Monday, December 21, 2009
Friday, December 4, 2009
Kicking the Can in Afghanistan
“Kick the Can” is a child’s game familiar to kids from large cities. The only equipment required is an old tin can and a few willing children. The skills in play are stealth and speed. Like “Hide & Seek,” all but one of the players hides; and then they are sought by the solitary hunter. A caught player must be escorted to “jail” and remain in the detention until all players are captured or a free player breaks from cover and “kicks the can” before being caught himself.
Few kids win this game often, because, as the number of players increases, the odds that one will prevail against many, decreases. The hunter has two handicaps other than numbers; he doesn’t know the location of the other kids and they get to choose when to race for home. The farther a hunter strays from home base, the more vulnerable he becomes. With “Kick the Can,” all initiative is ceded to the quarry - a kind of fool’s game for solitary hunters.
At the risk of abusing a metaphor, we have now embarked on a national strategy that looks for all the world like such a fool’s game; and, in the process, ignores rules even a child might understand.
The first rule is that one side doesn’t get to make the rules of the game. In Afghanistan, declaring an arbitrary time limit, not only telegraphs your moves, but does nothing save ratchet up the pressure on the home team. If we can set aside for a moment all the campaign nonsense about wars of “choice” and wars of “necessity,” we might consider the blowback from Iraq. Having reversed the sectarian poles in Baghdad, might not the “progress” we see there be a kind of prudent economy of force? The Shiite majority may simply wait for the clock to run out now that we have set a date certain for withdrawal. The King of Jordan warns of a Shiite Crescent to the north of Israel. Is he wrong?
One side doesn’t get to control is the number of players by fiat either. The arbitrary designation of just one leader (Osama bin Laden) and a single terrorist organization (al Qaeda) as the “core” of the problem ignores a much larger threat with a global reach. Islamic fundamentalism is not limited to Afghanistan or Pakistan. Indeed, the ideology and financing on the Sunni side originates in places like Egypt and Saudi Arabia, our erstwhile “allies.” The militant threat on the Shiite side of the threat equation originates with Iran – now a nuclear aspirant. If Iraq was a distraction from the real threat in Afghanistan, how is Afghanistan not a distraction from the real threat in Iran?
The truth about Iraq is that it was a corrupt totalitarian Arab state that was a menace to its corrupt theocratic Arab neighbors. Now Iraq is a corrupt Shiite state that in all likelihood will pursue a sectarian alliance with Iran. The truth about Afghanistan is that it is a tribal, if not feudal, mélange besieged by naïve Western apologists. The truth about Pakistan is that it is a corrupt janissary that might be one bullet away from theocracy. The truth about Iran is that it is already the world’s first and largest Shiite theocracy; a so-called Islamic “republic.” We might add that Tehran makes no secret of its quest for the bomb and makes no secret of how they might use it. The truth of all of this is that the threat is not a specific terrorist or a specific terror group; and surely the threat is not a specific Muslim country or a specific state sponsor.
The malignant bloom of jihad and theocracy within Islam world wide is the true threat. This menace is not simply demographic; it is also political. Theocracy is the goal of Islamists of every stripe; to replace secular law with a religious monoculture. And the final and most worrisome truth is the inability or unwillingness of national security specialists, in general, and President Obama, in particular, to recognize any of this.
Tehran is yet another example in the Muslim constellation where we presume to make the rules of the game; we assume that the Persians can be jawboned or threatened with “sanctions” to relinquish their nuclear ambitions. True pluralism and diversity in the world today might be measured by the numbers of illusions we harbor about those who would make our worst nightmares come true.
Our new strategy announced on 1 December by the President at West Point has two components; moderation and denial. With the moderate approach we are neither “all in” nor “all out” in Afghanistan. We have limited our targets to one leader and one terror organization – and a kind of half-baked “nation building”. In Afghanistan, we aspire to do what the British and Soviets could not. The English used to strap insurgents to the busy ends of cannons and the Soviets used to level villages from the air. Our tactics are different; we plan to conquer Islamist fanatics with kindness - moderate on moderate.
As we try to walk the middle way, play the “moderate” game, we should be mindful of what everyone’s favorite moderate over in Istanbul said recently on the subject. Recep Tayyip Erdogan announced that the adjective “moderate” was an insult to the faith. “Islam is Islam and that’s it;” according to our NATO ally, the Turkish Prime Minister. We must commend Erdogan for his candor and doctrinal consistency. Apparently, being moderately Islamic is a little like being moderately pregnant.
The second component of the West Point proclamation is denial. “Islam is one of the world’s great religions” we are told. We are led to believe that Jihad, Sharia, cultural irredentism, misogyny, and fifty years of terrorism have nothing to do with Muslims in general or Islam in particular. Never mind that prominent Muslims tell us otherwise so frequently that we can not or will not hear what they say. We insist that those who say it do not mean it or those who mean it can’t be taken seriously. Yes, they speak about Islam, but the do not speak for Islam; so goes the mantra. The quest for Sharia and Kalifa is dismissed as the fantasies of a Muslim fringe.
Criticizing the general outlines of the West Point strategy is necessary but not sufficient. The specifics of a modest reinforcement, constrained by an 18 month timeline, also deserve some scrutiny. No markers were set in the West Point plan; but military operations analysts have been looking at such campaigns, including Afghanistan, for decades. Military Operations Research (MOR) is an aggregate of disciplines that attempts to size forces and examine the variables that might lead to victory or stability. These disciplines include; statistics; probability theory, game theory, modeling, and simulation among others.
Three variants of OR have been applied to Afghanistan or similar contingencies; force to force comparisons, force to population models, and most recently, strategy to strategy comparisons. All three reach similar conclusions; force allocations are too small and the strategy will not work in any case. The conclusion of just one of these analyses from the RAND Review speaks for all three.
This analysis concluded that some combination of 500,000 troops or police might be required in Afghanistan alone, not for victory, just for stability. Or in the words of the report: “The extremely low force ratio for Afghanistan, a country with a larger population than that of Iraq, shows the implausibility of current stabilization efforts by external forces”.
This is the polite way of saying there are not enough US or allied troops in the field to do the job – nor is an adequate force likely to be deployed. For a government contractor, this kind of candor is rare, indeed. The idea that the allies will fight al Qaeda and the Taliban while training and equipping 400,000 competent Afghan cops and soldiers in 18 months is also delusional. The majority of recruits would have to come from the Pashtun tribes and these folks haven’t given up much since Roxanne married Alexander.
In short, General McChrystal probably underestimated the theater problem to begin with - and President Obama certainly didn’t give him what he asked for anyway. We have to assume that the Pentagon, Foggy Bottom, and the White House are aware of the available studies and have chosen to ignore their conclusions and press their luck in the tribal mountains of Afghanistan anyway. Ironically, a previous attempt to control this area was called “the great game”.
As in “Kick the Can,” numbers matter and we appear to be playing a fool’s game; the allied expeditionary force has little or no edge in South Asia. Short of a catastrophe, in 18 months, we will still be asking “what is to be done?” in Afghanistan and Pakistan. And we may still be playing “Kick the Can” with the larger problem in the Muslim world.
---------------------------
This essay apeared on American Thinker 8 Dec 09. Author also blogs on Jenkins Hill.
Few kids win this game often, because, as the number of players increases, the odds that one will prevail against many, decreases. The hunter has two handicaps other than numbers; he doesn’t know the location of the other kids and they get to choose when to race for home. The farther a hunter strays from home base, the more vulnerable he becomes. With “Kick the Can,” all initiative is ceded to the quarry - a kind of fool’s game for solitary hunters.
At the risk of abusing a metaphor, we have now embarked on a national strategy that looks for all the world like such a fool’s game; and, in the process, ignores rules even a child might understand.
The first rule is that one side doesn’t get to make the rules of the game. In Afghanistan, declaring an arbitrary time limit, not only telegraphs your moves, but does nothing save ratchet up the pressure on the home team. If we can set aside for a moment all the campaign nonsense about wars of “choice” and wars of “necessity,” we might consider the blowback from Iraq. Having reversed the sectarian poles in Baghdad, might not the “progress” we see there be a kind of prudent economy of force? The Shiite majority may simply wait for the clock to run out now that we have set a date certain for withdrawal. The King of Jordan warns of a Shiite Crescent to the north of Israel. Is he wrong?
One side doesn’t get to control is the number of players by fiat either. The arbitrary designation of just one leader (Osama bin Laden) and a single terrorist organization (al Qaeda) as the “core” of the problem ignores a much larger threat with a global reach. Islamic fundamentalism is not limited to Afghanistan or Pakistan. Indeed, the ideology and financing on the Sunni side originates in places like Egypt and Saudi Arabia, our erstwhile “allies.” The militant threat on the Shiite side of the threat equation originates with Iran – now a nuclear aspirant. If Iraq was a distraction from the real threat in Afghanistan, how is Afghanistan not a distraction from the real threat in Iran?
The truth about Iraq is that it was a corrupt totalitarian Arab state that was a menace to its corrupt theocratic Arab neighbors. Now Iraq is a corrupt Shiite state that in all likelihood will pursue a sectarian alliance with Iran. The truth about Afghanistan is that it is a tribal, if not feudal, mélange besieged by naïve Western apologists. The truth about Pakistan is that it is a corrupt janissary that might be one bullet away from theocracy. The truth about Iran is that it is already the world’s first and largest Shiite theocracy; a so-called Islamic “republic.” We might add that Tehran makes no secret of its quest for the bomb and makes no secret of how they might use it. The truth of all of this is that the threat is not a specific terrorist or a specific terror group; and surely the threat is not a specific Muslim country or a specific state sponsor.
The malignant bloom of jihad and theocracy within Islam world wide is the true threat. This menace is not simply demographic; it is also political. Theocracy is the goal of Islamists of every stripe; to replace secular law with a religious monoculture. And the final and most worrisome truth is the inability or unwillingness of national security specialists, in general, and President Obama, in particular, to recognize any of this.
Tehran is yet another example in the Muslim constellation where we presume to make the rules of the game; we assume that the Persians can be jawboned or threatened with “sanctions” to relinquish their nuclear ambitions. True pluralism and diversity in the world today might be measured by the numbers of illusions we harbor about those who would make our worst nightmares come true.
Our new strategy announced on 1 December by the President at West Point has two components; moderation and denial. With the moderate approach we are neither “all in” nor “all out” in Afghanistan. We have limited our targets to one leader and one terror organization – and a kind of half-baked “nation building”. In Afghanistan, we aspire to do what the British and Soviets could not. The English used to strap insurgents to the busy ends of cannons and the Soviets used to level villages from the air. Our tactics are different; we plan to conquer Islamist fanatics with kindness - moderate on moderate.
As we try to walk the middle way, play the “moderate” game, we should be mindful of what everyone’s favorite moderate over in Istanbul said recently on the subject. Recep Tayyip Erdogan announced that the adjective “moderate” was an insult to the faith. “Islam is Islam and that’s it;” according to our NATO ally, the Turkish Prime Minister. We must commend Erdogan for his candor and doctrinal consistency. Apparently, being moderately Islamic is a little like being moderately pregnant.
The second component of the West Point proclamation is denial. “Islam is one of the world’s great religions” we are told. We are led to believe that Jihad, Sharia, cultural irredentism, misogyny, and fifty years of terrorism have nothing to do with Muslims in general or Islam in particular. Never mind that prominent Muslims tell us otherwise so frequently that we can not or will not hear what they say. We insist that those who say it do not mean it or those who mean it can’t be taken seriously. Yes, they speak about Islam, but the do not speak for Islam; so goes the mantra. The quest for Sharia and Kalifa is dismissed as the fantasies of a Muslim fringe.
