to God's laws. He goes on to say that it is not what goes into a man that makes him unclean, but what comes out of him, as lust, immorality, and so on. There may be less to this than meets the eye. Whether one is condemning a violation of the dietary law or judging the goodness of a person's heart, what one has to go by is the person's behavior. Perhaps eating pork does not make one unclean, but would a good person eat pork, knowing that such an act would be offensive to the community?

On this date in 1775, Samuel Johnson declared, "Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel." I'm not so sure. In this day and age, a lot of scoundrels have chosen religion as their last refuge. Moreover, while a scoundrel may use patriotism as a refuge, many good people may perform patriotic acts of sacrifice. Does a scoundrel's use of patriotic cover may all patriotism suspect?

By the way, the Current Reading sidebar of the blog provides you with the titles of the books I am now reading. If you run out and find copies of them now, you could finish reading them by the time I come out with my review.

Lone Survivor -- A Review

Lone Survivor: The Eyewitness Account of Operation Redwing and the Lost Heroes of SEAL Team 10
by Marcus Luttrell, with Patrick Robinson
Little Brown & Co, 2007

Most of the books about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan we see reviewed here are either analyses of the policies that led to the wars or critiques of their execution. We tend to overlook a stark reality: The wars are being fought by individual soldiers who actually can get injured or killed in the process. Though they tend not to write books about their wars, when they do, we probably should read them. Indeed, in a very real way, they have earned our attention. One such warrior/writer is Marcus Luttrell.

Because I'm going to say some uncomplimentary things about this book and its author, I want to make something clear: Marcus Luttrell shed his blood attempting to carry out the missions his commanders gave him, and I admire him for that and appreciate his sacrifices very much. He's done things I know for a fact I couldn't do. This book is his account of Operation Redwing, which resulted in the deaths of his three SEAL teammates and of sixteen would-be rescuers in the mountains of Kunar Province, Afghanistan, in June, 2005.

It is a story that deserves to be told, but unfortunately, this book is very nearly unreadable.

First, the actual account of Operation Redwing comprises only about a third of the text. The rest is endlessly repetitive macho boasting. Luttrell is a rip-roaring, six-gun shooting, God-fearing Texan, as we hear over and over and over and over. The SEALs are the roughest, toughest, baddest dudes walking the earth, as we hear over and over and over and over. Do you remember those loud-mouth, over-bearing jocks you went to high school with? Luttrell is one of them.

Second, Luttrell's dramatic you-are-there account of his unit's heroic fight to the death against overwhelming odds is badly—and sadly—marred by his complete failure to comprehend why it happened the way it did. Three interacting factors led to the deaths of Operation Redwing's casualties: bad planning and intelligence, bad luck, and arrogance. Luttrell's four-person SEAL team was plunked down on a barren mountainside that offered little cover and, most importantly, no easy way to escape if anything went wrong. They were there to watch for and, if possible, capture or kill a Taliban leader believed to be in the area. Unbeknownst to the mission’s planners, he was there with hundreds of his fighters. While the SEALs were crouched on the mountainside watching, three goat-herders and several dozen bleating goats almost literally stepped right on them.

The mission was doomed at that point. The SEALs could have killed or detained the goat-herders, but their disappearance and the goats milling around on the hillside would have aroused the suspicions of the villagers. The SEALs chose to let them go, but then, for some unfathomable reason, they didn't immediately abort the mission and depart the area. A short while later, they were attacked by about a hundred Taliban fighters and cut to pieces. Luttrell was the only survivor, mostly because a grenade blew him into a ravine where the Taliban couldn't find him, and he eventually was rescued by some villagers who decided to protect him, even though they put their lives at great risk doing so. Later, a rescue helicopter searching the area at low altitude and slow speed was shot down by the Taliban with a rocket-propelled grenade, killing all sixteen aboard.

Luttrell believes that everyone died not due to bad planning and bad luck, but as a direct result of liberal politicians and media in the US, who won't let the military kill anyone they want. Luttrell preposterously claims that while his team was being shot at, they discussed whether the liberals would prosecute them for murder if they shot back. Of course, there's not a chance that really happened. Nor is there the slightest possibility that the hero of the book, Lt. Michael Murphy, who was awarded a posthumous Medal of Honor for his actions that day, took a vote about whether to release the goat-herders, and fear of liberals caused the SEALs to let them go.

