The Gertrude Bell Jar

Cartoon Comment

Aziz Poonwalla has an excellent post up at City of Brass about the “Cartoon StupidStorm,” with links to a great deal of worthwhile commentary on the controversy. I would draw your particular attention to the Mona Eltahawy piece from which Poonwalla quotes extensively in his own earlier post at Dean’s Place:

Lost amid the ashes of torched embassies and the senseless deaths of Muslim protestors is the fact that the cartoon controversy is as much about freedom of expression in the Muslim world as it is about freedom of expression in Europe.

The violence and the bitter words exchanged over the past few days have little to do with Islam but everything to do with those who want to be its sole guardians and spokespeople. [...]

This is not a clash of civilizations but a battle between the extremists - Muslims and non-Muslims alike - and the rest of us who refuse to allow them to speak for us. This is about control. So of course it is about freedom of expression - in Denmark and in the Muslim world.

Also, another book to add to the reading list: Pascal Boyer's Religion Explained. Sounds like essential reading based on the GNXP comment Poonwalla highlights.

Notes On Torture

Jane Galt has an interesting post discussing what she calls “the Glenn Reynolds approach” to the torture issue in economic terms. I had been thinking of it as the Mark Bowden approach myself, as published in two Atlantic articles (not available to non-subscribers online), one of them soon after the Abu Ghraib revelations. The idea is that torture should continue to be illegal and we should trust that if any ticking time bomb scenario that can be resolved through torture ever really does arise, CIA or FBI agents or whichever government agents are involved will go ahead and assume the risk of breaking the law to get the information. As opposed to using this idea of a ticking time bomb to normalize torture in all kinds of prosaic situations which could never have been used to persuade anyone of the “necessity” of torture as an available tool in the WOT in the first place. For me one of the worst things about Abu Ghraib was how unnecessary it was, even if you accept the all-torture-all-the-time-to-defend-our-nation argument. What we saw was more or less random abuse of ordinary prisoners for no coherent intelligence-gathering purpose whatsoever, in which the CIA’s treatment of a handful of alleged intelligence asset-prisoners was allowed to set the tone for the treatment of all prisoners by any guards in any context.

There’s a partial summary of Bowden’s argument in this article, but this quote gives me pause:

The advantage of Bowden's system of post-facto justification resides chiefly in the uncertainty it produces. Unlike the torture warrant system where a detainee knows that his captors must obtain approval before administering any coercive measures, in Bowden's world the prisoner never knows for sure what the interrogator will do. This uncertainty alone provides the questioner significant leverage.

I don’t recall drawing that conclusion from the Bowden articles back when I read them, but because of the restricted access I can’t double-check it now to see if Bowden shares it. My understanding is that if torture is illegal, then any prisoner can reasonably expect not to encounter any, but still might anyway, and in that case has well-defined avenues of legal recourse available, however imperfectly they may function in practice (as is currently and always has been the case in police stations all across the nation for ordinary arrestees). And indeed since this is currently precisely how civil rights of ordinary prisoners in the criminal justice system are protected, it seems odd to view the illegality of torture as, in itself, a potential additional coercive method. Otherwise, the linked article summarizes Bowden accurately I think.

Catching up on the Constitution

Normblog has a nice round-up of comments from Iraqi voters and bloggers, and a pretty spot-on analysis of the meaning of the vote on the Constitution (by Jeff Weintraub). Austin Bay has an interesting collection of reactions and analysis as well.

New Political Religions/Barry Cooper

New Political Religions, or An Analysis of Modern Terrorism by Barry Cooper.

I’m a tad behind on book reviews and so had to dip back into this a little to jog my memory, and was reminded again of what a really interesting book this is, even though it ended up being a tad disappointing on the subject of Islamism. I posted about Cooper’s basic theory about pneumopathology, first & second reality, etc. with reference to Aum Shinrikyo and Stalin in some detail back in October when I was actually reading this the first time. And indeed, as I expected then, his treatment of the Islamic sense of history turned out to be as good as any I’ve come across so far:

… following the hijra, the Prophet defeated his own tribe in battle and therefore created the umma, humanity in statu nascendi obedient to God …