Criticizing the general outlines of the West Point strategy is necessary but not sufficient. The specifics of a modest reinforcement, constrained by an 18 month timeline, also deserve some scrutiny. No markers were set in the West Point plan; but military operations analysts have been looking at such campaigns, including Afghanistan, for decades. Military Operations Research (MOR) is an aggregate of disciplines that attempts to size forces and examine the variables that might lead to victory or stability. These disciplines include; statistics; probability theory, game theory, modeling, and simulation among others.
Three variants of OR have been applied to Afghanistan or similar contingencies; force to force comparisons, force to population models, and most recently, strategy to strategy comparisons. All three reach similar conclusions; force allocations are too small and the strategy will not work in any case. The conclusion of just one of these analyses from the RAND Review speaks for all three.
This analysis concluded that some combination of 500,000 troops or police might be required in Afghanistan alone, not for victory, just for stability. Or in the words of the report: “The extremely low force ratio for Afghanistan, a country with a larger population than that of Iraq, shows the implausibility of current stabilization efforts by external forces”.
This is the polite way of saying there are not enough US or allied troops in the field to do the job – nor is an adequate force likely to be deployed. For a government contractor, this kind of candor is rare, indeed. The idea that the allies will fight al Qaeda and the Taliban while training and equipping 400,000 competent Afghan cops and soldiers in 18 months is also delusional. The majority of recruits would have to come from the Pashtun tribes and these folks haven’t given up much since Roxanne married Alexander.
In short, General McChrystal probably underestimated the theater problem to begin with - and President Obama certainly didn’t give him what he asked for anyway. We have to assume that the Pentagon, Foggy Bottom, and the White House are aware of the available studies and have chosen to ignore their conclusions and press their luck in the tribal mountains of Afghanistan anyway. Ironically, a previous attempt to control this area was called “the great game”.
As in “Kick the Can,” numbers matter and we appear to be playing a fool’s game; the allied expeditionary force has little or no edge in South Asia. Short of a catastrophe, in 18 months, we will still be asking “what is to be done?” in Afghanistan and Pakistan. And we may still be playing “Kick the Can” with the larger problem in the Muslim world.
---------------------------
This essay apeared on American Thinker 8 Dec 09. Author also blogs on Jenkins Hill.
Wednesday, December 2, 2009
Rose Colored Journalism
Names for most of our sciences have Greek roots, a tradition that goes back to Aristotle. Every few years, a new one appears that invariably will be an “ology” of one sort or another. And so it was with “agnotology” several years ago. Here we have a compound of two Greek words; agnosis- “not knowing” and logia – “the study of”. The study of ignorance would be the literal meaning. The word was coined (2001) by Robert Proctor who teaches at Stanford. He was concerned that “junk” science was being used to defend the indefensible, things like cigarette smoking. More recently, agnotological evidence in the global warming hypothesis has been exposed. Specialists define the problem in several ways; a deliberate attempt to mislead, a perpetuation of ignorance, or neglect of known truths. Culturally induced ignorance is the favored definition.
Put another way, every day ignorance is simply the absence of knowledge, and therefore ethically neutral. Agnotology, on the other hand, would be a willful misconstruction, perpetuation, or avoidance. The difference between agnotology and an information vacuum is like the difference between ignorance and stupidity. With stupidity, you know the truth, but refuse to accept it – or you perpetuate falsehoods.
Giving this phenomenon a name is a new development; but clearly several related practices have been around for centuries. Politicians use “opposition research” to discredit opponents, intelligence agents use disinformation, and soldiers use psychological operations (aka PSYOPS) to confuse the enemy. Nonetheless, to date, the few experts in the agnotology field seem to agree that Media, print and broadcast, is the prime suspect for the modern practice, the antithesis of “enlightenment” - culturally produced ignorance. False narratives might be a good way to think of the agnotology that we encounter on a daily basis.
None of this is news or a surprise to anyone who can read a newspaper or use a TV remote. The editorial pages of most papers and magazines are awash with untutored opinion masquerading as fact or truth. Publications like Newsweek feature pages of opinion now before they get to the actual news. The message of such a format is clear; spin is more important than facts.
Interviews with so called “newsmakers” are a favorite venue for creating false narratives. Two recent examples from the headlines illustrate the political agnotology problem: The Fox News interview with Bill Clinton (26 Sep 06) and PBS’s more recent interview with Hilary Clinton (10 Nov 09) in Berlin.
First, a few words about the respective journalists. Chris Wallace of Fox News comes from the pit bull school of journalism. He does not suffer fools gladly, nor does he allow politicians to make excuses or cook the books. He also asks tough questions and tough follow-ups. Charlie Rose of PBS is the polar opposite of Wallace. Rose is more like an obsequious poodle who could serve as a role model for any state funded news anchor. He asks banal, if not leading questions, many of which he answers himself. Rose allows his political guests to make speeches and rattle on with talking points; he seldom challenges self-serving assertions with follow-up questions.
Comparing the two Clinton interviews, a reader is struck by two things. First is the difference between a journalist who is a truth seeker - and a journalist who facilitates false narratives. The second is the consistent self-serving, albeit mendacious, stories that the Clinton’s continue to tell over the years.
The major themes of the Clinton national security saga are: Bill is a victim; specifically, a victim of a right-wing conspiracy. He did all that could be done about terrorism; no one knew anything about al Qaeda until he and Richard Clark came along. Today’s problems in places like Iraq and Afghanistan are due to the “mismanagement” of the Bush administration. And the specific threat from bin Laden and al Qaeda today is a legacy of the Bush, not the Clinton years. The central false narrative is the assertion that bin Laden and al Qaeda represent the “core” of the Islamist threat. In short, once bin Laden is dead and his organization neutralized, American will be avenged and all will be well with Islamists everywhere. Let’s look at the relevant portions of the interview transcripts.
Wallace fox hunting circa 2006
Mike Wallace: …when you pulled troops out of Somalia in 1993, bin Laden said, "I have seen the frailty and the weakness and the cowardice of U.S. troops." …Then there was the bombing of the embassies in Africa and the attack on the USS Cole… after the attacks, … bin Laden separated his leaders, spread them around, because he expected an attack, and there was no response…Why didn't you do more to put bin Laden and Al Qaeda out of business when you were president?...The 9/11 Commission said: "The U.S. government took the threat seriously, but not in the sense of mustering anything like the kind of effort that would be gathered to confront an enemy of the first, second or even third rank."
Bill Clinton: …All right. Let's look at what Richard Clarke said. Do you think Richard Clarke has a vigorous attitude (sic) about bin Laden?...The country never had a comprehensive anti-terror operation until I came there… After the Cole (attack), I had battle plans drawn to go into Afghanistan, overthrow the Taliban, and launch a full-scale attack search for bin Laden… But at least I tried. That's the difference in me and some, including all the right-wingers who are attacking me now. They ridiculed me for trying…So you did Fox's bidding on this show. You did your nice little conservative hit job on me… you falsely accused me of giving aid and comfort to bin Laden because of what happened in Somalia. No one knew Al Qaeda existed then… I've never criticized President Bush, and I don't think this is useful. But you know we do have a government that thinks Afghanistan is only one-seventh as important as Iraq…And you've got that little smirk on your face and you think you're so clever… I did everything I thought I responsibly could.
A few weeks ago Hilary Clinton took the opportunity to perpetuate her husband’s narrative on PBS.
ROSE COLORED JOURNALISM CIRCA 2009
Charlie Rose:…is a Taliban in control in Afghanistan a threat to the United States?
Hilary Clinton: Yes. And to many of us, the principal objective is still to defeat, capture, kill the Al Qaeda leadership. We do think that is important…It’s a core issue for us… and much of what President Obama and the rest of us in this administration have been working on for the last eight months is that given the failures of the last eight years to capture and kill the Al Qaeda leadership…So he will be clearly defining the purpose of our mission, how it’s going to be reconstituted.
Charlie Rose: What’s taking so long, and what’s the debate inside?
Hilary Clinton: Well, I have to say that I think we went through eight years where it at least appeared on the outside that there wasn’t enough time taken, there wasn’t enough thought given as to what we were trying to achieve and how we would achieve it. There were a lot of midcourse corrections. Witness the surge in Iraq…The mission was, frankly, confused. There was a lot of talk during the prior administration that came pretty close to nation building, transforming Afghanistan…And we do bear some of the responsibility, frankly, for helping to create the very terrorists that we’re now all threatened by.
We find it hard to believe that nobody knows where the Al Qaeda leadership is. And I think that there is no evidence that anybody in the government at the top levels knows.
Charlie Rose: All right. So what’s the message of the Obama administration and from the secretary of state about the United States and its foreign policy intentions today?
Hilary Clinton: That we are back. Back as fully engaged. We’re not leaving any part of the world unattended to, because that was one of the most common complaints I heard…
Charlie Rose:.. what’s the impact of the global economic crisis?
Hilary Clinton: What we have done is by moving from the creditor nation that my husband’s policies helped to create to the debtor nation that we inherited from the Bush administration, made even worse by the lapses in regulation and the failure of oversight… I am a true believer in the… all these wonderful old-fashioned but very important values that (I) hold….
Setting the Record Straight
Bill Clinton’s recall or recitation of facts is flawed on many levels, but two stand out. He refuses to take little or any responsibility for the run up to the 9/11 attacks in New York, although the first attack against the Twin Towers took place on his watch. He also claims that no one knew anything about the al Qaeda threat until his administration. When Wallace refuses to accept these false narratives, the interview becomes a one-sided food fight. The ex-president descends to invective, paranoia, and name calling.
Hilary’s narrative with Charlie Rose is more civil, and even less candid; if that’s possible. While trying to explain Obama’s national security and economic policy; she refers to the mismanagement of the Bush years on no fewer than five occasions. Indeed, Mrs. Clinton spends so much time looking backwards; she could be channeling Mullah Omar. Rose doesn’t question any of this. She goes on to insist that somehow America is responsible for creating terrorists. Rose doesn’t dispute this chestnut. She concludes with a hymn to old fashioned values. Rose smiles in agreement. Hearing either Clinton talk about values is a little like hearing Woody Allen talk about parenting.
The truth in what’s not said
Yet the most damning evidence about the Clinton chronicles is what wasn’t said in either interview. Put aside all those Islamist provocations in the Clinton years, the attacks on: US embassies in Africa, US ground forces in Somalia, US airmen in Saudi Arabia, US naval forces in Yemen, and against civilians in the Twin Towers in New York. Put all that and Clinton’s dithering aside and recall that Kabul fell (26 September 1996) to the Taliban on the Clinton watch.
Recall also the intern under the desk in the Oval Office; recall the perjury, and impeachment trial that followed. Recall all the ballyhoo about Madeline Albright as the first female secretary of state and then remember that every girl’s school in Afghanistan was shuttered on her watch. Recall also Christina Lamb’s description (2002) of the Islamist “street” in Kandahar in the Clinton years. Talking to a teen in a soccer stadium, she recorded this narrative:
I‘ve seen more than a hundred (executions). I used to come because it was entertainment….The best time was during Ramadan because then there would be at least a hanging or amputation a day, sometimes three or four….we would buy pistachios or oranges. The person could be shot, hanged or sacrificed….you know, like sheep.
Their hands would be tied and they would be laid on a block then their chest split open with a long knife and their guts spilled out. Women were tied to goalposts and shot down, or if they had committed adultery, they would be stoned….I saw some homosexuals have their hands and feet tied and a wall collapsed on top of them. That was interesting….