Luttrell directly states that no civilians should have the right to even know what the military is doing, let alone the right to control it. Even worse, he is aggressively and arrogantly ignorant about the places he's sent to, the events that have transpired there, and the people who live there. He asserts that everyone who hates America in the region—Saddam, the Sunni insurgents and Shiite militias in Iraq, the Taliban, al Qaeda, the Iranians, and everyone else—are all in a carefully orchestrated conspiracy to destroy us. Further, there actually are weapons of mass destruction hidden in Iraq, but—you guessed it—the liberals won't let the military go after them. This kind of claptrap goes on for many, many pages.

Finally, the book is riddled with factual errors, some the result of Luttrell's braggadocio, but others more serious. For example, he tells us that his father was a Texan born and bred, but a few pages later, he was actually born in Oklahoma, then a few pages later, he's a native-born Arkansas woodsman. No big deal, really, but we also learn that the Pakistani border is in Afghanistan's northwest, that the C-130 that Luttrell flies in is built by Boeing, not Lockheed, that the Taliban are the Mujahedeen who fought the Russians, and so on. There are many, many such errors, and one wonders why a respectable publisher like Little, Brown apparently didn't do any fact-checking.

At its best, this book is the story of a man who is willing to go to one of the most dangerous spots on earth, knowing that there is a very real possibility he may die there, simply because he believes to the core of his being that he must do his duty. At its worst, this book seems to be nothing more than the story of a loudmouthed Rambo wannabe.

So, while I admire Luttrell for his sacrifices, the book he and his co-writer produced is so badly flawed as to be nearly unreadable. And that is a great shame.

The Commission – A Review

Shenon, Philip. The Commission: The Uncensored Story of the 9/11 Investigation. New York, Boston: Twelve, 2008.457 pages. Acknowledgments. Notes. Bibliography. Index.

First, a note on the business of selling books through the encouragement of conspiratorial thinking. The subtitle of Philip Shenon’s The Commission might give the reader the impression that any other accounts of the 9/11 Commission’s activities have been censored. As far as I know, this is not true. In his bibliography, Mr. Shenon lists only one book which would fall into that category: Without Precedent: The Inside Story of the 9/11 Commission, by Thomas Kean and Lee Hamilton (with Benjamin Rhodes). Although Governor Kean and Chairman Hamilton may have selected their material somewhat differently than Mr. Shenon has done, I doubt that they would characterize their book as the censored story of the 9/11 investigation.

That aside, The Commission appears to have had the intention of showing that the findings of the 9/11 Commission were flawed or in some way misleading because of the relationship of the commission’s executive director, Philip D. Zelikow, with people inside the Bush administration, and his particular friendship with Condoleeza Rice, President Bush’s national security advisor. If that was Mr. Shenon’s intention, he has failed of its accomplishment.

Professor Zelikow did have a friendship of long standing with Condoleeza Rice, and when Professor Rice moved to the State Department in President Bush’s second term, she appointed Zelikow the Counselor of the Department. Zelikow apparently had something to do with the demotion and sidelining of Richard Clarke, the chief voice for anti-terrorist analysis and action in the National Security Council staff. According to evidence provided by Mr. Shenon, Zelikow did attempt to make it appear that President Bush and his staff were more attentive to al-Qaeda, and to terrorist threats in general, than was actually the case. In other words, Mr. Shenon makes a good showing that Professor Zelikow made some effort to slant the commission’s report in a direction favorable to the Bush White House.

Mr. Shenon also makes clear any such efforts on Professor Zelikow’s part had little or no effect on the final report. This was for several reasons. First, other members of the staff, working with some of the commissioners, were able to nullify Mr. Zelikow’s attempt to spin the testimony of CIA analysts about the President’s Daily Brief (PDB) of August 6, 2001, entitled “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.” Second, the biggest single area in which the report was probably deficient was its failure to examine the wealth of material in the National Security Agency (NSA) files. This was not due to any fault of Mr. Zelikow, nor do we know if the NSA material would have laid blame on the White House or elsewhere. Time and resources constraints prevented the commission from examining all the material it might have wished to.

