*Some Chicago Boyz know each other from student days at the University of Chicago. Others are Chicago boys in spirit. The blog name is also intended as a good-humored gesture of admiration for distinguished Chicago boys including those pictured above (we claim no affiliation), and others who helped to liberalize Latin American economies.
"Restore(s) a little sanity into current political debate" - Kenneth Minogue, TLS "Projects a more expansive and optimistic future for Americans than (the analysis of) Huntington" - James R. Kurth, National Interest "One of (the) most important books I have read in recent years" - Lexington Green
I’m late, late, incredibly late on four books that authors gave me to review. That doesn’t mean that I can’t give credit where credit’s due … in plenty of time for the book-buying frenzy before the holidays. With luck, I’ll finish off the full reviews in December but since *I’m* buying copies of these books for friends and family, maybe one or more of them might fit someone on your list. All recommended for the categories of people headlined.
Economists, Physicists, History of Science buffs
Newton and the Counterfeiter describes Isaac Newton’s multi-year battle with one of London’s most successful counterfeiters. No surprise who wins in the end, but it is surprising how well Levenson provides background on the protagonists … without overwhelming the reader. Recommended for students or professionals with an interest in the history of money, finance, or just a fascination with what the great Newton did after he polished off the Principia. The counterfeiter’s “colourful” life precludes giving this book to a pre-teen but all others will find it, like the earlier-reviewed The Ghost Map, a fascinating snapshot of life in London.
Japanophiles, Asian culture fans, World History Buffs
I’m years late on this one but Through the Looking Glass is highly recommended for anyone wondering how Japan ended up with such a different culture … and why their adoption of Western technology at a breakneck pace in the late 19th century was so successful. Thought-provoking and such a good summary of Japanese culture that I’ve struggled for over 50 hours to epitomize in writing what the author has written in hopes of getting a full book review out the door. I’ve failed, but I’ve also bought more than a half-dozen copies of this book for friends on two continents with an interest in Asian culture.
Free: The Future of a Radical Price by Wired Editor-in-Chief Chris Anderson picks up where his Long Tail finished. The halving of computation, bandwidth, and data storage costs each year has made a new generation of businesses financially feasible. The freemium service (like Flickr, LinkedIn, Facebook, etc.) where basic services are free and a small set of customers pay for additional features, has become so common that it is now unremarkable. Anderson looks at the history of the word, the different definitions of free in the context of culture and business, and the gap in the academic literature in understanding the new generation of businesses that leverage “free” in profound ways. My book review will, like my earlier review of Long Tail, look at why the Anglosphere has been the source of so much “free” over the last couple of centuries and why it leads the way in both charitable and profitable businesses that leverage the idea. A “must have” for anyone thinking of starting a business. People under 30 will think “d’uh” but Anderson still offers a lot of context and some very good background on the history of “free” in business in the 20th century for younger readers. And a fun, even revolutionary, read. I’m buying copies for nieces and friends with an interest in media.
Ambitious NCOs, Military Officers, World History buffs, Prognosticators of the American future
Empires of the Silk Road: A History of Central Eurasia from the Bronze Age to the Present is a grand summary of the culture of the steppes, from the time of the domestication of the horse and the appearance of lactose-tolerant humans (see 10,000 Year Explosion), to the 21st century suppression of the Chechens, Tibetans, and Uighurs. A fascinating source book on the ebb and flow of culture across the “ocean of grass” and the firm focus these cultures had on trading with the great empires on their periphery. Trade with us … or die. Most of these cultures, and the direct influence they had on world history, has been largely unknown except to a handful of scholars. In Empires, the author brings all this background information together in one place, draws on the most modern scholarship in linguistics, history, and archaeology, and provides a ground-breaking introduction to the general public. The striking parallels with the European nations that built empires based on liquid oceans becomes clear only by the end of the book … as is the tentative nature of Russia and China’s hold on the vast interior steppe (triggered by the introduction of firearms, and only solidified in the final massacres of the Junghars by Qing China in the mid-18th century). Anyone with an interest in Russia, the Middle East, or China will learn a great deal about the role of the Central Asian Culture complex on these areas in the last 4,000 years. Nowadays, military folk posted to the ‘Stans or places like Mongolia will find this book invaluable … firstly as a brisk introduction to the cultural roots of the place, and secondly as a reference book to read and re-read in future years to grasp “the big picture.” If you have friends or family that are ambitious for learning about the continent (let alone the region), start them off at the beginning. Anyone senior to Captain should buy this book simply to have it ready when needed. Because it will be needed. You can’t understand the Chinese and Russians without understanding the “enemy” they faced for centuries and the echoes that continue in their territorial obsessions. Highly, highly recommended. My full review will comment on the author’s more personal assessments but his account of Central Asian history is a entirely straight-forward, well referenced, and real service to the English-speaking public. I’ve bought copies, again, for friends in Europe and North America.