The most obvious characteristic of the early history of the Islamic community was its political success. Unlike Christianity, which penetrated an already existing political order, imperial Rome, Islam combined temporal and spiritual activity in a single act of imperial-religious founding. As Smith observed: "the success was comprehensive as well as striking. As we have said, the enterprise gained not only power but greatness. In addition to quickly attaining political and economic mastery, Muslim society carried forward into new accomplishments both art and science. Its armies won battles, its decrees were obeyed, its letters of credit were honored, its architecture was magnificent, its poetry charming, its scholarship imposing, its mathematics bold, its technology effective." Moreover, it proved difficult and perhaps impossible for one participating in Islamic history, that is, the pious Muslim, to distinguish the political from the religious dimensions. As Fazlur Rahman puts it, Muhammad was "duty-bound to succeed." His success, for the community, was understood to be an intrinsic part of Islam, an element of Islamic history, proof, as it were, of God’s favor. The victories of the Prophet were understood to be the victories of God.

… The success in actually spreading God’s message to humanity seemed to confirm the meaning of Islamic history in the course of events, namely, the history of Islamic society and of the Muslim religion. That is, the gap between paradigmatic and pragmatic history or between Augustine’s two cities seemed to be closing and perhaps even to be closed. For Muslims, God had spoken and told human beings how to live; those who submitted to God’s will and lived the way God said were visibly blessed. The pragmatic triumphs of the Muslim armies were understood as the confirmation and triumph of paradigmatic Islamic history. Pragmatic events thus confirmed a symbolic meaning and then came to be understood as having themselves acquired a symbolic meaning.

(Though Cooper does not head in this direction in his analysis, it seems to me partly to explain why the complaints of Muslims against the West seem to spring not just from jealousy as some have argued, or even solely resentment of specific real injustices, but from an underlying sense of existential wrongness with the current position of Muslims in the world. Indeed, even among the relatively secularized in Muslim lands there’s a sort of bafflement about this. This also perhaps is why it did finally become possible for Muslims in the 20th Century to embrace the European notion of an International Jewish Conspiracy, which would have seemed utterly nonsensical to their forebears. Yes, the Jews were sometimes enemies of the Prophet, but the Prophet always won. The Jews had not even succeeded in killing Jesus, though the Christians mistakenly thought they had. In Islamic history until the advent of the state of Israel, the Jews were considered too incompetent to seriously trouble anyone. How could it be otherwise if they were not Muslims?)

Anyhoo, having described the Aum Shinrinkyo cult and its progression from predicting a coming apocalypse from which those who accepted its purifying message could be saved to seeking to bring about the apocalypse in order to punish those who ignored it, Cooper promises:

As we shall argue below, modern Islamist thinkers such as Qutb or bin Laden easily combine jihadist and apocalyptic traditions in the expectation that a final and ecumenic conquest requires a pure society, which in turn is a bridge to the end time, an essential element in a grandiose redemptive event prior to the end of the world.

And there follows a valuable discussion of the theological evolution and general headspace (to use the technical term) of the Islamist jihadist movement and its suicide-bombing foot soldiers. But the evidence of apocalypticism is a bit thin:

The Jews are not, for Islamists, merely the citizens of Israel and unwelcome neighbors of the Muslim states of the region. Nor are they merely the repository of a long-standing hostility. Later in the interview bin Laden explained why he was so confident of victory: "We are certain that we shall--with the grace of God--prevail over the Americans and over the Jews, as the Messenger of Allah promised us in an authentic prophetic tradition when He said the Hour of Resurrection shall not come before Muslims fight Jews and before Jews hid behind trees and rocks."

This "authentic prophetic tradition" is one of many apocalyptic themes surrounding relations between the two religions, Islam and Judaism. Article Seven of the (Sunni) Hamas Covenant, for example, states: "The time [of Resurrection] will not come until Muslims fight the Jews and kill them, and until the Jews hide behind rocks and trees whence the call is raised: ‘Oh Muslim, here is a Jew hiding! Come and kill him.’" During the apocalyptic Hour of Resurrection, therefore, the common world is transfigured, and even the rocks and trees cry out to assist in the process of extermination of the enemies of God.

The purpose of this large-scale killing is akin to Asahara’s purpose of ordering large-scale pao-ing: to bring about a peaceful world of triumphant justice. As with the example of Aum Shinrikyo, common sense has difficulty grasping how an apocalyptic war of extermination can achieve an endless peace of righteousness. Thus, as Juergensmeyer said, with some perplexity, there are no "simple answers" that terrorists alive with apocalyptic expectations can give when they are asked "simple questions," such as: "What kind of state do you want? How do you plan to get it? How do you think you will get along with the rest of the world?" Juergensmeyer’s commonsense questions are easily dismissed by terrorist pneumopaths because such people are concerned, not with getting along with the rest of the world, but with changing the structure of reality, with "changing the world" as Marx put it, so that an apocalyptic conflict will give rise to a metastatic peace.

