Splat

On Purpose?

2006-10-05T18:46:00.000-07:00

It's weird that Woodward has credibility in his criticisms since he once absurdly praised this lot.

Was that part of some plan?

enough already

2006-10-01T12:12:00.000-07:00

with the Foley crap. Is this important? No. It's unworthy of most of the bloggers spending thousands and thousands of words on it. Yes, OF COURSE, those who are the most sanctimonious about sexuality are hypocrites. Tell me something I didn't know.

It makes me depressed to see these intelligent progressive waste hours and words on something that is, by its nature, trivial. Yes, yes. It's bad for old men to chase underage boys (or girls) and it's even worse when they use their power and position to do so. Of course, its effects are not trivial since politically damaging the Republicans is obviously critical at the current time. And, yet. It looks stupid to generate that much moral outrage over some sexual hypocrisy and deceit when you have just finished channeling outrage about torture and the loss of basic civil rights and the unnecessary deaths of tens of thousands of innocent people. Political strategizing on this idiotic sex scandal is a good thing if you are looking at the main chance--but don't go on and on about it with a tone of high dudgeon and outrage. It trivializes other issues, wastes time and never works for the left anyway.

They Did It

2006-09-29T00:15:00.000-07:00

The senate. They did it. Twelve democrats. I feel sick.

ETA: Digby says that they know there has been a de facto coup. Yes, something of this seems true judging from my many emails about how we must be sure every vote is counted this November. They can't even get paper ballots and fair elections. The plan for democracy.

I can't even talk about the politics of it now. The strategizing. The analysis. It's all beyond me at the moment. What is maddening is not that this party did this or that or what am I to think of the democrats. It's that it happened at all. It's hard to wrap my mind around in some ways. In other ways, it's entirely expected.

The New Yorker Usually Does Not Suck

2006-09-26T22:20:00.000-07:00

Which is nice, in a world where many things do suck. I was asking myself the other day what the New Yorker would be like if Tina Brown were still the editor and it's not a pretty picture. The New Yorker has been the source for countless important stories on Iraq, on Katrina, on the environment and the disastrous results of the current administration. Yet, I don't know who the current editor is. Was it always so political? I don't think so. I don't remember it being so. I started reading it in the '90s. For the short stories. mostly. It seemed full of vignettes and then, under Tina Brown, Vanity Fairesque worship of the rich and famous. Not much political insight.

Still, there were two articles in the September 11th issue that continue to bother me. What surprised me was that, because they were in The New Yorker, they came in under the wire, as it were. I accepted their presuppositions without realizing it.

The first was George Packer's "The Moderate Martyr: Interpreting Islam for the Modern World." It's about the Sudanese Islamic philosopher named Taha. (I'd never heard of him before.) Briefly, Taha makes it possible for Muslims both to embrace modern universalistic ethics and to believe in the Koran by positing two versions of the Koran: A Medina version and a Meccan version. The Median version is universalistic and the Meccan enjoins Muslims to regard women as lesser and to kill infidels, among other things. (Strangely, perhaps, a fundamentalist Christian member of my family actually mentioned to me about six months ago that "something happened to Mohammed after he left Medina." Freaking out that this person, whom I love, was going to say something horrible, I tried to change the subject but I gathered that Christian fundamentalists are turning to critiques of Islam, which is scary. But they are also thinking about Islam religiously and finding out about its history, which is sort of interesting.)

What disturbed me about the article: That it so quickly embraced and confirmed the idea that Muslims who care about equality and justice have this terrible problem in that Islam enjoins them to affirm inequality and injustice. Is this true? It is true in the sense that all the major monotheisms have a long history of intolerance and inequality and some scary-ass things in their central religious texts. Islam says slavery is OK, and so do Judaism and Christianity. But beyond that it makes it sound as if any attempt to marry these more ancient views with a modern enlightenment morality are just somehow pathetic and inauthentic. I know many people who would agree with this, about all three monotheisms. Yet, we know there are a number of instances where Islamic political power and Islamic culture has taken a just and reaonably enlightened (for its time) form. Medieval Muslim rulers were supposed to be more tolerant than Christian rulers of the same period. And most of the people who want to condemn all monotheisms for immoral statements in its foundational texts would not be comfortable with the idea we should throw out Kant and Aristotle because of their racist and sexist views.