I’ve been saying this for some time. The American people are (largely) not suicidal, and will demand to know who is responsible, and they will therefore seek out the variable with the highest degree of correlation. But if some of the variables are hidden by law, they’ll use the (less precise) visible ones: race, ethnicity, gender, religion, national origin. Every Leftist and Imam professes to be afraid that Ethnic Profiling or Religious Profiling is coming, but if they continue to prevent the rest of American from engaging in Ideological Profiling, then Ethnic Profiling is what we’re going to get. Lots of innocents will be harmed, but Americans will feel safer and think “It’s the best we could do in a bad situation.”
Charles Cameron, former Senior Analyst with The Arlington Institute and Principal Researcher with the Center for Millennial Studies at Boston University. He specializes in forensic theology, with a deep interest in millennial, eschatological and apocalyptic religious sects of all stripes.
Charles will be doing a series of guest posts at Zenpundit that will drill down into the important but often elusive religious-cultural connections that impact American national security and foreign policy issues.
…..A couple of other recent items in the news about languages and translation at home and abroad should concern us.A report from the US Department of Justice on the FBI’s Translation Project was less than enthusiastic, not only finding that significant quantities of material collected in the Bureau’s highest-priority counter-terrorism and counter-intelligence collection categories were never evaluated, but that the number of translators inn the FBI pool had diminished since a 2005 audit, that in 2008 the FBI met its hiring goals for linguists in only 2 of its 14 critical languages, that security clearance and language proficiency training for a new linguist took 19 months before hiring could take place, and that 70 percent of the FBI’s own linguists in the field offices tested did not attend the FBIs required training course. ”
The very first episode of the “I Love Lucy” show established a template for all of the sitcoms to follow. The episode, titled, “Lucy Thinks Ricky Is Trying to Murder Her” has the archetypal sitcom plot:
Lucy is absorbed in her mystery/suspense novel…Later on, Lucy over hears a conversation Ricky is having with his agent and misunderstands the phone call, as she is only able to hear Ricky’s end of the line. She then comes to the mistaken conclusion that Ricky is going to kill her, based on the novel’s plot and Ethel’s card reading. [emp added]
Much wackiness ensues. The device is as old as comedy itself. See Shakespeare and the Greek comedies. Character A misunderstands something Character B did or said and then takes action based on that misunderstanding, with comedic consequences. Most importantly, the resolution of the plot occurs when the misunderstanding is cleared up by explicit and honest communication. Everyone hugs and all is forgiven.
A lot of observers are having trouble figuring out the philosophical underpinnings of Barack Obama’s foreign policy. How does the president see America’s place in the world? How will he use American power? How much does he care about such things?
I think Obama et al believe that all of life’s problems are ultimately just the result of miscommunications and misunderstandings like those that drive a sitcom plot. Obama views himself in the role of the wise character in the sitcom who puzzles out the misunderstanding and brings all of the characters together for hugs at the end.
Let’s call this the “Wacky Sitcom Mixup” school of foreign policy.
I think that, look, we all know that the Israeli-Palestinian issue is one that is a very serious and difficult problem that we are working hard also to try to resolve. We inherited a lot of problems. If you remember, when my husband left office, we were very close to an agreement because he worked on it all the time. The next administration did not make it a priority and did not really do much until toward the end. And unfortunately, we are trying to make up for some lost time, in my opinion.