They (the Taliban) made the family come and watch and collect the dead bodies. They used to keep an ambulance at the gate so when people had their hands or feet amputated they would be taken straight to the hospital. (pp. 246-249)
The stadium where this “entertainment” took place was completed in 1996 with the help of American taxpayers – at the midpoint of the Clinton administration.
This is the narrative of the Clinton years we don’t hear on PBS, most of the commercial networks, or in many print sources. We also don’t hear that the state sponsored theocratic barbarity in Afghanistan didn’t stop until George Bush sent in the Marines. We don’t hear that George Bush reopened those girl’s schools.
And now we hear Barack Obama claim that he will “finish the job.” Would that be finishing the job that Clinton didn’t begin nearly twenty years ago; or finishing the job that Bush began so well? If the strategy enunciated by Mrs. Clinton on 10 November, i.e. moving forward by looking back, plays out; we are in for a dark future. Enduring questions about President Obama’s judgment fester on many issues: yet, none is more worrisome than this; why did he bring the Clinton circus back to town? Agnotology indeed!
--------------------
The author also blogs at; http://jenkinshill.blogtownhall.com/
Put another way, every day ignorance is simply the absence of knowledge, and therefore ethically neutral. Agnotology, on the other hand, would be a willful misconstruction, perpetuation, or avoidance. The difference between agnotology and an information vacuum is like the difference between ignorance and stupidity. With stupidity, you know the truth, but refuse to accept it – or you perpetuate falsehoods.
Giving this phenomenon a name is a new development; but clearly several related practices have been around for centuries. Politicians use “opposition research” to discredit opponents, intelligence agents use disinformation, and soldiers use psychological operations (aka PSYOPS) to confuse the enemy. Nonetheless, to date, the few experts in the agnotology field seem to agree that Media, print and broadcast, is the prime suspect for the modern practice, the antithesis of “enlightenment” - culturally produced ignorance. False narratives might be a good way to think of the agnotology that we encounter on a daily basis.
None of this is news or a surprise to anyone who can read a newspaper or use a TV remote. The editorial pages of most papers and magazines are awash with untutored opinion masquerading as fact or truth. Publications like Newsweek feature pages of opinion now before they get to the actual news. The message of such a format is clear; spin is more important than facts.
Interviews with so called “newsmakers” are a favorite venue for creating false narratives. Two recent examples from the headlines illustrate the political agnotology problem: The Fox News interview with Bill Clinton (26 Sep 06) and PBS’s more recent interview with Hilary Clinton (10 Nov 09) in Berlin.
First, a few words about the respective journalists. Chris Wallace of Fox News comes from the pit bull school of journalism. He does not suffer fools gladly, nor does he allow politicians to make excuses or cook the books. He also asks tough questions and tough follow-ups. Charlie Rose of PBS is the polar opposite of Wallace. Rose is more like an obsequious poodle who could serve as a role model for any state funded news anchor. He asks banal, if not leading questions, many of which he answers himself. Rose allows his political guests to make speeches and rattle on with talking points; he seldom challenges self-serving assertions with follow-up questions.
Comparing the two Clinton interviews, a reader is struck by two things. First is the difference between a journalist who is a truth seeker - and a journalist who facilitates false narratives. The second is the consistent self-serving, albeit mendacious, stories that the Clinton’s continue to tell over the years.
The major themes of the Clinton national security saga are: Bill is a victim; specifically, a victim of a right-wing conspiracy. He did all that could be done about terrorism; no one knew anything about al Qaeda until he and Richard Clark came along. Today’s problems in places like Iraq and Afghanistan are due to the “mismanagement” of the Bush administration. And the specific threat from bin Laden and al Qaeda today is a legacy of the Bush, not the Clinton years. The central false narrative is the assertion that bin Laden and al Qaeda represent the “core” of the Islamist threat. In short, once bin Laden is dead and his organization neutralized, American will be avenged and all will be well with Islamists everywhere. Let’s look at the relevant portions of the interview transcripts.
Wallace fox hunting circa 2006
Mike Wallace: …when you pulled troops out of Somalia in 1993, bin Laden said, "I have seen the frailty and the weakness and the cowardice of U.S. troops." …Then there was the bombing of the embassies in Africa and the attack on the USS Cole… after the attacks, … bin Laden separated his leaders, spread them around, because he expected an attack, and there was no response…Why didn't you do more to put bin Laden and Al Qaeda out of business when you were president?...The 9/11 Commission said: "The U.S. government took the threat seriously, but not in the sense of mustering anything like the kind of effort that would be gathered to confront an enemy of the first, second or even third rank."
Bill Clinton: …All right. Let's look at what Richard Clarke said. Do you think Richard Clarke has a vigorous attitude (sic) about bin Laden?...The country never had a comprehensive anti-terror operation until I came there… After the Cole (attack), I had battle plans drawn to go into Afghanistan, overthrow the Taliban, and launch a full-scale attack search for bin Laden… But at least I tried. That's the difference in me and some, including all the right-wingers who are attacking me now. They ridiculed me for trying…So you did Fox's bidding on this show. You did your nice little conservative hit job on me… you falsely accused me of giving aid and comfort to bin Laden because of what happened in Somalia. No one knew Al Qaeda existed then… I've never criticized President Bush, and I don't think this is useful. But you know we do have a government that thinks Afghanistan is only one-seventh as important as Iraq…And you've got that little smirk on your face and you think you're so clever… I did everything I thought I responsibly could.
A few weeks ago Hilary Clinton took the opportunity to perpetuate her husband’s narrative on PBS.
ROSE COLORED JOURNALISM CIRCA 2009
Charlie Rose:…is a Taliban in control in Afghanistan a threat to the United States?
Hilary Clinton: Yes. And to many of us, the principal objective is still to defeat, capture, kill the Al Qaeda leadership. We do think that is important…It’s a core issue for us… and much of what President Obama and the rest of us in this administration have been working on for the last eight months is that given the failures of the last eight years to capture and kill the Al Qaeda leadership…So he will be clearly defining the purpose of our mission, how it’s going to be reconstituted.
Charlie Rose: What’s taking so long, and what’s the debate inside?
Hilary Clinton: Well, I have to say that I think we went through eight years where it at least appeared on the outside that there wasn’t enough time taken, there wasn’t enough thought given as to what we were trying to achieve and how we would achieve it. There were a lot of midcourse corrections. Witness the surge in Iraq…The mission was, frankly, confused. There was a lot of talk during the prior administration that came pretty close to nation building, transforming Afghanistan…And we do bear some of the responsibility, frankly, for helping to create the very terrorists that we’re now all threatened by.
We find it hard to believe that nobody knows where the Al Qaeda leadership is. And I think that there is no evidence that anybody in the government at the top levels knows.
Charlie Rose: All right. So what’s the message of the Obama administration and from the secretary of state about the United States and its foreign policy intentions today?
Hilary Clinton: That we are back. Back as fully engaged. We’re not leaving any part of the world unattended to, because that was one of the most common complaints I heard…
Charlie Rose:.. what’s the impact of the global economic crisis?
Hilary Clinton: What we have done is by moving from the creditor nation that my husband’s policies helped to create to the debtor nation that we inherited from the Bush administration, made even worse by the lapses in regulation and the failure of oversight… I am a true believer in the… all these wonderful old-fashioned but very important values that (I) hold….
Setting the Record Straight
Bill Clinton’s recall or recitation of facts is flawed on many levels, but two stand out. He refuses to take little or any responsibility for the run up to the 9/11 attacks in New York, although the first attack against the Twin Towers took place on his watch. He also claims that no one knew anything about the al Qaeda threat until his administration. When Wallace refuses to accept these false narratives, the interview becomes a one-sided food fight. The ex-president descends to invective, paranoia, and name calling.
Hilary’s narrative with Charlie Rose is more civil, and even less candid; if that’s possible. While trying to explain Obama’s national security and economic policy; she refers to the mismanagement of the Bush years on no fewer than five occasions. Indeed, Mrs. Clinton spends so much time looking backwards; she could be channeling Mullah Omar. Rose doesn’t question any of this. She goes on to insist that somehow America is responsible for creating terrorists. Rose doesn’t dispute this chestnut. She concludes with a hymn to old fashioned values. Rose smiles in agreement. Hearing either Clinton talk about values is a little like hearing Woody Allen talk about parenting.
The truth in what’s not said
Yet the most damning evidence about the Clinton chronicles is what wasn’t said in either interview. Put aside all those Islamist provocations in the Clinton years, the attacks on: US embassies in Africa, US ground forces in Somalia, US airmen in Saudi Arabia, US naval forces in Yemen, and against civilians in the Twin Towers in New York. Put all that and Clinton’s dithering aside and recall that Kabul fell (26 September 1996) to the Taliban on the Clinton watch.
Recall also the intern under the desk in the Oval Office; recall the perjury, and impeachment trial that followed. Recall all the ballyhoo about Madeline Albright as the first female secretary of state and then remember that every girl’s school in Afghanistan was shuttered on her watch. Recall also Christina Lamb’s description (2002) of the Islamist “street” in Kandahar in the Clinton years. Talking to a teen in a soccer stadium, she recorded this narrative:
I‘ve seen more than a hundred (executions). I used to come because it was entertainment….The best time was during Ramadan because then there would be at least a hanging or amputation a day, sometimes three or four….we would buy pistachios or oranges. The person could be shot, hanged or sacrificed….you know, like sheep.
Their hands would be tied and they would be laid on a block then their chest split open with a long knife and their guts spilled out. Women were tied to goalposts and shot down, or if they had committed adultery, they would be stoned….I saw some homosexuals have their hands and feet tied and a wall collapsed on top of them. That was interesting….
They (the Taliban) made the family come and watch and collect the dead bodies. They used to keep an ambulance at the gate so when people had their hands or feet amputated they would be taken straight to the hospital. (pp. 246-249)
The stadium where this “entertainment” took place was completed in 1996 with the help of American taxpayers – at the midpoint of the Clinton administration.
This is the narrative of the Clinton years we don’t hear on PBS, most of the commercial networks, or in many print sources. We also don’t hear that the state sponsored theocratic barbarity in Afghanistan didn’t stop until George Bush sent in the Marines. We don’t hear that George Bush reopened those girl’s schools.
And now we hear Barack Obama claim that he will “finish the job.” Would that be finishing the job that Clinton didn’t begin nearly twenty years ago; or finishing the job that Bush began so well? If the strategy enunciated by Mrs. Clinton on 10 November, i.e. moving forward by looking back, plays out; we are in for a dark future. Enduring questions about President Obama’s judgment fester on many issues: yet, none is more worrisome than this; why did he bring the Clinton circus back to town? Agnotology indeed!
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The author also blogs at; http://jenkinshill.blogtownhall.com/
Thursday, October 29, 2009
Electronic Autism
“I think I shall never see a poem as lovely as a tree.” – Joyce Kilmer
A good idea is often the author of an institution; unfortunately, the institution often then becomes the enemy of the idea. Large and complex organizations are especially vulnerable to bureaucratic schizophrenia. Susceptibility seems to be aggravated by automated support systems. Digital deficit disorders are often magnified by the rigor and inflexibility of the binary logic that underlies all software. The “human resources” that design, manipulate, and monitor the digital and dot.com worlds are collectively, and often derisively, labeled “nerds” or “geeks”. Indeed, on a personal level, the symptoms of electronic autism are fairly obvious.
Does your daughter prefer to text message or post the most intimate details of her life, including racy pictures, online instead of risking a real date with an actual boy? Does your son retreat to the basement or his room with a cell phone, an I Pod, a laptop, and video games instead of playing a sport or joining a club? Does your husband prefer holding hands with an electronic mouse after dinner instead of holding your whatever? If the answer to any of these questions is yes, you get the picture.