In any case, what I didn't like was the author's implicit assumption that all forms of Islam other than those by this guy Taha are inevitably oppressive and supremacist. That it's sort of inimical to Islam to be that way. At least, I found myself thinking "Oh. I guess maybe Islam is sort of a naturally violent and cruel religion." The article kind of slips that in, in what I thought was a disturbing way.

The second article does a very similar thing. Jeffrey Goldberg's article about Hamas. I think it was written with a bit more honesty. What it says is most likely true but I have to wonder what isn't said. Much interviewing is done of men shooting rockets into Israel, political leaders who want their sons to "grow up to be martyrs, as long as they kill Israelis." Yes, there are Palestinians who want their children to be suicide bombers and think that they will shoot rockets into Israel until Israel somehow goes away. (It is very strange, this claim they make--do they forget the existence of the Israeli bombs? The Israelis have PLANES. The Israelis have MISSILES. The Isralis have NUCLEAR WEAPONS. How could they possibly believe that they will harass the Israelis with their little rockets into up and leaving, even if they do happen to get their hands on much better rockets?)

Are there no Palestinians who are thoughtful and have insight into what is happening? Why is it so rare for us to hear their views? What is the real position of the "Palestinian moderates," whose existence is only postulated by some Israeli official?

I suppose one thing I always think when I read about the dangerous Muslim extremists--why is there never any mention of the fact that they are so outgunned it isn't even funny? I'm not sure what Goldberg could have put in his article to make it less of an affirmation that Palestinians are just crazy and there is no hope for peace with those crazy Palestinians. Maybe it's just the case that there is no hope for peace with those crazy Palestinians but is there no one he could interview--no Palestinian whatsoever--that could give a different perspective. It's just: Crazy Palestinians and a few Israelis who are presented as somewhat moderate.

At some point--I get very lazy writing a website that no one reads--I will explain in more detail my absolute and unwavering commitment to the existence of Israel.

I like to think of myself almost as an outside observer. I have some strong feelings about criticism of Israel when it seems anti-Semitic. (Yes, such a thing is possible. Even rather commonplace.) OK, I have some very strong feelings about that. But in general, I analyze the stories I read in a somewhat disinterested way. I have no axe to grind, in particular. I'm not a freaked out anti-Zionist or a ferocious pro-Zionist (at least of the Palestinian hating type). I am concerned about the deep suspicion of Muslims that I see creeping in (if it wasn't there already) to the less extremist news sources. The failure to present a multi-faceted picture of Islam, Muslims, Palestinians, the Palestinian situation. And of course, I cannot prove beyond a shadow of a doubt there is a multi-faceted picture. I suppose I go by the principle that there always is one. Well, almost always.

It is ridiculous to say perhaps but I worry a bit for the Muslims. Things are bad for them in a variety of ways and I suppose I worry they will get worse. At some point, if things do get worse, then we will have to admit that Muslims are being targeted as Muslim. Then, of course, I worry for the rest of us because we have to live with Muslims and things are not going to be pretty for any of us if large numbers of them turn to violence in response to oppression. I think lefty bloggers tend to avoid such discussions because then it plays into the rightists hands--they have set things up so that concern about the anti-religious turn things are taking sounds like concern for the terrorists. Also, some progressive bloggers are uncomfortable with religion or actively opposed to religion. But at some point we have to ask when the attempt to get a few bad people by sifting through a whole group of people who share characteristics of those bad people (primarily religion but also national origin) starts to become the persecution of a people as a whole.

Prescience

2006-09-25T21:03:00.000-07:00

I just has this strange premonition that Hilary Clinton is going to be president

And yet. It cannot be.

And yet it might.

Dudes, it was a PREMONITION OF THE FUTURE.

Off The Deep End

2006-09-25T00:55:00.000-07:00

OK, last post went a bit off the deep end perhaps. Good thing no one reads this. I can't believe I started out thinking that I would avoid anything controversial and simply gather data for my officially sanctioned research. Ha ha ha ha ha ha.

In any case, this little website still retains its status as a secret diary. And I want, today, to say: Dear Diary, Please remind me to move to Canada.

I'm very tired of being told I cannot move to Canada. First, who is moving to Canada? No one. There are no mass migrations. Yet. So what harm would I do if I did move to Canada? And I suppose the real question is: What good do we do here?