The hadith repeated in the forgoing is the only concrete Islamic or even Islamist reference cited as an example of Muslim apocalyptics; all other references Cooper makes are to a vague commonality with the apocalyptics of the Abrahamic tradition in general. It doesn’t seem like a firm basis for arguing that Islamism is actually animated by (as opposed to merely consonant with) apocalyptic expectations in the same way Aum Shinrikyo was. The hadith could be cited merely to bolster predictions of eventual victory, a claim common to most if not all leaders seeking to incite others to war. It might also serve the purpose of bolstering the notion, otherwise not terribly present in traditional Islamic sources or beliefs, that ultimately God wants all those Jews dead anyway, in the minds of those suiting up to slaughter unarmed busloads of them, today. If this is really all there is, isn’t it just as likely that Islamism is more like any other utopian political movement than an apocalyptic religious cult like Aum Shinrikyo? Could Lenin have answered any of Juergensmeyer’s "simple questions" in any detail either, before the fact of actually administering a state? After I had read Cooper’s book, references to "the Last Day" in Islamist texts did start jumping out at me, but I find it hard to tell how important they are. Christians refer to "Judgement Day" all the time, too. Among non-fundamentalist types it’s just supposed to remind you about prioritizing God’s expectations over material desires, not to imply that it’s just around the corner and you should be really expecting it or anything. I had probably recited the Lord’s Prayer a thousand times in my lifetime before learning that it contains references to the end time, in an Atlantic article about Millenarianism published on the eve of 2000. There’s not enough information here to even tell how present the End of Days is in the minds of ordinary Muslims, let alone Islamists.

I’m not convinced that the notion of "wrecking the present to create a peaceful future" as Cooper puts it presupposes an apocalyptic mindset, either. I have written before about the role the notion of going to war in order to make peace played in Muhammad’s use of warfare in spreading Islam, and a certain similarity that bears to the Bush doctrine (it’s a long entry, so to quote just the relevant bit):

At [the time of the hejira], only a small portion of the population of the Arabian peninsula was urbanized. Most Arabs were still organized into Bedouin tribes, and relations between tribes were mostly defined by warfare. Each tribe had its own god, and would routinely raid other tribes for treasure and slaves. The god of the loser would be smashed and repudiated by his or her previous adherents who had escaped the raid intact, and who would then sometimes adopt the god of the victors as evidently the stronger deity.

Muhammad sought to convert the Arabs to Islam by warfare in a similar fashion. For one thing, victory in warfare was the major sign of the efficacy of any god in the minds of the Arabs; for another, monotheism offered the promise, ultimately, of peace. Muhammad's innovation was to offer prisoners of war the option of conversion to Islam and membership in the Muslim community rather than execution or enslavement; his theory was that once all the Arabs were united under the god of Abraham, war itself would cease. In this theory and in this context, warfare for the sake of Islam was understood to be basically defensive, it being only a matter of time before any prosperous community, including any community of Muslims if it gained any traction or success, would be attacked and raided by another under a different banner. (The notion of preemptive "defensive" warfare, with the additional purpose of creating the conditions for a more permanent peace, will perhaps be familiar to those following current events). In essence, the goal was to replace warring tribal affiliations with shared Muslim confessional identity as the basis of community.

And indeed there are many other examples. "Making the world safe for democracy," anyone? Intriguingly, the "reality-based" remark from an unnamed person in the White House was leaked shortly after my first post about Cooper’s discussion of first and second reality; I half-suspected that someone in the administration was reading his book, or some part of its bibliography.

I don’t regard Cooper’s theory about the role of Muslim apocalyptics as wrong so much as unproven. I imagine I’ll have to read some of the books he footnotes to get a better handle on what Muslim apocalyptics actually are and what role they might play in Islamist theology. For my own future reference, assuming I ever get around to this, the most relevant texts seem to be:
David Cook, Contemporary Muslim Apocalyptic Literature. (Forthcoming. Well, maybe published by now.).
David Cook, Studies in Classic Muslim Apocalyptic.
David Benjamin & Steven Simon, The Age of Sacred Terror.
Mark Juergensmeyer, Terror in the Mind of God: The Global Rise of Religious Violence.