By all accounts, digital deficit disorders have now migrated to government and commerce. Electronic autism has gone viral; it has become a cultural phenomenon. The communications revolution that was supposed to create a warm and congenial global village has instead created a billion cold, unresponsive, and often hostile pockets of isolated indifference.
Try asking a local, state, or federal agency a question online. Chances are your problem is not one of their automated options. Indeed, once you have exhausted the programmed prompts, you must begin anew in what often seems to be an endless loop. Good luck with a phone call! The response standards for government apparatchiks seem to be designed at the Department of Motor Vehicles or the Post Office. Economy is the touted rationale behind automated systems; yet local and federal bureaucracies and budgets still grow like that chubby, surly kid in your basement. You know, that child who doesn’t have time to chat with you because he or she has a thousand fantasy friends on Face Book, U Tube, or Twitter.
The picture is even grimmer in the world of commerce where the gap between seller and buyer is growing as we speak. Debits to your account are posted instantly while credits might take days or months – especially if there is a dispute. The “float” is never to your advantage. All online problem resolution requires a run through the maze of online prompts; and then you get to attempt to talk to someone if you’re lucky enough to find a help number. Yet here again, you are run through another gauntlet of automated cues where the penultimate prompt tells you that “you are a valued client, all of our drones are busy, please hold for the next customer service representative.” These patronizing recordings are dishonest on three counts; if you were “valued,” someone would pick up the damn phone; the only “customer representative” in the equation is you; and “service” is never the primary design consideration behind any kind of “automated” customer relations.
A single maple tree in Washington, DC provides all the evidence we might need to appreciate the consequences of electronic autism in government and business circles.
Several years ago, it might be as long as ten; a medium size sugar maple blew over on Carolina Place, NW. The tree was caught, and still lies, on above ground utility wires that are maintained by three different “service” companies; power, cable, and phone. These utilities are complimented by a tree service company (Aspulundi) and the various bureaucracies in the DC City Government which oversee both trees and utilities. After years (yes, years) of complaints about this hazard to utilities, parked automobiles, and pedestrians; a pair of power company (PEPCO) trucks, with crews, appeared in September to reroute their wires off the tree. The tree was left to hang on the cable and phone lines, making the tree even more unstable with three power wires rerouted.
When the absurdity of this “solution” was brought to the attention of the PEPCO crew, the chief indignantly called his superior who confirmed that the tree was the city’s problem and the other utility cables weren’t their concern either. The implied logic here is that each utility should reroute their wires in turn instead of removing the derelict tree which is bound to fall anyway - and that day is hastened each time a supporting wire is removed.
Let’s see if we can follow the economic logic here. Instead of all five interested parties cooperating and agreeing to a common sense solution (i.e. removing the tree), at a cost of approximately one thousand dollars (confirmed by estimates); each party is pursuing separate solutions to the same hazard, where the collective cost will be many thousands of dollars. Keep in mind that the offending tree becomes more of a threat with each rerouting. Each of the five separate agencies, including the city government, is supported by automated response systems, information technology acquired in the name of efficiency and economy. Unfortunately, these systems, apparently, do not converse with citizens, customers, or each other.
All of this might be just another humorous symptom of life in a one party town. Or maybe some folks would simply dismiss such Orwellian nonsense as another kind of inside the beltway “stimulus” package. Yet the cost is born by stakeholders; citizens and voters who in these difficult times might expect some prudence on the part of the nation’s capitol or their “service” utilities. The price of electronic autism grows daily; let’s hope they never run out of your money.
(A truncated version of this essay appeared in the Washington edition of The Current, 11 Novwmber 2009.)
A good idea is often the author of an institution; unfortunately, the institution often then becomes the enemy of the idea. Large and complex organizations are especially vulnerable to bureaucratic schizophrenia. Susceptibility seems to be aggravated by automated support systems. Digital deficit disorders are often magnified by the rigor and inflexibility of the binary logic that underlies all software. The “human resources” that design, manipulate, and monitor the digital and dot.com worlds are collectively, and often derisively, labeled “nerds” or “geeks”. Indeed, on a personal level, the symptoms of electronic autism are fairly obvious.
Does your daughter prefer to text message or post the most intimate details of her life, including racy pictures, online instead of risking a real date with an actual boy? Does your son retreat to the basement or his room with a cell phone, an I Pod, a laptop, and video games instead of playing a sport or joining a club? Does your husband prefer holding hands with an electronic mouse after dinner instead of holding your whatever? If the answer to any of these questions is yes, you get the picture.
By all accounts, digital deficit disorders have now migrated to government and commerce. Electronic autism has gone viral; it has become a cultural phenomenon. The communications revolution that was supposed to create a warm and congenial global village has instead created a billion cold, unresponsive, and often hostile pockets of isolated indifference.
Try asking a local, state, or federal agency a question online. Chances are your problem is not one of their automated options. Indeed, once you have exhausted the programmed prompts, you must begin anew in what often seems to be an endless loop. Good luck with a phone call! The response standards for government apparatchiks seem to be designed at the Department of Motor Vehicles or the Post Office. Economy is the touted rationale behind automated systems; yet local and federal bureaucracies and budgets still grow like that chubby, surly kid in your basement. You know, that child who doesn’t have time to chat with you because he or she has a thousand fantasy friends on Face Book, U Tube, or Twitter.
The picture is even grimmer in the world of commerce where the gap between seller and buyer is growing as we speak. Debits to your account are posted instantly while credits might take days or months – especially if there is a dispute. The “float” is never to your advantage. All online problem resolution requires a run through the maze of online prompts; and then you get to attempt to talk to someone if you’re lucky enough to find a help number. Yet here again, you are run through another gauntlet of automated cues where the penultimate prompt tells you that “you are a valued client, all of our drones are busy, please hold for the next customer service representative.” These patronizing recordings are dishonest on three counts; if you were “valued,” someone would pick up the damn phone; the only “customer representative” in the equation is you; and “service” is never the primary design consideration behind any kind of “automated” customer relations.
A single maple tree in Washington, DC provides all the evidence we might need to appreciate the consequences of electronic autism in government and business circles.
Several years ago, it might be as long as ten; a medium size sugar maple blew over on Carolina Place, NW. The tree was caught, and still lies, on above ground utility wires that are maintained by three different “service” companies; power, cable, and phone. These utilities are complimented by a tree service company (Aspulundi) and the various bureaucracies in the DC City Government which oversee both trees and utilities. After years (yes, years) of complaints about this hazard to utilities, parked automobiles, and pedestrians; a pair of power company (PEPCO) trucks, with crews, appeared in September to reroute their wires off the tree. The tree was left to hang on the cable and phone lines, making the tree even more unstable with three power wires rerouted.
When the absurdity of this “solution” was brought to the attention of the PEPCO crew, the chief indignantly called his superior who confirmed that the tree was the city’s problem and the other utility cables weren’t their concern either. The implied logic here is that each utility should reroute their wires in turn instead of removing the derelict tree which is bound to fall anyway - and that day is hastened each time a supporting wire is removed.
Let’s see if we can follow the economic logic here. Instead of all five interested parties cooperating and agreeing to a common sense solution (i.e. removing the tree), at a cost of approximately one thousand dollars (confirmed by estimates); each party is pursuing separate solutions to the same hazard, where the collective cost will be many thousands of dollars. Keep in mind that the offending tree becomes more of a threat with each rerouting. Each of the five separate agencies, including the city government, is supported by automated response systems, information technology acquired in the name of efficiency and economy. Unfortunately, these systems, apparently, do not converse with citizens, customers, or each other.
All of this might be just another humorous symptom of life in a one party town. Or maybe some folks would simply dismiss such Orwellian nonsense as another kind of inside the beltway “stimulus” package. Yet the cost is born by stakeholders; citizens and voters who in these difficult times might expect some prudence on the part of the nation’s capitol or their “service” utilities. The price of electronic autism grows daily; let’s hope they never run out of your money.
(A truncated version of this essay appeared in the Washington edition of The Current, 11 Novwmber 2009.)
Saturday, September 12, 2009
Monoculture
(This essay originally appeared in the 16 Aug 09 edition of American Thinker)
“The quickest way to end a war is to lose it”. – George Orwell
Monoculture is a term that has been freighted with a lot of baggage, mostly negative. The origin of this compound word is usually traced to agriculture where it is used to describe a farm or a farming community that relies on a single crop. Tobacco, cotton, sugar, and now corn, are examples. The advantages of monoculture farming are obvious; seed, soil, water and equipment requirements are uniform. Yet standardization has a down side. Uniformity makes crops vulnerable to a single pathogen or pest; and the soil, once exhausted, needs to be replenished. Newer varieties of seed or more pesticides or more fertilizer are required. In short, the single crop specialist, over time, must work harder and faster to stay in the same place - until he or the land is exhausted. The tipping point of monoculture is often defined by a single vulnerability.
More recently the notion of monoculture has migrated to cyberspace. Here again it is used as a pejorative to describe alleged abuses by software or telecommunications monopolies; Microsoft operating systems, Google search engines or cable companies are frequently described as monocultures. The advantages of singularity here, like agriculture, are uniformity, consistency, and homogeneity. The disadvantages are also obvious. Like all monopolies, the lack of serious competition breeds complacency, arrogance, and indifference; inferior products and shoddy services. While good ideas often create good institutions, just as often, over time, that same institution becomes the enemy of the idea – especially new ideas. Here monoculture becomes a kind of totalitarianism; a cult of “my way or the highway”.
Single party towns, cities, states and even countries often become political monocultures. National Socialists, Fascists, and Marxists are examples in the extreme. Once a single party achieves success, controls the levers of power; the dominant ethic often becomes the retention of power. An ideology that may come to power with appeals to diversity and pluralism often morphs into a culture of exclusion – a place where the external infidel (non-believer) and the internal apostate (independent thinker) become public enemies. Such developments are not limited to primitive political forms like monarchies and military dictatorships. Indeed, often the worst totalitarians begin as Utopian prophets. Even with democracies, the first free election is often last real election.
America, often held up as the exemplar of democratic probity, is no exception. Some of the most dysfunctional states and municipalities are the victims of single party arrogance and mismanagement. The District of Columbia, Baltimore, Chicago, Detroit, Newark, Cleveland, San Francisco and possibly all of the state of California are examples.
Utopian schemes from which monocultures rise always have two faces. Almost all international or regional organizations begin with high hopes for the comforts of conformity; and then reality sets in. Somehow we never get to know how regional parochialism is an improvement over national chauvinism. World organizations such as the League of Nations and now the United Nations are not much better. The most frequent consensus in these forums is the agreement to agree to do nothing about real problems or bad behavior. Maybe the world would be less safe without these organizations, without these “talking cures,” and maybe most of these forums are just job programs for otherwise unemployable international bureaucrats. There are few measures of effectiveness for what didn’t happen or “what might have been”.
The problem with the layering of international, national and local governments is that eventually, like the monoculture farmer, you have to work harder and run faster just to stay in the same place. And as the shrewd Baroness from Finchley observed; “Eventually, you run out of other people’s money”. No government at any level creates wealth or prosperity; they consume it. Chaos is not an accident; it’s merely the logical consequence of unmanageable complexity or catastrophe. Sometimes the two are synonymous with homogeneity.
None of this has ever deterred Utopian intellectuals who pedal uniformity, conformity and the quest for some enchanted ideology or technology which eliminates conflict and brings unity, peace, and justice to all. Serious people often take these things seriously.