The endless attempts by the Obama administration to blame everything on their predecessor are getting worn around the edges, and betray a serious lack of class and of executive strength. But even worse: Hillary’s formulation puts the blame for the Israeli-Palestinian problem in the wrong place–on the U.S. (and, by extension, on Israel) rather than on the death-cult leadership that has long controlled the Palestinian territories. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted by Lexington Green on 11th September 2009 (All posts by Lexington Green)
Thanks to Trent, I was reminded of something that I have always considered to be the most important fact about 9/11, yet which is rarely mentioned in these terms:
The only part of the American national security establishment that successfully defended America on 9/11 was the portion of the reserve militia on board Flight 93, acting without orders, without hierarchy, without uniforms or weapons, by spontaneous organization and action.
Most people don’t even know they are part of the reserve militia.
But the genius of the Founders lives on in this legal category, which recognizes that the ultimate responsibility for the defense of the country rests on and in the people. The standing Army, and the organized militia (National Guard) are the main line of defense, but the people are an army in latent form, the ultimate defense force, as any democratic people should be and must be.
This article, entitled The Militia And The Constitution: A Legal History, is very good. it establishes the deep roots of the militia concept, down to the American founding. Buried in the last footnote, it says:
The United States technically continues to have a national “general” militia, consisting of all able-bodied males between the ages of 17 and 45 years of age who are not members of the National Guard or the Naval Militia. 10 U.S.C. § 311 (West Supp.1989). Likewise, state codes contain provisions establishing general “unorganized” militias. See, e.g., VA. CODE ANN. § 44-1 (Michie Supp.1989). For practical purposes, however, these “organizations” have ceased to play any real role in national defense.
(emphasis added) But look how wrong, how 20th Century, that last comment is. In the era of mass armies, the “practical purposes” of national defense did not have a place for the “reserve militia”. But in an era of scattered, seemingly random, attacks, by terrorists and saboteurs, the only reasonable hope to thwart, contain, defeat and respond to these modern enemies is if the population at large is resilient and mentally and physically prepared — and armed — to respond to the surprise and the initiative of the enemy, as the Flight 93 passengers did. For practical purposes, on 9/11 the “general militia” far from “ceasing” to play a “real role in national defense”, was the only “organization” that successfully played any role in national defense.
(The spontaneous evacution of Manhattan by ship and boat owners was a similar bottom-up response.)
The lessons of 9/11 have been left unlearned for eight years in America.
These lessons contradict most of what people claim to know about America, modernity, and how the world works.
Bottom-up, inductive, spontaneous self-organization is the essence of America.
It works in all fields when it is allowed to do so.
UPDATE: Jim Bennett wrote to remind me of his observation, “The Era of Osama lasted about an hour and a half or so, from the time the first plane hit the tower to the moment the General Militia of Flight 93 reported for duty.” Jim’s UPI column appears not to be online (why not?), but Mark Steyn quotes him here. We Anglospherists take the long view on these issues.
(This is basically a rerun of my posts from this day in 2006-2008. Some new links added this year are at the bottom of the post.)
I am increasingly worried about our prospects for success in the battle against those who would destroy our civilization. America and the other democracies possess great military, economic, and intellectual strengths–but severe internal divisions threaten our ability to use these resources effectively.
Within days of the collapse of the Towers, it started. “Progressive” demonstrators brought out the stilt-walkers, the Uncle Sam constumes, and the giant puppets of George Bush. They carried signs accusing America of planning “genocide” against the people of Afghanistan.
Professors and journalists preached about the sins of Western civilization, asserting that we had brought it all on ourselves. A well-known writer wrote of her unease when her daughter chose to buy and display an American flag. Some universities banned the display of American flags in dormitories, claiming that such display was “provocative.” Read the rest of this entry »
Posted by Lexington Green on 14th July 2009 (All posts by Lexington Green)
Do these Islamist fighting groups ignore the international laws of armed conflict? They do not. It would be a grave mistake to conclude that they do. Instead, they study it carefully and they understand it well.
They know that a British or Israeli commander and his men are bound by international law and the rules of engagement that flow from it. They then do their utmost to exploit what they view as one of their enemy’s main weaknesses.