Geeking the Rules

Regarding my earlier posts on Islamism and geekiness, H. sent along some interesting links, saying:

There's a goody-goody aspect to Islamism, those horrid young men often lecture their families about how they aren't devout enough, blah, blah, blah, blah, until the families kick them out. Here's an example from Egypt:
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/07/international/africa/07sharm.html

Goody-goody, and with a sense of superiority like this British dude:
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/08/international/asia/08jihad.html

And just plain cruel in an ultra-legalistic way, like the Taliban punishing all men for not having beards, even the Hazara with their inherited inability to grow a proper beard. Women with disabled husbands couldn't work to support their families. The RULES are more important than anything else.

My summary: bossy, sense of superiority, goody-goody, angry, and extremely cruel. I think I remember the type from childhood.

The NYT stories reminded me of a moment in a movie (made-for-tv, I think) about the 9/11 terrorists supposedly based on available documents and interviews with family members. The movie focuses on the marital relationship between one of the bombers (I forget his name) and his spouse, and at one point shows him chastising his wife (a Turkish Muslim) for not wearing hijab inside their apartment while she is alone with him, and she is shocked; the demand seems bizarre to her.

That particular example goes to illustrate, I think, the highly mechanical way in which Islamists understand the "rules" of Islam. There is a great deal of debate, of course, as to whether the Qur’an really requires a particular mode of dress or even just head covering for women at all, or whether the Qur’an merely demands modest dress, and various iterations of the veil have simply been the historical costume of modesty for women living in Muslim lands; Muslims who interpret the Verse of the Hijab the latter way believe loosely-fitting and non-revealing Western dress and uncovered heads are perfectly modest in the Western context and hence are appropriate for Muslim women living in the West. But even among those for whom the veil is considered straightforwardly an Islamic requirement for women, there’s no belief that a woman should wear one while alone with her own husband. The requirement is contextual, not absolute. It’s not that a woman should be veiled all the time, it’s that she should be veiled when within sight of non-related men. The idea that a woman should just wear hijab all the time, period, appears to be an invention of 20th Century Islamists, and you will find some fundamentalist texts advising women that they may, for example, take off their gloves but not their headscarves in front of their husbands, sons, and uncles. This is distinct from normal and traditional Muslim practice, in which the veil is removed as soon as a woman is inside her own house with her own relatives.

Subsequent thought: And the hectoring about indoor hijab seems only to arise in proselytizing Islamist texts. Even within the Islamic Republic of Iran, nobody seems to believe that one should wear hijab indoors. I remember reading about an Iranian filmmaker grappling with the problem of presenting scenes of private life in films to be shown to the public. Islamic covering had to be maintained, yet it would seem totally unnatural to an Iranian public to show a woman wearing hijab inside her own house. The solution turned out to be things like, making it so the woman had just come out of the shower, wearing a robe and her hair done up in a towel, and so forth.

It could be that part of the purpose of encouraging a strict, mechanical rules orientation for prospective recruits is precisely to alienate them from their families and former friends, the better to allow an alternate consensus reality as created by recruiters to take hold in their minds. Separating recruits from non-believers seems to be a common tactic for "cults" of all stripes.

Update: Mr. Bell Jar came across "a kindred thought."

Book One Page One: You Won't Have To Give Up Your Gameboy

Further to yesterday’s post about the geek factor in Islamist terrorism, here’s another data point I didn’t have time to put up but is part of why I’ve tended to focus like a laser on articles that deal with this subject. From the introductory chapter of Milestones by Sayyid Qutb, a foundational Islamist text that continues to be widely distributed as a recruitment tool:

It is essential for mankind to have new leadership!

The leadership of mankind by Western man is now on the decline, not because Western culture has become poor materially or because its economic and military power has become weak. The period of the Western system has come to an end primarily because it is deprived of those life-giving values which enabled it to be the leader of mankind.

It is necessary for the new leadership to preserve and develop the material fruits of the creative genius of Europe, and also to provide mankind with such high ideals and values as have so far remained undiscovered by mankind, and which will also acquaint humanity with a way of life which is harmonious with human nature, which is positive and constructive, and which is practicable.