Karl Marx thought a world commune was possible if only the proletariat would rise and seize the moment. Little did he imagine that the proletariat would be hijacked by a vanguard of venal intellectuals. Marx seems to have slept through French history. Woodrow Wilson thought the League of Nations was a good idea and then Hitler thought he could bludgeon the world into Aryan consciousness. Albert Einstein thought world government was possible if only America would take the lead - proving only how little of the reason required for great science is fungible. Even Canadians got into the act; Marshal McLuhan forecast a global village united by communications technology. McLuhan hardly noticed that the number of nation states had doubled since WW II while the world was supposed to be bonding with Media cement. The post-colonial political centrifuge was at odds with the global village; the medium didn’t send that message.
Today, another variant of Utopian unity and conformity darkens the horizon. Five hundred some odd years after the fall of Constantinople, religion is on the march again; this time the objective is Tel Aviv, Rome and all points west. Once again the barbarians are at the gate. The 21st Century version of monoculture is a triple threat; military, ideological, and totalitarian. Theocracy is the latest militant monoculture; and if Islamists have their way, it will be the last.
All forms of monoculture are authoritarian in some respect; however, theocracy seeks to be totalitarian in all respects. For contemporary Islamists, there are no divided loyalties. National boundaries are irrelevant; only the boundaries of the Ummah (Muslim world) count. Civil or penal law is another abomination; there is only one law, religious law (Sharia). The separation of church and state is heretical; the religious community is the state, the community.
For the fundamentalist, the division of the world into material and spiritual realms is the nexus of Western culture; the source of wars and all other woes. The divided authorities of democracies are at the root of a “hideous schizophrenia;” indeed, infidels and apostates are sick, slaves to a self-imposed angst. The jihadist is a humanitarian, a liberator. He represents one God (Allah), one law (Sharia), one messenger (Mohammed), and one message (jihad). With jihad, the medium is also the message.
In its most benign incarnation the jihad is simply a “struggle”. In practice there are several means, at least four ways to fight for universal unity: the struggle to improve self, study and accept the word of God; the struggle to spread the word of God, once properly understood; the struggle to do God’s work, improve the community; and finally, jihad is also the right and requirement to defend Islam with every violent means available – jihad of the sword. Yes, defend! By definition, the nature of jihad, the nature of the war (harb), is defensive.
For the devout, the world is divided into two spheres: the house of Islam (dar al-Islam), they who have submitted to Sharia; and the house of war (dar al-harb), they who have yet to submit. Those outside of the Muslim community, or those within, who doubt, are living in a state of dangerous ignorance (jahiliyya). The danger is literal, by ancient and modern legal definition; apostasy is a capital offense, punishable by death. Ignorance itself is an aggressive threat, one that threatens to infect the purity and divide the unity of true believers. Eliminating ignorance is God’s purpose, Mohammed’s purpose, and the Koran’s purpose. It is also the right and duty of all Islamists to fight any ignorance of God’s will. The ultimate goal of militant Islam is one God, one law, one path, and one community of believers – in short, monoculture.
The Islamist take on the role of ignorance in society however, is more political than theological; indeed, it is a convenient rationalization for aggression. The proper role of civil society, or civilization writ large, is not to clear every thicket of contradiction or ignorance; the proper role of authority in any society is to eliminate the deserts of intolerance. And there is little debate within the Muslim community on the meaning of jihad. Dr. Tawfik Hamid, a former mujahadeen, cautions; “The doctrines of jihad are not taken out of context, as many apologists for Islamism argue. They are central to the faith and ethics of millions of Muslims”.
For jihadists, means are variable; the type of jihad is tailored to circumstances – time, conditions, and place. What works here might not work there. The tactics may change but the strategy is constant; “two steps forward, one step back”. Mainstream or so-called “moderate” organizations like the Muslim Brotherhood (al-Akwan) make peaceful protestations on cue, yet their menace is underlined by spin-offs, cut-outs, and splinter groups which are more than happy to do the “wet” work as necessary. In one case a brotherhood operative, Ramadan Abdullah Shallah, taught at a Florida university for three years before assuming command of Islamic Jihad in Syria. His first act as chief was to call for the elimination of Israel.
In a more recent case, the grandson of the founder of al Akwan, Tariq Ramadan, was about to accept a teaching post at Notre Dame when his visa was denied. Supporters of Ramadan represent him as a scholar and “reformer”. Yet the facts tell another story. Tariq was probably happy to seek refuge at South Bend because British and French critics had exposed his irredentism and his defenses of bloody jihad in Europe. In short, Mr. Ramadan had been caught practicing taqiyya; a kind of Islamic dissimilation where you are not required to speak the truth to infidels. Indeed, Bernard Kouchner, French Minister of Foreign Affairs, has labeled Tariq Ramadan a “most dangerous man”.
The Ramadan appointment has been defended in the name of free speech, academic freedom, and ecumenicism. Yet, there are no axioms of freedom that require the academy to provide a soapbox for hate speech; and more important, ecumenicism is not a suicide pact. Or as George Orwell might put it; “There are some ideas that are so wrong that only a very intelligent person could believe in them.”
The liberation theologists of Notre Dame are not alone; there is an emerging if not bizarre convergence between Western intellectuals and Jihad dissimulators; an odd couple coalition of the American Left and the Islamic Right. John Walsh, writing for the Harvard International Review, winter 2003, claims that “there is no evidence to undermine the Brotherhood’s peaceful rhetoric”. He also repeats, without question, the party line; “The Brotherhood has never ordered an act of terrorism”.
In the March/April, 2007 edition of Foreign Affairs, Robert Leiken and Steven Brooke took a similar tack in “The Moderate Muslim Brotherhood” where the title itself is an asserted conclusion. The problem with these arguments, and many like it, is the willingness to accept spoken or written assurances about non-violence while ignoring or rationalizing the violence
itself. As a practical matter, the historical record, of deeds not words, is what should inform judgments. Surely there are peace loving Brothers; but, their existence in no way offsets the dark history and continuing excuse making for terror. Academic and official analyses of modern theocrats have two troubling deficits; little common sense and no sense of responsibility.
National security naiveté is not limited to journalists and academics. The July 2009 conference of the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA) provided a forum for Imam Warith Deen Umar, among others. He is the former director of NY State prison chaplains. Umar used the occasion to argue that a small number of Jews “control the world”. He offered White House aides Rahm Emanuel and David Axelrod as evidence. Iman Umar was preceded by Valerie Jarrett as keynote speaker. Ms. Jarret is a senior White House advisor for public engagement; her appearance was a first for any White House official. ISNA is a Brotherhood affiliate.
Brotherhood proselytizers are now seconded in America by Hizb ut Tahir (HT), an organization now represented in at least 40 other countries. HT is a Sunni political party based in Palestine which openly advocates Kilafah, a unitary Muslim state controlled by clerics and Sharia. This theocratic movement has been outlawed in many Muslim countries; yet, they held their first open national conference in America in Illinois this July.
Al Akwan and Hizb ut Tahir are thought to be the largest and best organized radical Islamic political movements in the world. Although they make frequent peaceful protestations; they both rationalize violent jihad, non-violent sedition, and anti-Semitism. The Brotherhood is infamous for its cut-outs or affiliates who represent a “whose who” of terror organizations including Hammas and al Qaeda. HT is thought to be a recruiting venue for mujahadeen who, once indoctrinated, are then passed on to line terror groups as required. Their alumni include known “jihad of the sword” soldiers including Abu Musad al-Zarqawi and Kalid Sheik Mohammed. Neither al Akwan nor Hizb ut Tahir appear on the State Department’s official list of terror groups.
The incongruity of American kafirs (infidels) trying to rebrand al Ikwan as “moderate” is beyond ironic. From the Islamist point of view, a secular Muslim is two things; an apostate and a target. In Egypt alone, the most populous Arab nation, the Brotherhood or cutouts, have been responsible for hundreds of terrorist incidents and scores of assassination attempts, several of which have been successful.
The Brothers assassinated Anwar Sadat and have been responsible for more than half dozen attempts against Hosni Mubarak. Al-Ikwan is illegal in Egypt where there are few illusions about “moderation”. The latest menace on the Israeli front, Hammas, is a Brotherhood export.
The list of so-called moderates like Sadat who have been executed for apostasy is international. Benasir Bhutto was a special threat, a presumptuous woman and a secular Islamist. The most notable martyr to “moderation” was Afghan President Mohammed Najibullah. In August of 1996, he called for the US and “the civilized world to launch a joint struggle against fundamentalism”. A month later, he was assassinated and hoisted on a lamppost by the Taliban as a public example. Najibullah had more than a dog in the fight; he gave his life trying to define the enemy. More than a decade later, Najibullah’s clarity is lost under a fog of politically correct euphemisms.
This and other evidence that jihad apologists are willing to ignore is overwhelming. According to State Department figures, the number of terrorist incidents and casualties has increased tenfold since Najabullah’s death. More recently, a professional intelligence officer, Stephen Collins Coughlin, at the Pentagon, connected the dots linking historical Sharia precedents to contemporary jihadist military doctrine in a 300 page legal brief. Coughlin was labeled a “Christian zealot with a poison pen” and fired for his candor.
His nemesis turned out to be a former Deputy Secretary of Defense, Gordon England. Apparently Major Coughlin was asked to moderate his scholarship and legal expertise at the behest of a special assistant to England, Hesham Islam. Egyptian born Islam was a “community outreach” expert for the Pentagon with ties to al Ikwan affiliates in America. Mr. Islam left his Pentagon post after several “anomalies” in his resume were exposed.
If nothing else, Jihads of the tongue and of the hand, these “peaceful” struggles, provide a kind of plausible deniability, a convenient separation from those with blood on their hands, the jihahists of the sword.
This jihad al-sayf is frequently literal. Never mind individual amputations or beheadings; recall the massacre at Luxor, the work of a Brotherhood splinter, where 84 were killed, 58 of them tourists, one of which was a child of five. Several were hacked to death with knives and swords. The literal symbol of the sword is lost on Westerners; the coercive power of the knife is not lost on Muslims.
Children aren’t incidental casualties or collateral damage of jihad; they are often targets - especially females. At Beslan an entire grade school of over seven hundred was held hostage: 334 hostages were killed; 186 of these were children. Although the leader of the massacre was a Chechen national, Shamil Basayev; his crew, like most jihadist operations, was international. Several held British passports and some were associated with the Finsbury Park Mosque, London.
In January of 2004, Basayev issued an annual report of sorts entitled “Nothing Can Stop this Jihad”. In it he highlights Russian losses and all the usual justifications common to such manifestos; appeals to Allah, blessings to the Prophet, cant about the righteousness of bloody jihad, castigations of kefirs , and one eerily prophetic note; he compares Russians to “children who close there eyes in order to hide”. Ten months later nearly 200 hundred Russian children were dead at Beslan.
Religion is the heart of the Western predicament. On the one hand, smug intellectuals dismiss religion as some primitive superstition. In the process they underestimate the power of ideas, the significance of Jihad and Sharia; and their relation to military doctrine in the Muslim world. On the other hand, these same self-anointed progressives defend the separation of church and state and freedom of religion. Here they are skewered on the horns of the political correctness dilemma; tolerating intolerance in the name of tolerance. Separation of church and state is not the only core value in peril; the rights of women and children and freedom of thought and speech are also at risk under any theocratic ideology.
One constant of despotism over the centuries has been anti-Semitism. The modern jihadist is no exception. Not only are 20th Century atrocities like the European Jewish and Armenian Christian genocides denied by Islamic politicians, but ayatollahs and imams regularly use the Prophet and the Koran as touchstones for characterizing Jews as “apes and pigs”. This bigotry is not a “fringe” phenomena; it is a thread of Muslim history. Indeed, with Saudi Arabia and Iran, intolerance is a state sponsored activity. Despotism has only three requirements; false prophets, slaves to immutable doctrine, and naïve apologists.