Third, the primary reason that the 9/11 Commission’s report does not point fingers at President Bush or Professor Rice is that the chairs of the commission, Governor Kean and former Congressman Hamilton, were determined to avoid blaming individuals or institutions, in favor of recommending future courses of action. Thus, as an analyst cited by Mr. Shenon said in a critique of the report, every negative comment on an institution was balanced by some positive remark, and this was even more true with regard to leading individuals. Mr. Zelikow didn’t need to divert the staff or censor the report to avoid the attribution of blame to Mr. Bush or Ms. Rice; the commissioners took care of that for him.

Why did the 9/11 Commission choose to take such an approach, when the 9/11 families and a great many other people wanted villains to blame? The co-chairs were determined to have a unanimous report, feeling that any lack of unanimity would vitiate the impact of the report. On a panel composed of equal numbers of Democrats and Republicans, some on each side quite partisan, anything more than the mildest criticism of President’s Clinton and Bush, of Democrats or Republicans in Congress, or other partisan figures would have made unanimity unattainable.

Mr. Zelikow’s undoubted talents as an historian and a staff director brought into the report a great deal of material which made clear the failings of various federal agencies and political leaders, even if the report was not always explicit in pointing out individual faults. Moreover, there is general agreement that the 9/11 Commission’s report is perhaps the best-written such document in the history of blue-ribbon commissions.

If Mr. Shenon fails to make the case that Philip Zelikow somehow subverted the commission’s investigation in order to protect the White House, what story does he tell? He tells what is in itself a fascinating story of a group of experts, some academics, some experienced military or civil servants, pulled out of their normal lives and drawn together into an investigation that all of them seem to have felt was the most important enterprise of their lives. Whatever Mr. Zelikow’s faults, the commission staff nonetheless performed brilliantly, putting in months of their time digging through stacks of paper, sorting out truth from lies, and arriving at a coherent account of what may be the most confusing event in American history: the 9/11 attack.

One point that is made early and often is that the people in charge on 9/11, including many of the military and police officials who testified before Congress and various commissions, were often lying. The whole matter of whether the Air Force could have shot down the last of the hijacked planes was based on a timeline which was wrong. Once people had presented false information in sworn testimony, they were often reluctant to have the record corrected. (There was much internal discussion about the advisability of bringing criminal charges against some of these officials.) The “fog of war” was exacerbated by some officers disinclination to tell the truth.

Another point is that the consequences for some individuals and agencies were determined by reasons, as Shenon describes them, that might or might not seem sufficient. The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and its then-new director, Robert Mueller, came out unscathed and with recommendations for increased resources, despite a dismal record of inattention and incompetence. George Tenet at the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), on the other hand, while cooperative and helpful to the commission, convinced the commissioners that he was lying, and led them to recommend that the CIA be weakened, and the Director be replaced in his interagency functions by a new Director of National Intelligence. As I read some of the material on Tenet, I felt a certain amount of sympathy for the man. He was obviously in over his head, promoted far beyond his level of competence, to the point that the commissioners found it impossible to believe that a man in such a position could have such a poor grasp of the facts. What may have been merely a poor memory came across as willful obfuscation.

I think Shenon’s book is worthwhile reading for a number of reasons. It does provide a good look inside the workings of an investigation into grave and important matters, and shows how difficult it can be for such an investigation to get it right. It reinforced my confidence in the 9/11 Commission’s findings, if not in all of their recommendations. And it made very clear that Richard Clarke and others were correct in their opinion that President Bush paid little or no attention to terrorism or terrorist threats prior to 9/11, and that his National Security Advisor did nothing to bring these matters to his attention.
I think a reader would do very well to compare and contrast Condoleeza Rice’s performance as National Security Advisor, as revealed in The Commission, with that of her successor, Stephen Hadley, as portrayed by Bob Woodward in The War Within. Rice conceived her role as telling the bureaucracy what the President wanted them to do, not telling the President what the bureaucracy thought he needed to know. Hadley took the initiative to lead the President to see that a change of strategy in Iraq was necessary, and to agree that such a change could be accomplished. Neither of these people was a second Henry Kissinger, or even a second Brent Scowcroft, but Hadley came far closer to the kind of advisor the President needs, if not the kind the President always wants.