Islam is the only System which possesses these values and this way of life.
The period of the resurgence of science has also come to an end. This period, which began with the Renaissance in the sixteenth century after Christ and reached its zenith in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, does not possess a reviving spirit.

All nationalistic and chauvinistic ideologies which have appeared in modern times, and all the movements and theories derived from them, have also lost their vitality. In short, all man-made individual or collective theories have proved to be failures.

At this crucial and bewildering juncture, the turn of Islam and the Muslim community has arrived--the turn of Islam, which does not prohibit material inventions. Indeed, it counts it as an obligation on man from the very beginning of time, when God deputed him as His representative on earth, and regards it under certain conditions as worship of God and one of the purposes of man's creation.

"And when Your Sustainer said to the angels, I am going to make My representative on earth.," (Qur'an 2:30)

"And I have not created jinns and men except that they worship Me." (2:143)

Thus the turn of the Muslim community has come to fulfill the task for mankind which God has enjoined upon it.

"You are the best community raised for the good of mankind. You enjoin what is good and forbid what is wrong, and you believe in God." (3:110)

"Thus We have made you a middle community, so that you be witnesses for mankind as the Messenger is a witness for you." (2:143)

Islam cannot fulfill its role except by taking concrete form in a society, rather, in a nation; for man does not listen, especially in this age, to an abstract theory which is not seen materialized in a living society. From this point of view, we can say that the Muslim community has been extinct for a few centuries, for this Muslim community does not denote the name of a land in which Islam resides, nor is it a people whose forefathers lived under the Islamic system at some earlier time. It is the name of a group of people whose manners, ideas and concepts, rules and regulations, values and criteria, are all derived from the Islamic source. The Muslim community with these characteristics vanished at the moment the laws of God became suspended on earth.

If Islam is again to play the role of the leader of mankind, then it is necessary that the Muslim community be restored to its original form.

It is necessary to revive that Muslim community which is buried under the debris of the man-made traditions of several generations, and which is crushed under the weight of those false laws and customs which are not even remotely related to the Islamic teachings, and which, in spite of all this, calls itself the 'world of Islam.'

I am aware that between the attempt at 'revival' and the attainment of 'leadership' there is a great distance, as the Muslim community has long ago vanished from existence and from observation, and the leadership of mankind has long since passed to other ideologies and other nations, other concepts and other systems. This was the era during which Europe's genius created its marvelous works in science, culture, law and material production, due to which mankind has progressed to great heights of creativity and material comfort. It is not easy to find fault with the inventors of such marvelous things, especially since what we call the 'world of Islam' is completely devoid of all this beauty.

But in spite of all this, it is necessary to revive Islam. The distance between the revival of Islam and the attainment of world leadership may be vast, and there may be great difficulties on the way; but the first step must be taken for the revival of Islam.

If we are to perform our task with insight and wisdom, we must first know clearly the nature of those qualities on the basis of which the Muslim community can fulfill its obligation as the leader of the world. This is essential so that we may not commit any blunders at the very first stage of its reconstruction and revival.

The Muslim community today is neither capable of nor required to present before mankind great genius in material inventions, which will make the world bow its head before its supremacy and thus re-establish once more its world leadership. Europe's creative mind is far ahead in this area, and at least for a few centuries to come we cannot expect to compete with Europe and attain supremacy over it in these fields.

Hence we must have some other quality, that quality which modern civilization does not possess.

But this does not mean that we should neglect material progress. We should also give our full attention and effort in this direction, not because at this stage it is an essential requirement for attaining the leadership of mankind, but because it is an essential condition for our very existence; and Islam itself, which elevates man to the position of representative of God on earth, and which, under certain conditions, considers the responsibilities of this representative as the worship of God and the purpose of man's creation, makes material progress obligatory for us.

You may read the entire chapter (though this is the bulk of it) here (no hard link, Qutb is in the author scroll on the side there). I don’t want to make to much out of this; it’s possible that the technological superiority of the West was (and perhaps still is) so widely taken as a sign of civilizational efficacy that Qutb thought of it as the very first dragon he needed to slay in recruiting others to the Islamist cause. But the same might have been said about Western military power as well, which instead is referenced only in passing. In any case it’s interesting that an argument about how the West will soon experience a decline in technological progress and only a new Islamic leadership will be able to take it up again is in the introduction to a book like this, perhaps explaining why math and science geeks haven’t shied away from a movement frequently characterized (incorrectly) as “medieval.”