I WANT TO MOVE TO CANADA. I am desperate to move to Canada in fact. That is my prayer of the week: Jesus, Mary and Joseph. Somehow, please get us safely entrenched in Canada. With jobs. I will happily give up my citizenship if it is what is required to overcome Canada's protectionist work policies. I will learn the Canadian national anthem. I already know the title! "O, Canada!" See? I'm practically Canadian already.

Why

2006-09-24T04:44:00.000-07:00

Many people have theories about why the Bush administration wants to legalize torture, wants to be able to treat detainees in any way they want without any legal oversight or human rights protections.

Krugman says: It is because they can.

But I think it is something else. And if the horrible thing is true, that Bush's intentions are shared by some of the United Statesans, then this will be the reason: It's a symbolic exorcism of hate and fear. I think the reason Muslims and only Muslims (so far) are to be tortured is that there is a terrible fear, a remarkable and incredible fear of Muslims that has been created by this government. Remarkable in that this government is killing Muslims at a rate of (at least) 100 to 1. I think one thing at the root of this fear (and accompanying hatred, the resentment of each and every Muslim for making these cowardly people so afraid) is simply the fact that there are a whole, whole lot of Muslims and they are different and Not Like Us. But mostly, because there are a lot of them.

To torture is to exercise power. It is an act of power. It conquers your fear. If only for a little while. It is interesting that people comment about the Nazi hatred of the Jews but less about the Nazi fear of the Jews. The Jews were seen as all-powerful, as controlling all political events, even the military response to Nazi aggression. Each bomb dropped on Germany was seen--by the most crazy people in the Nazi party, not the opportunists probably--as a Jewish bomb. What is horrific about the Holocaust is not just that so many millions were killed but what was done in addition to the killing--the torture. It was if the Germans had to reduce each Jew to powerlessness and witness this powerlessness in all its forms to expunge their fear. And death alone doesn't do that for some reason, when you are killing a person and what you fear is an abstract idea. And of course, we know that some men torture women for related reasons.

OK, now I sound like Ward Churchill. I think. I actually don't know what Ward Churchill sounds like. Anyway, I sound like some crackpot college professor. I'm also freaking myself out, making myself sick and even scaring myself thinking about these terrifying, sickening things. Also, I violated the cardinal internet rule not to make the Nazi analogy.

Except. I don't know what else to think. The thing I've never understood about the post-terrorism era IS the fear of Muslims. Muslims will obviously become scary to me if they come to believe they are direct political targets and start to fight back in the U.S. Then I suppose I'll be scared of Muslims. But overall, I don't get the overwhelming fear of terrorism that resulted from 9/11 and I don't get the overwhelming fear of Muslims. Of course, I'm not afraid of sudden death in general. I'm afraid of evil. I think the reason the Nazi analogy is so hard to resist right now is that we are seeing a new kind of evil and we don't have any way to comprehend it. There have always been the evils of greed and opportunism and indifference and exploitation--slavery, genocide--these things are not pretty. Those things are over, though, at least in their most direct forms. There is violence against women and racist violence that floats around the fringes of our society even now (affecting the middle, of course). And that has the same whiff of intentional cruelty--by private citizens-- but it is different somehow because we know that is pathological and there are laws against it and it is officially reviled. Intentional cruelty has not really been the U.S. Government's thing. Up to now.

Conservatives and Torture

2006-09-22T02:06:00.000-07:00

I was very disturbed by a comment by Maura Liason of NPR (too lazy to google spelling of her name) that took for granted 'the public' was entirely behind President Bush's attempt to make torture legal.

She said something like "oh, of course, people don't want to give the terrrorists special treatment." But then she said that McCain has a special status so that people give him a pass when he says THAT TORTURE IS NOT SOMETHING THAT SHOULD BE DONE.

So that...what? Fifty years of international law out the window? The eighth amendment? Poof. "Well, of course, people don't really support the eighth amendment but McCain has special status (as a victim!) and so when he says he cares about morality and the eighth amendment, people excuse his foolhardiness." This is pretty much an equivalent statement to the statement she made.

In my previous incarnation, on a different website which I destroyed, partly because current politics drove me so crazy and the internet made me so suseptible to political obsession, I had many ranting posts about how I hate NPR. Those ones never got any comments. (People used to comment. Being a weirdo, I actually didn't like that in certain ways! I'm not cut out for this and yet I go on.) I guess no one really gets the horror that is NPR who is on the liberal/lefty end of things. So let me just say it again; I HATE NPR. I HATE THEM FOR PRETENDING EVERYTHING IS NORMAL. THAT THIS SITUATION IS NORMAL. They are so FUCKING CHIPPER when they talk about HOW TORTURE IN SOME FORM OR OTHER MAY BE MADE LEGAL.