The oft repeated mantra that Israel, not Jews, is at the heart of Muslim angst is another deceit. Anti-Israel rhetoric is mostly anti-Semitism shaded with a political veil. The structural bigotry of Sunni Deobandis and Wahbis all predate the state of Israel, in one case by millennia. Wahabism is the state religion of the wealthiest Arab state, Saudi Arabia; the irredentism of al Ikwan is the most infamous modern export of Egypt, the most populous Arab state. The Brotherhood was created in Egypt two decades before the state of Israel reappeared in the Levant. The official hate speech of Shiite Iran is a modern phenomenon, but its literary antecedents are as old as the Sunni variety.
Surely the mere presence of modern Israel in the midst of the Arab world is itself an irritant; and many Israeli policies have aggravated the problem. However, any honest review of historical Muslim literature and commentaries reveal anti-Semitism to be part of the warp and weft of ancient and contemporary ideology. Just as surely apologists can find appropriate citations to the contrary; nonetheless, these exceptions are not the rule.
Official irredentism has been underlined by Arab and Muslim states at numerous human rights forums. The 60th Session of the UN Commission on Human Rights, 7 April 2004, was no exception. Whenever issues such as the stoning of women, honor killings, mutilations, and the apostasy death penalty are raised, Muslim officials reject any criticism as interference in the internal affairs of a sovereign state. (Dar al-Islam scholars recognize secular or national boundaries when convenient to their arguments.) Only two Muslim states address the apostasy issue in their penal codes (Sudan and Mauritania); both mandate the death penalty. In all other Muslim states the issue is covered by religious law where the penalty is the same. Wherever elected politicians are superseded by clerics, the first casualty is reason.
Religious dogma is not negotiable; the idea that “moderate” Islam can or will compromise core tenants is absurd. Why change a winning strategy? In contrast, secular democratic values in Europe and America appear to be malleable at their best and marketable at their worst. Indeed, serving and retired presidents, premiers, cabinet officers and military personnel all avail themselves of Petro-retainers with unseemly regularity. This is not to suggest that such officials are for sale; but their values may have lease options.
Some ask the question; why now? Why has radical jihad now come to dominate the threat spectrum? The answer is simple; because it can! The theosophy, dogma, and militant doctrine (as Major Coughlin reminds us), have been elaborated for centuries had anyone cared to look. The Arab world, especially, now has the resources to resume the “struggle”. The largest transfer of wealth in human history is underwriting the attempt to undo the last five hundred years of human history.
Nonetheless, the Islamic chimera of religious homogeneity is still a pipe dream. Cultural, political and theological unity can not be validated by virtue, history, or reason. Put aside for a moment the record of utopias or even the practical difficulties of establishing or maintaining a universal theocracy. The real evil is coercion. No political monoculture can succeed or be sustained without force and oppression. This is the great moral contradiction of all utopian visions and with militant Islam today; a warped amalgam of military terror, bigotry, politics, cultural arrogance, and misappropriated wealth.
Surely persuasion is one of many tactics used on believers, doubters, and infidels. Yet, in the end, like all totalitarian schemes; theocracy is underwritten by fear and the threat or reality of force. Anwar Sadat put it best before his assassination; “Fear is the most effective tool in destroying the soul of an individual - and the soul of a people”.
Najabullah and Sadat had the integrity and courage to identify the theocratic threat and its consequences – and they paid with their lives. Sadly, there are few signs at the moment that any Western politicians, save a few Israelis, are worthy of their mantle or their sacrifice. Appeasement is not so much a hopeful strategy as it is a symptom of fear, a signal of weakness, and a harbinger of defeat.
All monocultures are destined to fail eventually; they all suffer from insurmountable internal contradictions. Healthy biological and political cultures require diversity, competition and pluralism to thrive. Unfortunately, the lessons of the last century seem to be forfeit by first decade of this century. In an age where any principle or weapon might be sold if the price is right, the cost of relearning the futility of utopian visions will be high. Islamic monoculture is sure to fail, but before it does, the jihad could wipe more than Israel “off the face of the earth”. Words like holocaust may be inadequate to describe the impending clash.
“The quickest way to end a war is to lose it”. – George Orwell
Monoculture is a term that has been freighted with a lot of baggage, mostly negative. The origin of this compound word is usually traced to agriculture where it is used to describe a farm or a farming community that relies on a single crop. Tobacco, cotton, sugar, and now corn, are examples. The advantages of monoculture farming are obvious; seed, soil, water and equipment requirements are uniform. Yet standardization has a down side. Uniformity makes crops vulnerable to a single pathogen or pest; and the soil, once exhausted, needs to be replenished. Newer varieties of seed or more pesticides or more fertilizer are required. In short, the single crop specialist, over time, must work harder and faster to stay in the same place - until he or the land is exhausted. The tipping point of monoculture is often defined by a single vulnerability.
More recently the notion of monoculture has migrated to cyberspace. Here again it is used as a pejorative to describe alleged abuses by software or telecommunications monopolies; Microsoft operating systems, Google search engines or cable companies are frequently described as monocultures. The advantages of singularity here, like agriculture, are uniformity, consistency, and homogeneity. The disadvantages are also obvious. Like all monopolies, the lack of serious competition breeds complacency, arrogance, and indifference; inferior products and shoddy services. While good ideas often create good institutions, just as often, over time, that same institution becomes the enemy of the idea – especially new ideas. Here monoculture becomes a kind of totalitarianism; a cult of “my way or the highway”.
Single party towns, cities, states and even countries often become political monocultures. National Socialists, Fascists, and Marxists are examples in the extreme. Once a single party achieves success, controls the levers of power; the dominant ethic often becomes the retention of power. An ideology that may come to power with appeals to diversity and pluralism often morphs into a culture of exclusion – a place where the external infidel (non-believer) and the internal apostate (independent thinker) become public enemies. Such developments are not limited to primitive political forms like monarchies and military dictatorships. Indeed, often the worst totalitarians begin as Utopian prophets. Even with democracies, the first free election is often last real election.
America, often held up as the exemplar of democratic probity, is no exception. Some of the most dysfunctional states and municipalities are the victims of single party arrogance and mismanagement. The District of Columbia, Baltimore, Chicago, Detroit, Newark, Cleveland, San Francisco and possibly all of the state of California are examples.
Utopian schemes from which monocultures rise always have two faces. Almost all international or regional organizations begin with high hopes for the comforts of conformity; and then reality sets in. Somehow we never get to know how regional parochialism is an improvement over national chauvinism. World organizations such as the League of Nations and now the United Nations are not much better. The most frequent consensus in these forums is the agreement to agree to do nothing about real problems or bad behavior. Maybe the world would be less safe without these organizations, without these “talking cures,” and maybe most of these forums are just job programs for otherwise unemployable international bureaucrats. There are few measures of effectiveness for what didn’t happen or “what might have been”.
The problem with the layering of international, national and local governments is that eventually, like the monoculture farmer, you have to work harder and run faster just to stay in the same place. And as the shrewd Baroness from Finchley observed; “Eventually, you run out of other people’s money”. No government at any level creates wealth or prosperity; they consume it. Chaos is not an accident; it’s merely the logical consequence of unmanageable complexity or catastrophe. Sometimes the two are synonymous with homogeneity.
None of this has ever deterred Utopian intellectuals who pedal uniformity, conformity and the quest for some enchanted ideology or technology which eliminates conflict and brings unity, peace, and justice to all. Serious people often take these things seriously.
Karl Marx thought a world commune was possible if only the proletariat would rise and seize the moment. Little did he imagine that the proletariat would be hijacked by a vanguard of venal intellectuals. Marx seems to have slept through French history. Woodrow Wilson thought the League of Nations was a good idea and then Hitler thought he could bludgeon the world into Aryan consciousness. Albert Einstein thought world government was possible if only America would take the lead - proving only how little of the reason required for great science is fungible. Even Canadians got into the act; Marshal McLuhan forecast a global village united by communications technology. McLuhan hardly noticed that the number of nation states had doubled since WW II while the world was supposed to be bonding with Media cement. The post-colonial political centrifuge was at odds with the global village; the medium didn’t send that message.
Today, another variant of Utopian unity and conformity darkens the horizon. Five hundred some odd years after the fall of Constantinople, religion is on the march again; this time the objective is Tel Aviv, Rome and all points west. Once again the barbarians are at the gate. The 21st Century version of monoculture is a triple threat; military, ideological, and totalitarian. Theocracy is the latest militant monoculture; and if Islamists have their way, it will be the last.
All forms of monoculture are authoritarian in some respect; however, theocracy seeks to be totalitarian in all respects. For contemporary Islamists, there are no divided loyalties. National boundaries are irrelevant; only the boundaries of the Ummah (Muslim world) count. Civil or penal law is another abomination; there is only one law, religious law (Sharia). The separation of church and state is heretical; the religious community is the state, the community.
For the fundamentalist, the division of the world into material and spiritual realms is the nexus of Western culture; the source of wars and all other woes. The divided authorities of democracies are at the root of a “hideous schizophrenia;” indeed, infidels and apostates are sick, slaves to a self-imposed angst. The jihadist is a humanitarian, a liberator. He represents one God (Allah), one law (Sharia), one messenger (Mohammed), and one message (jihad). With jihad, the medium is also the message.
In its most benign incarnation the jihad is simply a “struggle”. In practice there are several means, at least four ways to fight for universal unity: the struggle to improve self, study and accept the word of God; the struggle to spread the word of God, once properly understood; the struggle to do God’s work, improve the community; and finally, jihad is also the right and requirement to defend Islam with every violent means available – jihad of the sword. Yes, defend! By definition, the nature of jihad, the nature of the war (harb), is defensive.
For the devout, the world is divided into two spheres: the house of Islam (dar al-Islam), they who have submitted to Sharia; and the house of war (dar al-harb), they who have yet to submit. Those outside of the Muslim community, or those within, who doubt, are living in a state of dangerous ignorance (jahiliyya). The danger is literal, by ancient and modern legal definition; apostasy is a capital offense, punishable by death. Ignorance itself is an aggressive threat, one that threatens to infect the purity and divide the unity of true believers. Eliminating ignorance is God’s purpose, Mohammed’s purpose, and the Koran’s purpose. It is also the right and duty of all Islamists to fight any ignorance of God’s will. The ultimate goal of militant Islam is one God, one law, one path, and one community of believers – in short, monoculture.
The Islamist take on the role of ignorance in society however, is more political than theological; indeed, it is a convenient rationalization for aggression. The proper role of civil society, or civilization writ large, is not to clear every thicket of contradiction or ignorance; the proper role of authority in any society is to eliminate the deserts of intolerance. And there is little debate within the Muslim community on the meaning of jihad. Dr. Tawfik Hamid, a former mujahadeen, cautions; “The doctrines of jihad are not taken out of context, as many apologists for Islamism argue. They are central to the faith and ethics of millions of Muslims”.
For jihadists, means are variable; the type of jihad is tailored to circumstances – time, conditions, and place. What works here might not work there. The tactics may change but the strategy is constant; “two steps forward, one step back”. Mainstream or so-called “moderate” organizations like the Muslim Brotherhood (al-Akwan) make peaceful protestations on cue, yet their menace is underlined by spin-offs, cut-outs, and splinter groups which are more than happy to do the “wet” work as necessary. In one case a brotherhood operative, Ramadan Abdullah Shallah, taught at a Florida university for three years before assuming command of Islamic Jihad in Syria. His first act as chief was to call for the elimination of Israel.