Suicide Terrorism: The Geek Factor

Here’s an interesting article about brain differences that contribute to empathic versus systematizing skills, how those skills seem to be distributed slightly unequally between men and women, and how heritability of those properties might contribute to autism and autism spectrum disorders like Asperger’s. Here’s another discussing the relationship between autism spectrum disorders and skills in math and sciences, and describing how “geek colonies” created by workplaces like those in Silicon Valley seem to both confirm the genetic hypothesis and the link between autism and math/science-oriented careers.

Here’s an article presenting one self-identified geek’s opinion about why other geeks seem to find reductive and rigidly-structured ideologies like Objectivism so appealling. Here’s another explaining that most volunteers for Kamikaze units in the Japanese air force were 20-something university students, usually in the sciences. Here’s another discussing how Islamist suicide bombers share that profile.

Most Islamic scholars characterize Islamist theology and interpretation as an obscene cartoon of the real thing; hence many analysts have argued that highly secularized, science-oriented individuals figure largely in the ranks of Islamist terrorists because they are more susceptible to indoctrination in Islamist ideology due to their pre-existing ignorance of Islamic tradition. It’s easier to fill up an empty vessel than to get someone to look at an old belief system in a dramatically different way, goes the thinking. But it may be instead that the same non-empathic, systematized way of thinking that leads a person to math and science pursuits also tends to lead a person to a rigid and totalizing simple-rules-oriented ideology like Islamism to pick an example at random.

What difference does any of this make? Oh, probably none. But it’s kind of interesting.

Disclaimer: Most geeks are totally harmless, some of my best friends are geeks, I'm a geek, but not of the sciency kind so I can "pass." Etc. etc.

Arab Opinion On Reform

Abu Aardvark has an interesting post about the results of a (non-scientific) public opinion poll by Al-Arabiya:

More than 80% of participants said that the delayed development of the Arab world is the fault of the reluctance of their governments about changes and reforms. Since the other options on this question included "the Arab Israeli conflict" and "terrorism", this result seems significant. As for the reasons why people don't participate in political life in the Arab world, 61% said that lack of confidence in political parties was the main reason they abstained, while some 94% mentioned "fear" as a reason not to participate. I found it somewhat disheartening that only 23% saw freedom of expression as the fastest way to develop, although I wonder if the framing of the question mattered there. In a different part of the survey, 59% saw "the absence of democracy and freedom of opinion" was the most important challenge confronting political development.

The (also non-scientific) Al Jazeera poll he posted about earlier was also pretty interesting. Abu comments:

Second, the 37%-35% net in favor of reform and democracy over Palestine/Israel as the highest priority issue should actually be the headline finding here. In past surveys of this kind, you were far more likely to find 60-70% choosing Palestine first, which crowded out all other issues. That Palestine is not now crowding out reform is encouraging and interesting.

And later, in his comments section, he adds,

Reform and democracy and human rights are not alternatives to caring about Palestine. Posing them as such has been standard practice for Arab rulers for many years, and it's been all too effective as an excuse for refusing change. My sense of this is not that pushing for domestic reform comes at the expense of caring about the Palestinians, but that the two issues go together for a lot of Arabs today. Certainly that's the way it's been framed on al Jazeera for years now...

Civilized People Would Never Tolerate Genocide!

See now, this is the kind of thing that baffles me:

You don't need to be a master geo-strategist or have a doctorate in comparative anthropology to figure out that a culture and religion indifferent or worse to murder on a large scale is going to be a problem for the civilized countries. Egyptian, Saudi, and other Arab Muslims who object to this characterization of them have it within their power to prove me wrong, or not, by what they finally do about Darfur.

See the entire history of world-wide indifference to instances of genocide when the national interests of no outside nation are at stake for the easiest refutation of this statement (Kosovo was an exception, and even then only just barely, as you may recall—his use of the example here is disingenuous, since obviously European intervention followed American intervention, which is highly unlikely ever to be forthcoming with regard to Sudan), which I’m sure everyone can work out for themselves. The question for me is, has always been, why does a person who believes this support the Bush Doctrine on any level? Do they really believe that we can actually change the basic culture and religious beliefs of that many people at will? If you really, truly believe that Islam and Arab culture is inherently savage, then it seems to me that you must also think that there is no hope whatsoever for democratization, and that those who want to return to the "realpolitik" model, of conducting foreign policy in the Middle East through repressive dictators and monarchs whose rule we help to maintain, are right, always have been, always will be.