Their very modus operandi is built on the, correct, assumption that Western armies will normally abide by the rules.
It is not simply that these insurgents do not adhere to the laws of war. It is that they employ a deliberate policy of operating consistently outside international law. Their entire operational doctrine is founded on this basis.
Posted by Helen on 15th February 2009 (All posts by Helen)
After all, I am becoming involved in this discussion and a posting might be preferable to responses on the discussion forum. This is cross-posted from the BrugesGroupBlog, which I run in parallel to my work on EUReferendum. As I explain elsewhere on it, the intention had been to make this blog a part of a structured research programme but that is not going to happen. So, it continues as a more or less personal political blog until I set up another one as part of a network Richard North and I envisage.
On EUReferendum my colleague, Richard North (often referred to by me as the boss) and I have expended a very large number of words on the Geert Wilders affair. It would, therefore, be seemly to call a halt to the flood and so I shall (albeit temporarily) as soon as I have discussed a couple of related issues.
My colleague has already written about the Conservative Party’s ridiculous reaction but there have been some developments there as chronicled by ToryBoyBlog, a.k.a. Conservative Home.
At first the Conservatives, laughably known as Her Majesty’s Opposition, kept quiet on the matter of a Dutch parliamentarian being stopped from taking up an invitation by two members of the House of Lords to explain his political views because another member of the House of Lords, who is waiting to be sentenced for dangerous driving that resulted in a death, was threatening violence. The threats were unlikely to have turned into reality but that is a separate issue. They were made. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted by Verity on 12th February 2009 (All posts by Verity)
Britain’s House of Lords is our second, or revising, chamber.
Until the middle of the last century, the lords referred to were all hereditaries and many of their antecedents had had a seat in the English Parliament since its inception. It wasn’t a full time job and didn’t pay anything. Most lords had ancestral fortunes to conserve, ancestral lands to manage and family businesses to further. Some who lived in London attended fairly frequently, but most of the rest of them rolled up whenever there was a debate to which they could contribute something by way of their expertise. They got a little daily allowance – their lunch allowance and their train fare – and rolled back to the ancient pile.
In 1958, life peers (the title dies with the holder) were created as a means of widening the range of expertise in the Lords, and for rewarding those who had served the country. Such peers are created by the prime minister of the day.
It worked fairly well until Tony Blair got his grasping, febrile fingers on it. He created a number of life peers who have recently been found to have been selling access and favors for large amounts of dosh. As with all who subscribe to the Left in Britain, Blair professed to believe in “multiculturalism” and made cringe worthy, and destructive, obeisance to Islam. In this cause, he created a title for “Lord” Ahmed.
Zenpundit opined that al-Suri appears to be the Islamic terrorist movement’s “John Arquilla, William Lind and Louis Beam rolled into one”, and that “he probably would have made a fine blogger had he not also been – well – a sociopathic nihilist.” Agreed, though I would expressly add “homicidal, sociopathic nihilist”.
Several facts stood out about as-Suri. One was that his politico-military thought is not so much Islamic, and certainly not traditionalist, as a mélange of Islamic themes mixed with other revolutionary and radical thinking originating in the West. Also, he encouraged a massively decentralized Jihad, cell-based, self-starting, networked but not hierarchical, with al Qaeda as a source of inspiration and doctrine but not command and control. Only such a hyper-dispersed effort could wage a bottom-up struggle against the USA and its allies, which enjoy so many advantages in terms of surveillance and destructive power.
Islamic militancy has become infused with Third World theories, Marxism, fascism, and nationalism. It cannot escape the whirlwind of ideas that has drifted over the decades into the Middle East. All militant websites seemed to urge for a peripheral jihad in the frontiers (Chechnya, the Philippines island of Mindanao, Afghanistan, Bosnia, Kashmir) and for an imaginary ummah (Islamic society) in which they hold dominion under the guise of piety. He points out that many of these websites originate not from the periphery but from Europe, Malaysia and even North America areas in which there is access to technology. This is a key observation: for the Islamic militants, a cell requires access to free societies and western technologies to propagate and acquire tools for their rejectionist movements.