In a more recent case, the grandson of the founder of al Akwan, Tariq Ramadan, was about to accept a teaching post at Notre Dame when his visa was denied. Supporters of Ramadan represent him as a scholar and “reformer”. Yet the facts tell another story. Tariq was probably happy to seek refuge at South Bend because British and French critics had exposed his irredentism and his defenses of bloody jihad in Europe. In short, Mr. Ramadan had been caught practicing taqiyya; a kind of Islamic dissimilation where you are not required to speak the truth to infidels. Indeed, Bernard Kouchner, French Minister of Foreign Affairs, has labeled Tariq Ramadan a “most dangerous man”.
The Ramadan appointment has been defended in the name of free speech, academic freedom, and ecumenicism. Yet, there are no axioms of freedom that require the academy to provide a soapbox for hate speech; and more important, ecumenicism is not a suicide pact. Or as George Orwell might put it; “There are some ideas that are so wrong that only a very intelligent person could believe in them.”
The liberation theologists of Notre Dame are not alone; there is an emerging if not bizarre convergence between Western intellectuals and Jihad dissimulators; an odd couple coalition of the American Left and the Islamic Right. John Walsh, writing for the Harvard International Review, winter 2003, claims that “there is no evidence to undermine the Brotherhood’s peaceful rhetoric”. He also repeats, without question, the party line; “The Brotherhood has never ordered an act of terrorism”.
In the March/April, 2007 edition of Foreign Affairs, Robert Leiken and Steven Brooke took a similar tack in “The Moderate Muslim Brotherhood” where the title itself is an asserted conclusion. The problem with these arguments, and many like it, is the willingness to accept spoken or written assurances about non-violence while ignoring or rationalizing the violence
itself. As a practical matter, the historical record, of deeds not words, is what should inform judgments. Surely there are peace loving Brothers; but, their existence in no way offsets the dark history and continuing excuse making for terror. Academic and official analyses of modern theocrats have two troubling deficits; little common sense and no sense of responsibility.
National security naiveté is not limited to journalists and academics. The July 2009 conference of the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA) provided a forum for Imam Warith Deen Umar, among others. He is the former director of NY State prison chaplains. Umar used the occasion to argue that a small number of Jews “control the world”. He offered White House aides Rahm Emanuel and David Axelrod as evidence. Iman Umar was preceded by Valerie Jarrett as keynote speaker. Ms. Jarret is a senior White House advisor for public engagement; her appearance was a first for any White House official. ISNA is a Brotherhood affiliate.
Brotherhood proselytizers are now seconded in America by Hizb ut Tahir (HT), an organization now represented in at least 40 other countries. HT is a Sunni political party based in Palestine which openly advocates Kilafah, a unitary Muslim state controlled by clerics and Sharia. This theocratic movement has been outlawed in many Muslim countries; yet, they held their first open national conference in America in Illinois this July.
Al Akwan and Hizb ut Tahir are thought to be the largest and best organized radical Islamic political movements in the world. Although they make frequent peaceful protestations; they both rationalize violent jihad, non-violent sedition, and anti-Semitism. The Brotherhood is infamous for its cut-outs or affiliates who represent a “whose who” of terror organizations including Hammas and al Qaeda. HT is thought to be a recruiting venue for mujahadeen who, once indoctrinated, are then passed on to line terror groups as required. Their alumni include known “jihad of the sword” soldiers including Abu Musad al-Zarqawi and Kalid Sheik Mohammed. Neither al Akwan nor Hizb ut Tahir appear on the State Department’s official list of terror groups.
The incongruity of American kafirs (infidels) trying to rebrand al Ikwan as “moderate” is beyond ironic. From the Islamist point of view, a secular Muslim is two things; an apostate and a target. In Egypt alone, the most populous Arab nation, the Brotherhood or cutouts, have been responsible for hundreds of terrorist incidents and scores of assassination attempts, several of which have been successful.
The Brothers assassinated Anwar Sadat and have been responsible for more than half dozen attempts against Hosni Mubarak. Al-Ikwan is illegal in Egypt where there are few illusions about “moderation”. The latest menace on the Israeli front, Hammas, is a Brotherhood export.
The list of so-called moderates like Sadat who have been executed for apostasy is international. Benasir Bhutto was a special threat, a presumptuous woman and a secular Islamist. The most notable martyr to “moderation” was Afghan President Mohammed Najibullah. In August of 1996, he called for the US and “the civilized world to launch a joint struggle against fundamentalism”. A month later, he was assassinated and hoisted on a lamppost by the Taliban as a public example. Najibullah had more than a dog in the fight; he gave his life trying to define the enemy. More than a decade later, Najibullah’s clarity is lost under a fog of politically correct euphemisms.
This and other evidence that jihad apologists are willing to ignore is overwhelming. According to State Department figures, the number of terrorist incidents and casualties has increased tenfold since Najabullah’s death. More recently, a professional intelligence officer, Stephen Collins Coughlin, at the Pentagon, connected the dots linking historical Sharia precedents to contemporary jihadist military doctrine in a 300 page legal brief. Coughlin was labeled a “Christian zealot with a poison pen” and fired for his candor.
His nemesis turned out to be a former Deputy Secretary of Defense, Gordon England. Apparently Major Coughlin was asked to moderate his scholarship and legal expertise at the behest of a special assistant to England, Hesham Islam. Egyptian born Islam was a “community outreach” expert for the Pentagon with ties to al Ikwan affiliates in America. Mr. Islam left his Pentagon post after several “anomalies” in his resume were exposed.
If nothing else, Jihads of the tongue and of the hand, these “peaceful” struggles, provide a kind of plausible deniability, a convenient separation from those with blood on their hands, the jihahists of the sword.
This jihad al-sayf is frequently literal. Never mind individual amputations or beheadings; recall the massacre at Luxor, the work of a Brotherhood splinter, where 84 were killed, 58 of them tourists, one of which was a child of five. Several were hacked to death with knives and swords. The literal symbol of the sword is lost on Westerners; the coercive power of the knife is not lost on Muslims.
Children aren’t incidental casualties or collateral damage of jihad; they are often targets - especially females. At Beslan an entire grade school of over seven hundred was held hostage: 334 hostages were killed; 186 of these were children. Although the leader of the massacre was a Chechen national, Shamil Basayev; his crew, like most jihadist operations, was international. Several held British passports and some were associated with the Finsbury Park Mosque, London.
In January of 2004, Basayev issued an annual report of sorts entitled “Nothing Can Stop this Jihad”. In it he highlights Russian losses and all the usual justifications common to such manifestos; appeals to Allah, blessings to the Prophet, cant about the righteousness of bloody jihad, castigations of kefirs , and one eerily prophetic note; he compares Russians to “children who close there eyes in order to hide”. Ten months later nearly 200 hundred Russian children were dead at Beslan.
Religion is the heart of the Western predicament. On the one hand, smug intellectuals dismiss religion as some primitive superstition. In the process they underestimate the power of ideas, the significance of Jihad and Sharia; and their relation to military doctrine in the Muslim world. On the other hand, these same self-anointed progressives defend the separation of church and state and freedom of religion. Here they are skewered on the horns of the political correctness dilemma; tolerating intolerance in the name of tolerance. Separation of church and state is not the only core value in peril; the rights of women and children and freedom of thought and speech are also at risk under any theocratic ideology.
One constant of despotism over the centuries has been anti-Semitism. The modern jihadist is no exception. Not only are 20th Century atrocities like the European Jewish and Armenian Christian genocides denied by Islamic politicians, but ayatollahs and imams regularly use the Prophet and the Koran as touchstones for characterizing Jews as “apes and pigs”. This bigotry is not a “fringe” phenomena; it is a thread of Muslim history. Indeed, with Saudi Arabia and Iran, intolerance is a state sponsored activity. Despotism has only three requirements; false prophets, slaves to immutable doctrine, and naïve apologists.
The oft repeated mantra that Israel, not Jews, is at the heart of Muslim angst is another deceit. Anti-Israel rhetoric is mostly anti-Semitism shaded with a political veil. The structural bigotry of Sunni Deobandis and Wahbis all predate the state of Israel, in one case by millennia. Wahabism is the state religion of the wealthiest Arab state, Saudi Arabia; the irredentism of al Ikwan is the most infamous modern export of Egypt, the most populous Arab state. The Brotherhood was created in Egypt two decades before the state of Israel reappeared in the Levant. The official hate speech of Shiite Iran is a modern phenomenon, but its literary antecedents are as old as the Sunni variety.
Surely the mere presence of modern Israel in the midst of the Arab world is itself an irritant; and many Israeli policies have aggravated the problem. However, any honest review of historical Muslim literature and commentaries reveal anti-Semitism to be part of the warp and weft of ancient and contemporary ideology. Just as surely apologists can find appropriate citations to the contrary; nonetheless, these exceptions are not the rule.
Official irredentism has been underlined by Arab and Muslim states at numerous human rights forums. The 60th Session of the UN Commission on Human Rights, 7 April 2004, was no exception. Whenever issues such as the stoning of women, honor killings, mutilations, and the apostasy death penalty are raised, Muslim officials reject any criticism as interference in the internal affairs of a sovereign state. (Dar al-Islam scholars recognize secular or national boundaries when convenient to their arguments.) Only two Muslim states address the apostasy issue in their penal codes (Sudan and Mauritania); both mandate the death penalty. In all other Muslim states the issue is covered by religious law where the penalty is the same. Wherever elected politicians are superseded by clerics, the first casualty is reason.
Religious dogma is not negotiable; the idea that “moderate” Islam can or will compromise core tenants is absurd. Why change a winning strategy? In contrast, secular democratic values in Europe and America appear to be malleable at their best and marketable at their worst. Indeed, serving and retired presidents, premiers, cabinet officers and military personnel all avail themselves of Petro-retainers with unseemly regularity. This is not to suggest that such officials are for sale; but their values may have lease options.
Some ask the question; why now? Why has radical jihad now come to dominate the threat spectrum? The answer is simple; because it can! The theosophy, dogma, and militant doctrine (as Major Coughlin reminds us), have been elaborated for centuries had anyone cared to look. The Arab world, especially, now has the resources to resume the “struggle”. The largest transfer of wealth in human history is underwriting the attempt to undo the last five hundred years of human history.
Nonetheless, the Islamic chimera of religious homogeneity is still a pipe dream. Cultural, political and theological unity can not be validated by virtue, history, or reason. Put aside for a moment the record of utopias or even the practical difficulties of establishing or maintaining a universal theocracy. The real evil is coercion. No political monoculture can succeed or be sustained without force and oppression. This is the great moral contradiction of all utopian visions and with militant Islam today; a warped amalgam of military terror, bigotry, politics, cultural arrogance, and misappropriated wealth.
Surely persuasion is one of many tactics used on believers, doubters, and infidels. Yet, in the end, like all totalitarian schemes; theocracy is underwritten by fear and the threat or reality of force. Anwar Sadat put it best before his assassination; “Fear is the most effective tool in destroying the soul of an individual - and the soul of a people”.
Najabullah and Sadat had the integrity and courage to identify the theocratic threat and its consequences – and they paid with their lives. Sadly, there are few signs at the moment that any Western politicians, save a few Israelis, are worthy of their mantle or their sacrifice. Appeasement is not so much a hopeful strategy as it is a symptom of fear, a signal of weakness, and a harbinger of defeat.
All monocultures are destined to fail eventually; they all suffer from insurmountable internal contradictions. Healthy biological and political cultures require diversity, competition and pluralism to thrive. Unfortunately, the lessons of the last century seem to be forfeit by first decade of this century. In an age where any principle or weapon might be sold if the price is right, the cost of relearning the futility of utopian visions will be high. Islamic monoculture is sure to fail, but before it does, the jihad could wipe more than Israel “off the face of the earth”. Words like holocaust may be inadequate to describe the impending clash.