And beyond that, how can anyone who understands the relationship between ruler and press in the kinds of manifestly unfree countries we’re talking about here possibly mistake press silence about Darfur as an expression of the will of the people in general, rather than of rulers who have no intention of acting and therefore see no reason to get anyone to get all riled up about it? Or to complicate their narrative of blaming all their failures on the International Jewish Conspiracy and its puppet the U.S, or vice-versa, by acknowledging any shortcomings in other Arab-ruled nations? The pattern here is political, not cultural or religious, and has been the default since long before Darfur. I don’t get how you can beat your chest about lack of freedom in Middle Eastern countries in one breath and then treat their state-run media as some kind of deep expression of the popular will and character in another. A good Cold Warrior would never have been caught dead making this error about Pravda back in the day.

The irony is, 100 years ago, people like the guest blogger here were always going on about how passive and sensualist and downright effeminate Arab and Islamic culture were. No, really.

P. said: The interesting thing is that the "liberal" argument for 9-11 invokes all kinds of examples of economic duplicity with regimes as nasty as Sudan's.

To think of the Arab world as a collaborate and culpable monolith is as naive as saying that America could intervene forcefully on the part of the Basques, or the Kossacks.

Furthermore, Kosovo was a belated exception to a rule of sovereignity that also came out in Turkey, Rhodesia, Cambodia, Stalinist Russia, Rwanda, Uganda, Australia, China/Korea under Japan, and the Congo, to name a few examples from the 20th century. Stopping genocide is never as easy as it looks, and can be politically and fiscally disastrous. The problem from Hell is not yet solved, because the UN is not an effective or trusted force in these matters, and no other body has the scope and resources to put out all these fires. In most cases, genocide gets stopped by neighboring countries when the refugee burden gets too hot to handle. This is certainly not the quickest way to avert tragedy, but its probably the only realistic way to bring an end to genocide wwithin.

I replied: The interesting thing is that the "liberal" argument for 9-11 invokes all kinds of examples of economic duplicity with regimes as nasty as Sudan's.

I find that mindbending, myself. If you can recognize how destructive economic, military, and political duplicity with repressive regimes in the Middle East has been to our long-term interests so far, particularly in terms of the ideoligical development of Islamism, how can your answer be: Keep doing the same, except while rewarding Islamist terrorists with partial fulfillment of their demands? I couldn't think of a more effeciently self-destructive course if I tried.

M. said: The question for me is, has always been, why does a person who believes this support the Bush Doctrine on any level? Do they really believe that we can actually change the basic culture and religious beliefs of that many people at will? If you really, truly believe that Islam and Arab culture is inherently savage, then it seems to me that you must also think that there is no hope whatsoever for democratization, and that those who want to return to the "realpolitik" model, of conducting foreign policy in the Middle East through repressive dictators and monarchs whose rule we help to maintain, are right, always have been, always will be.

I suspect that they support the use of force to take out some enemies and concentrate the minds of others, but are suspicious of the democratization project and consider it either a smokescreen or wrongheaded. (Up through the elections, I was always afraid that we'd lose our nerve and go back to the more traditional strategy of installing a strongman we can control, which much of the foreign policy establishment seems genuinely more comfortable with.) It's certainly possible to support taking out Saddam and putting troops in the Mideast as a matter of asserting power and pressure his neighbors, as well providing an opportunity to take on the enemy under military conditions far away rather than law-enforcement conditions in the US, without seriously expecting or caring that democracy take root in Iraq or anywhere else in the region. From a realpolitik perspective, repressive dictators and monarchs who are more afraid of their violent Islamists than they are of us is a lose-lose, as are repressive dictators who derive a large part of their authority from being our enemy-- it's just that there's no distinction between repressive dictators and an elective governments that do likewise, and-- I think-- no inherent presumption that one governing style is more or less likely to be a problem for us than another. (Though since you live with someone who did graduate work on this sort of thing, he presumably can do better than my muddling.)

Conversely, we have pursued policies to change what we at least thought were a culture's basic cultural and political beliefs before-- postwar Japan being the clearest example, but there was certainly a sense that German culture was inherently militaristic, violent, and expansionist (hence the support for the Morgenthau plan of essentially destroying Germany as an industrial country-- and if you'd asked me in 1945, I might well have gone for that). I think rooting out Islam would be on a completely different scale (and would be impossible short of genocide on a scale to make the 20th century blanch), but others may see it as a bigger version of the remaking of the Axis powers.