The Jihad cannot be based in the lands of the existing Ummah. If it is limited to the technical means, and even the intellectual means, available there, it is doomed. First, it would be trapped in a backwater, waging a struggle against the ruthless police states of the “Near Enemy”, where it has already repeatedly suffered defeat. Second, without the network-enabling technology which is densely available in the developed world, as well as useful non-Islamic-derived ideas, an effective strategy such as the one al-Suri was seeking cannot be developed and executed.
The developed countries can only be effectively attacked to the extent their enemies are permitted a lodgment within their own borders.
Sending Western troops to fight Jihadis in Waziristan may or may not make the USA and its Allies more secure. But rooting out the Jihadis in New York, Detroit, Los Angeles, London, Paris and Munich is essential.
Osama bin Laden is the name and face we typically associate with the global Islamist terrorist movement. But bin Laden may be the man of yesterday. Al-Suri may ultimately be seen as the superior theoretician and strategist for the ongoing militant jihad against the USA, its allies, and the “near enemy”, i.e. the existing governments of the Arab Middle East. The reviewer describes al-Suri as “al-Qaida’s most formidable and far-sighted military strategist.”
The review gives an overview of al-Suri’s extraordinary life as a militant, and as the author of numerous books.
What I found most interesting was the parallel between al-Suri’s thought, and some of the current thinking among Western military writers on decentralized and networked warfare.
On Monday night, the ABC’s Lateline program ran a report on the suffering of civilians in Gaza, an absolutely legitimate subject. Among the heart-rending footage there was an interview with a Gazan civilian who understandably complained bitterly about Israel’s actions. But the ABC reporter didn’t ask the absolutely obvious question: Do you wish your leaders would stop firing missiles into Israel, which make inevitable both the economic blockade and the Israeli military response? The ABC, as usual, was following more or less exactly the terrorists’ preferred script for the Western media. Islamist terrorists have always been centrally concerned with the Western media and their understanding of its story presentation dynamics is acute, as this episode demonstrates. Hamas gets to sheet all blame to Israel.
[...]
Israel is always told to retreat to the 1967 borders. The two places where it has done this – southern Lebanon and Gaza – have been disasters for Israel and have not produced peace. The 1967 borders only work for Israel if its neighbours don’t make war on Israel any more. There is no indication at all that either Hamas or Hezbollah, or indeed Iran, which soon enough will possess nuclear weapons, is on a trajectory towards accepting Israel’s right to exist.
And finally, Hamas may well be operating in very close concert with its sponsors, Iran and Syria. There is tremendous Sunni Arab concern about the growing power of Iran, evident not least in the bloody political vacuum in Lebanon.
A crisis in Gaza forces the forthcoming Arab summit to focus on the Palestinians, rather than Syria’s murderous campaign to prevent the emergence of a democratic Lebanon.
After the situation in Lebanon becomes clearer, a huge Israeli operation in Gaza, to take control of the Gaza-Egypt border and to set up new intelligence mechanisms within Gaza, all to prevent the increase in rocket firings, is perhaps all but inevitable.
Posted by Helen on 10th February 2008 (All posts by Helen)
It was inevitable that the stories both in the media and on the blogosphere would use variants of Henry II’s alleged comment, which sent the four knights on their deadly mission to Canterbury. The Sun was the only newspaper to avoid it successfully with the headline “What a Burqua”. As good a reaction as any other.
When the first news of the latest faux pas by His Bloviation, the Archbishop of Canterbury, hit the internet, I thought I would stay away from the mess, on the grounds that I have covered the man’s pronouncements in the past and need not do so for a little while.
But all these — and many more practical objections — are small considering the grandiose stupidity of his central idea, that our differences with radical Muslims can be worked out in an “honest discussion”. A significant minority in the Muslim world does not want to talk to us, but wants us to submit and, preferably, convert. Most Muslims do not want that, but most Muslims are not our problem. Our strategy must be to separate the radicals from the moderates, not to unite all Muslims to demand things from us.