Saturday, July 11, 2009
Privatizing National Intelligence Estimates
(This commentary appeared in the Winter, 2009 edition of the Journal for Intelligence and Counterintelligence udder the title; "Escaping the Wilderness of Mirrors")
There was a time when most National Intelligence Estimates (NIEs) were classified, cloistered and rarely read. Recurring estimates were dusted off periodically and circulated in the Intelligence Community for coordination. “Happy” might be changed to “glad” and the cycle would begin anew. Indeed, the NIE was formatted not to be read, they all began with the punch lines, “Key Judgments”. Most readers stopped there.
All of this changed in the wake of the ‘weapons of mass destruction fiasco’. The subsequent NIE on Iraq was sifted above the fold like the ashes of Herculaneum. We have come full circle on analysis, from cooking the books to opening the books. CIA, especially, is clearly trying to address a credibility problem.
Unfortunately, this effort does not speak to the two faults at the heart of the analysis problem; competence and integrity.
As far as anyone knows, any given estimate might be written by one or sixteen nameless intelligence agency bureaucrats. Dissenting agencies appear in footnotes. In most cases, the point men represent agency politics not expertise. Few experts of national repute work in the bowels of Intelligence agencies. Most national estimates are not just group-think, worse still; they are bureaucratic group-think. They don’t represent good analysis so much as they represent consensus, however brief.
The sixteen agency circus is defended in the name of analytical diversity. These same agencies are then condemned as “stovepipes” when the diverse fail to converse; a classic ‘cake and eat it’ argument.
Integrity is the predictable victim when the key dynamic of the process is bureaucratic log-rolling. The closet battle between Air Force Intelligence and all others during the Cold War is a classic example. In that period, Air Force footnotes to strategic force NIEs would exceed the word count in the body of estimates. Those infamous bomber and missile “gaps” were products of this struggle. Maxwell Taylor’s, Uncertain Trumpet, documents some of the blow back from this era. Strategic force assessments are unique insomuch as the threat is tied directly to budgets. The math is simple, bigger threats equal bigger budgets.
Beyond weapons systems, cooking the books is an old and honored tradition in Intelligence Community analysis. The spectrum of fakery includes false ignorance, data manipulation and outright invention. Cases of premeditated ignorance would include the Israeli nuclear weapons program, the Tonkin Gulf incident and the KAL 007 shoot down, just to name a few. Blatant statistical manipulation was part of the heady brew during the McNamara years of the Vietnam War. Bomb damage, strategic hamlet, pacification and Vietnamization statistics, masquerading as measures of effectiveness, were all used to obscure an unpalatable ground truth. More recently, since 9/11 and in the run-up to the Iraq War, evidence seems to have been manufactured wholesale to support foregone conclusions.
After any real or imagined intelligence failure, the inevitable ad hoc commission comes to tell us how to fix the beast. Invariably, the answer is more money and more bureaucracy. Bigger is always better.
The 9/11 Commission and the more recent Iraq Study Group are illustrations. None of their bromides address the obvious solution to better national security analysis; ending the Executive Branch monopoly. There is no good reason for national security analysis to be the exclusive purview of any branch of government or worse still, a cabal of agencies with vested interests in outcomes. Privatization is the answer for analytical competence. Transparency is the answer for product integrity.
A small group of independent experts could convene as required to prepare assessments. The membership might vary as the subject requires. Experts might be compensated on a per diem basis. Politicians, lobbyists and obvious partisans need not apply. Intelligence agency functions could then be restricted to what they do best; collecting, processing, archiving and Tactical Intelligence.
Transparency might also eliminate special interest ad hoc analysis within the Intelligence Community. The Douglas Feith group which used to operate out of the Pentagon comes to mind.
Assessments from an independent group of experts might also benefit from single hand and named authorship, much like Supreme Court decisions. Dissenters would write minority opinions. Court analysis is attributable and transparent. National security analysis should not have lesser standards. Indeed, the current practice of giving the Executive Branch an exclusive on national security analysis is a little like giving the power of judicial review to Congress.
Calling our national assessments “intelligence” estimates is also misleading. The issue is national security not Intelligence. Intelligence is merely one of the ingredients of analysis. Most data, method and even thinking that go into analysis are unclassified. Surely sources and methods of intelligence collection need to be protected by classification. So be it. Nonetheless, classification should not be used as an excuse to obscure the whole process or product of national security deliberations.
If you were to visit the CIA web site, you might be led to believe that the NIE, and the process that supports it, is the gold standard in the Intelligence Community. Conversely, uninformed critics often sneer at Military Intelligence (aka Tactical Intelligence) as an oxymoron. In fact, our seamless net of tactical collection, identification, targeting and weapons applications is the Intelligence Community gold standard. This is not to say that the tactical folks don’t ever get it wrong. But when they do, their systems are self medicating. National estimates, on the other hand, have been a basket case for decades.
National security analysis needs to be separated from the Executive Branch and the Intelligence Community. Privatize immediately!
-------------------------------------------
There was a time when most National Intelligence Estimates (NIEs) were classified, cloistered and rarely read. Recurring estimates were dusted off periodically and circulated in the Intelligence Community for coordination. “Happy” might be changed to “glad” and the cycle would begin anew. Indeed, the NIE was formatted not to be read, they all began with the punch lines, “Key Judgments”. Most readers stopped there.
All of this changed in the wake of the ‘weapons of mass destruction fiasco’. The subsequent NIE on Iraq was sifted above the fold like the ashes of Herculaneum. We have come full circle on analysis, from cooking the books to opening the books. CIA, especially, is clearly trying to address a credibility problem.
Unfortunately, this effort does not speak to the two faults at the heart of the analysis problem; competence and integrity.
As far as anyone knows, any given estimate might be written by one or sixteen nameless intelligence agency bureaucrats. Dissenting agencies appear in footnotes. In most cases, the point men represent agency politics not expertise. Few experts of national repute work in the bowels of Intelligence agencies. Most national estimates are not just group-think, worse still; they are bureaucratic group-think. They don’t represent good analysis so much as they represent consensus, however brief.
The sixteen agency circus is defended in the name of analytical diversity. These same agencies are then condemned as “stovepipes” when the diverse fail to converse; a classic ‘cake and eat it’ argument.
Integrity is the predictable victim when the key dynamic of the process is bureaucratic log-rolling. The closet battle between Air Force Intelligence and all others during the Cold War is a classic example. In that period, Air Force footnotes to strategic force NIEs would exceed the word count in the body of estimates. Those infamous bomber and missile “gaps” were products of this struggle. Maxwell Taylor’s, Uncertain Trumpet, documents some of the blow back from this era. Strategic force assessments are unique insomuch as the threat is tied directly to budgets. The math is simple, bigger threats equal bigger budgets.
Beyond weapons systems, cooking the books is an old and honored tradition in Intelligence Community analysis. The spectrum of fakery includes false ignorance, data manipulation and outright invention. Cases of premeditated ignorance would include the Israeli nuclear weapons program, the Tonkin Gulf incident and the KAL 007 shoot down, just to name a few. Blatant statistical manipulation was part of the heady brew during the McNamara years of the Vietnam War. Bomb damage, strategic hamlet, pacification and Vietnamization statistics, masquerading as measures of effectiveness, were all used to obscure an unpalatable ground truth. More recently, since 9/11 and in the run-up to the Iraq War, evidence seems to have been manufactured wholesale to support foregone conclusions.
After any real or imagined intelligence failure, the inevitable ad hoc commission comes to tell us how to fix the beast. Invariably, the answer is more money and more bureaucracy. Bigger is always better.
The 9/11 Commission and the more recent Iraq Study Group are illustrations. None of their bromides address the obvious solution to better national security analysis; ending the Executive Branch monopoly. There is no good reason for national security analysis to be the exclusive purview of any branch of government or worse still, a cabal of agencies with vested interests in outcomes. Privatization is the answer for analytical competence. Transparency is the answer for product integrity.
A small group of independent experts could convene as required to prepare assessments. The membership might vary as the subject requires. Experts might be compensated on a per diem basis. Politicians, lobbyists and obvious partisans need not apply. Intelligence agency functions could then be restricted to what they do best; collecting, processing, archiving and Tactical Intelligence.
Transparency might also eliminate special interest ad hoc analysis within the Intelligence Community. The Douglas Feith group which used to operate out of the Pentagon comes to mind.
Assessments from an independent group of experts might also benefit from single hand and named authorship, much like Supreme Court decisions. Dissenters would write minority opinions. Court analysis is attributable and transparent. National security analysis should not have lesser standards. Indeed, the current practice of giving the Executive Branch an exclusive on national security analysis is a little like giving the power of judicial review to Congress.
Calling our national assessments “intelligence” estimates is also misleading. The issue is national security not Intelligence. Intelligence is merely one of the ingredients of analysis. Most data, method and even thinking that go into analysis are unclassified. Surely sources and methods of intelligence collection need to be protected by classification. So be it. Nonetheless, classification should not be used as an excuse to obscure the whole process or product of national security deliberations.
If you were to visit the CIA web site, you might be led to believe that the NIE, and the process that supports it, is the gold standard in the Intelligence Community. Conversely, uninformed critics often sneer at Military Intelligence (aka Tactical Intelligence) as an oxymoron. In fact, our seamless net of tactical collection, identification, targeting and weapons applications is the Intelligence Community gold standard. This is not to say that the tactical folks don’t ever get it wrong. But when they do, their systems are self medicating. National estimates, on the other hand, have been a basket case for decades.
National security analysis needs to be separated from the Executive Branch and the Intelligence Community. Privatize immediately!
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Sunday, June 14, 2009
The Best Among Us
On Memorial Day I unfurled a flag on my porch to honor the service of those who died, were wounded, or otherwise sacrificed for something greater than themselves. I do the same on the 4th of July as a token of my appreciation for the advantages of democracy. We don't have a perfect country, but its better than most of the alternatives that I can think of. Having hung the flag the other day, I surveyed the streets in four directions and saw one other flag. One flag - as far as the eye could see on the
Several days later, I picked up a copy of the neighborhood paper, The Northwest Current, and was greeted with an editorial headline; "Rolling Blunder," a snarky put down of the annual Memorial Weekend tribute to veterans known as Rolling Thunder. Originally a remembrance of
The author of this polemic is a reporter for the local ABC affiliate. He gets two columns of opinion space in most editions of The Current where he holds forth on every subject imaginable. Yet, I don't recall any complaints about street closures for rallies, marches, and marathons for every cause under the sun; including, most notably, a "million" man march organized by one of the nation's most noxious bigots. Hardly a month goes by in the
Journalists and TV networks often lament the recent decline in news readers and viewers. Yet, they seldom look to themselves or their product for an explanation. Consumers have not stopped reading or listening; they may have just stopped buying or reading slanted products that sneer at values or insult common sense. On the latter we could ask; what parade or demonstration doesn’t inconvenience someone?
Having done its best to sugar coat an insult, the “Rolling Blunder” harangue also presumes to instruct us on the difference between Memorial and Veteran's Day, as if self-evident were not a synonym for obvious. Indeed, Memorial Day commemorates those who died in battle or as Pericles, and later
If we only preserved one holiday where we close streets, wave flags and make noise; I would choose Memorial Day. I would choose to honor the memories of those who paid so dearly to preserve the right of journalists and their editors to be small minded, self-absorbed, and insensitive to real inconvenience and true sacrifice. I would choose to preserve the minor inconveniences of Memorial Day because we need a visible reminder of the best among us so that we do not succumb to the worst.
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