G. replied: I think rooting out Islam would be on a completely different scale (and would be impossible short of genocide on a scale to make the 20th century blanch), but others may see it as a bigger version of the remaking of the Axis powers.

I don't think there is any political objective to displace Islam (though some evangelists surely hope one day to convert all Muslims and everyone else too in a spiritual sense), but rather to tone it down to the tolerant religion of peace which respects women etc. which some adherents (and quite a few spinmeisters) maintain it is. In short, to foster a pre-1975-Beirut-style, Western-looking Islam by shutting down the Taliban, the ayatollahs and (one would hope sooner rather than later) the Saudi royal family.

The shorthand critique of the democratization initiative is that Americans (or W. anyway) believe that, given a chance, everyone else in the world would choose to be just like us. I think, however, that this is pretty much the case. Or at least they would be as much like as as, say, France: not necessarily best of friends, but not blood enemies and happy to vacation in the other's country. The lure of western individual freedom is just too intoxicating.

The problem is what constitutes "given a chance." A democratic ballot is no guarantee of democracy, let alone a (classical) liberal democracy, unless there is also all the accordant social and economic institutions and some degree of religious pluralism or other check on clerical power.

From that perspective, I think Iraq's ethnic and religious factionalism may actually be conducive to democratization since it would encourage coalition-building. Unless they kill each other first, of course.

I replied: it's just that there's no distinction between repressive dictators and an elective governments that do likewise, and-- I think-- no inherent presumption that one governing style is more or less likely to be a problem for us than another.

Ah, I think this is the part I was really not getting, I think because it seems so self-evidently false to me. Most of the pragmatic problems with attempting to realize foreign policy goals through "repressive dictators and monarchs who are more afraid of their violent Islamists than they are of us" is the total lack of tranparency; we never really know that they're doing what we think they're doing, and what else they might be doing that isn't even on our radar, and we don't seem capable of producing an intelligence community that can effectively keep an eye on them. The transparency in government that accompanies democracy as a matter of course would solve this problem. Or am I missing something?

"Eurabia"

Here’s an interesting article arguing that European Muslim discontent is overrated.

I've always thought the "Eurabia" thing seemed hysterical and overblown, largely because alarmist predictions about population explosions in general have a history of being politically motivated and ultimately proving false; it is great to see so much info pulled together to prove it baseless in the here and now. I would add to the theory presented in the article about schadenfreude the additional agenda I've noticed in the writings of people like Mark Steyn, to fold "Eurabia" panic into a narrative about sexual degeneracy (abortion, divorce, birth control, the sexual revolution, feminism in general) leading to the demise of Western Civilization as a whole. In this model, the Muslim takeover is just the wind that blows over our house of cards, and there's an underlying admiration of Muslim sexual conservatism there; strong Islamic family values will naturally defeat weak Western secular ones.

Anti-war rhetoric has also contributed its share to the panic; rhetoric about Western aggression inevitably making more terrorists is bolstered by overstating Muslim hostility worldwide, and accordingly I've noticed anti-war sources relying a little too credulously on sketchy reports of stepped-up terrorist recruitment among European Muslims since the beginning of the Iraq War. And arguments against democratization from the anti-war left nearly always feature alarmist predictions about any given group of Muslims alleged propensity to "elect Osama bin Laden" if allowed to vote. All through the Presidential election campaign last year I saw bits and pieces of rhetoric lifted from Imperial Hubris: How the West is Losing the War on Terror, an anti-war book by a CIA "expert" on Islamist terrorism that was harshly critical of the Bush administration. I can only hope that most who repeated its predictions hadn't actually read the thing; his basic theory is that nearly all Muslims are Islamists, so that our two options are to kill as many of them as possible (and he treats that as a serious option), or to completely withraw from all relations with the Middle East and wall ourselves off in a fortress America.

The notion that Islam and Arabs are inherently hyper-violent therefore serves many political agendas, which is perhaps why it seems to have solidified to such a degree across political affiliations. (Or maybe the fact that both groups mostly only turned up on the news when blowing stuff up in the 20 years or so preceding 9/11 made beliefs based on this stereotype easy to adopt).