Left and Right both err fundamentally by treating Muslims as monolithic. The Left imagines a harmonious Islam that the West has offended and should now appease. The Right is concerned about a monolithically hostile Islam that the West must defend itself against. In fact there are all kinds of Muslims, many of whom are friendly to the West, many of whom are part of the West. If our leaders don’t understand the important distinctions between Muslims then we will have great difficulty in responding effectively to events in the Muslim world.
Obama’s statements on foreign affairs reveal both foolishness and arrogance. Foolishness because appeasement as a strategy is never effective against committed enemies. Arrogance because it’s not all about us: there is big change underway in the Muslim world, it’s been going on for decades, and while we are now deeply involved and have a lot of power and influence, we didn’t start it. At best we can protect ourselves and help reasonable Muslims to prevail over the killers. But to do that effectively we need to draw clear distinctions between good guys and bad.
Once the US squandered its post-Sept. 11 leverage with Pakistan it was left with only bad options for coping with the nuclear-armed jihadist incubating country. And these too, it has ignored in favor of the chimera of democracy and elections.
After Sept. 11, President George W. Bush declared war on the forces of global terror and their state sponsors. But as the years have passed since then, he has done more to lose the war than he has to win it simply by ignoring it.
Bhutto’s murder is not a sign that elections and democracy frighten al-Qaida and therefore must be pursued. It is a sign that the Taliban and al-Qaida – together with their supporters in the Pakistani military and intelligence services and Pakistani society as a whole – don’t like people who are supported by the US. Her assassination was yet another act of war by the enemies of the West against the West.
If democracy and freedom are the US’s ultimate aims in this war, the only way to achieve them is to first fight and win the war. Bhutto – like her Palestinian, Egyptian and Lebanese counterparts – was a sideshow.
My friend Bruce Keslersent me an article by Dr. Angelo Codevilla, “American Statecraft and the Iraq War“, a senior scholar at The Army War College, that appeared under the aegis ofThe Claremont Institute. The critique offered by Codevilla is scathing; in many places his argument is quite insightful and in others, his heavily state-centric approach to international affairs shares the blindness of the elite he criticizes. An excerpt:
“The occupation was unnecessary to any rational American purpose. As President George W. Bush spoke on April 30, 2003, under the banner “Mission Accomplished,” representatives of the State and Defense Departments in Iraq were putting the finishing touches on the provisional government to which they were to devolve the country’s affairs two weeks later. There was to be no occupation. Iraqis would sort out their own bloody quarrels. The victorious U.S. armed forces, having turned Saddam Hussein’s regime over to its enemies, would challenge the Middle East’s remaining terror regimes to adjust their behavior or suffer the same fate. But even as Bush seemed to be recruiting a sovereign Iraqi government, he was interviewing the disastrous Paul “Jerry” Bremer to be Iraq’s viceroy and preparing United Nations resolution 1483 to “legitimize” the occupation. The Bush team then declared that occupying Iraq was necessary to transform it into a peaceful, united, liberal democracy, whose existence would coax nasty neighboring regimes to be nice. Bush had acceded to the private pleadings of then-Secretary of State Colin Powell and National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, as well as of British Prime Minister Tony Blair-whose advice reflected the unanimous wishes of Arab governments. While the administration’s newly minted mission was abstract and inherently beyond accomplishment, the Arab agendas-which had nothing in common with Bush’s-were intensely practical. And they prevailed.
The occupation of Iraq should go down in history as a set of negative lessons about war, the relationship between ends and means, the need for unity of purpose and command, and dealing with the world as it is rather than as one imagines it to be. The occupation, a confection of the U.S. foreign policy establishment’s hoariest recipes, is yet more evidence of that establishment’s bankruptcy. Media myth notwithstanding, the administration’s neoconservative component was sidelined as the occupation began. Bremer’s political advisor was the realist Robert Blackwill of the Council on Foreign Relations, and his military advisor was Walter Slocombe, a liberal internationalist from the Carter and Clinton Administrations. By 2007 the occupation’s military policy was being shaped by Stephen Biddle, another Kissingerian realist from the Council, for whom success means persuading somebody to accept America’s surrender. Bush confused statecraft, the pursuit of the country’s interests, with administrative politics-the consensus of constituencies in the bureaucracies (and their contractors), the prestige media, and the academy. As the disaster became undeniable, no one in the establishment dared to try to measure the occupation of Iraq against the standards of statecraft. “
Codevilla skewers the ideological assumptions of Washington officials and intellectuals from the Neocon Right, to the Liberal internationalist Left, to those of Realist scholars and diplomats. Kesler, in a post at Democracy Project, incisively interprets Codevilla’s philosophical approach to foreign policy analysis:
” Codevilla is a student of Machiavelli, who described the rules of the game of power. The rules may be used for good or ill, but to negate the ends accomplished by the necessary means is to create weakness and allow the field to those willing to use the rules for ill ends.
“a prince … cannot observe all of those virtues for which men are reputed good, because it is often necessary to act against mercy, against faith, against humanity, against frankness, against religion, in order to preserve the state.”
Codevilla takes the US severely to task for its failure to follow the rules in Iraq and the broader Middle East. His critique should be read in full. It’s not what most, either conservative or liberal, neocon or realist or defeatist, are accustomed to hearing. But, it cuts to the heart of our bleeding for four years, and the limited best outcomes we face. Codevilla has been consistently opposed to our entering Iraq, seeing bigger game afoot, and the confusion of our aims. He’s been proven correct, so far. His forecast, therefore, should be taken seriously. Most important, his indictment of our befuddled policy class requires a new realism in Washington.”
A weakness in Codevilla’s analysis is that while he correctly identifies the culpability of regional Arab states and Iran in sponsoring and tolerating terrorist groups and argues for meaningful penalties to be applied to such regimes, he overestimates the competency and resiliency of these states and simply dismisses the extent to which globalization has made non-state actors functionally independent of state patrons, who are quite helpful operationally but are no longer the existential requirement they once were in the 1970’s. Economics and network-theory are entirely absent from Codevilla’s analytical framework and while Islamic religious identity is admirably included, it is considered a primarily reactive (even understandably so) phenomenon, which even a casual study of the 120 year evolution of Islamist ideology would refute. States still rule all, in Codevilla’s vision, an assumption that deserves careful reexamination.
Nevertheless, a worthwhile and thought-provoking critique.
Posted by Jonathan on 30th September 2007 (All posts by Jonathan)
IT COULD be argued that since Ahmadinejad’s central message failed to register on his Western audiences that his visit to America was a failure. The fact that no media organs felt it necessary to analyze what he was talking about could be seen as a clear sign that no one is interested in buying what he is selling. But this is a dangerous argument, for it misses a basic truth.
Ahmadinejad is not interested in convincing the US government or even the majority of Americans to convert to Islam. He is interested in convincing adherents of totalitarian Islam and potential converts to the cause that they are on the winning side. He is interested in demoralizing foes of totalitarian Islam within the Islamic world and so causing them to give up any thoughts of struggle. In this goal he is no different from any of his Sunni counterparts in Saudi Arabia, al-Qaida, the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas or their sister organizations throughout the Islamic world and indeed throughout the West.
[. . .]
The thing of it is that aside from blind narcissism, there is a reason that the West ignores the dangers facing it. The Western media ignored Ahmadinejad’s message, just as it has insistently ignored the messages of bin Laden and Fatah throughout the years, because Westerners have a hard time believing that anyone would want to abide by the Islamic world view which denies mankind’s desire for freedom.
But no matter how ugly an ideology is, in the absence of real competition it gains adherents and power. The only way to ensure that jihadists’ demonic views are defeated is by stridently defending and upholding the fundamental principles on which the Free World is based. And the West hasn’t even begun to take up this challenge.
As a result, it has handed its enemies two victories already. It has demoralized its potential allies in the Islamic world, and it has failed to rally its own people to defend themselves.
In spite of what the West would like to believe, Ahmadinejad and his allies from Ramallah to Waziristan, from Gaza to Kandahar to Baghdad, are not negotiating. They are fighting. Rather than ignore them or seek to find nonexistent common ground, we must defeat them – first and foremost on the battleground of ideas.
(which I have not read):