It really gets to me. Can you tell?

I have been so appalled by recent events, but particularly by this torture issue, that I've started to feel physically ill. Every time I think of this I get sick. I think: IS THIS REALLY HAPPENING? IS OUR SOCIETY REALLY DEBATING WHETHER TORTURE IS OK? What the FUCK!

It's madness. Sheer madness. So suffice it to say that whatshername of NPR's claim got me even more freaked out. I hadn't really thought about THE PEOPLE (sorry, not italics on Safari). I hadn't really thought the American people could be behind such a thing. Undoubtedly that was sheer mental suppression on my part since I desperately fear the discovery that any ordinary person, good-hearted man on the street type, could favor torturing people. TORTURING HUMAN BEINGS. If that is true, then let's just face our society is doomed. Or over. The society we knew---badly guided by sort of enlightenment principles with a large dash of everymanforhimselfism--no longer exists. Call me crazy but it used to be pretty much taken for granted that sort of thing is just so so so so so so so wrong. I mean, I know people occasionally make claims they would like to torture atrocious criminals (convicted ones, mind you) or say that they deserve torture but those claims didn't go anywhere and most of us would say "Shucks, it sounds good in the abstract. But that is not something that we can ever do. Nor would we want to, in a real situation."

I've been wondering what the conservative spin on the thing is. I assume that the spin is that it is not torture. Even though, if you imagine that YOU might have to undergo such practices it's not too hard to also imagine that you'd want to be killed instead. Or you would yearn desperately for your own death. So that seems to clinch the idea--if you were at all honest with yourself--that the practices are torture. I was also thinking: If the conservatives--the supposedly thoughtful ones, who have blogs somewhere even though I don't read them--are supporting this, then that means some portion of the country is. The significant 25% who will follow the fanatics wherever they lead. I went to instapundit. He barely talks about it. But he does mention there could be some arguments against it. Andrew Sullivan seems pretty much against it.

But are they? Are any of them against it? Or has the whole world gone mad?

Comrades! Let us self-criticize!

2006-09-19T21:20:00.000-07:00

What's Liberal About the Liberal Arts: The Graphic Novel. With the cutest little Maoists you've ever seen.

"One fine morning, at the beginning of the semester they brought a new group of undergraduates to meet the new adjunct teaching Poli Sci 101: 'Bush is Hitler.'"

It's a heartwarming tale about chubby cheeked little Maoists struggling against the impudent imperalist forces who have blinded the unwitting conservative frat boys with their false dogma and promise of instant entry into middle management.

God, I think I'm going to have to use up my entire color printing cartridge and print the sucker out.

from Creek Running North

If you wanted one sentence to understand Americans it would be:

2006-09-13T00:32:00.000-07:00

Americans are scared of dying.

Well, no. It's a bit more subtle than that. More like: Americans want to have control over life and death, to tame it. We can't stand the idea that maybe we could have done something we did not do or that something we did ended up badly, like in death, when we could have not done that thing.

Americans want to be safe. And what makes them feel safest is doing things, things that give the appearance of controlling their safety. The appearance is often (maybe always) enough.

So maybe what Americans are truly scared of is regret. I don't know.

This little fact about us explains many things. It explains our crazy health care system, where more is spent per capita than in any other health care system in the world and yet the country as a whole is not particularly health. The reason so much is spent? We have to make sure to stamp out virtually every way we might die and the upper half of the country is so afraid they might not be able to do that that they are sort of OK with the lower half not having much health care at all. We want the crazy bone marrow transplant that gives us a 3% chance of survival after 5 years. Any system that doesn't leave open that random shot at eternal life is a system we can't stomach.

So maybe Americans like to gamble on long odds as long when there is the illusion that they might win. That would surely explain the way wealth is distributed in the U.S. Since even those who lose out are willing to put up with a system where they lose out just in case in the .00003% chance they win big, they won't have to part with any of their money.

The need to be in charge, just by your own self, to control circumstances--even when it means that collectively, circumstances spin even further outside your control--explains our inability to have rational gun control laws. Because the irrational gun policy makes it possible for me to carry a gun around to shoot you with in case you try to shoot me. Of course, it also makes it possible for you to carry a gun around which is why it is possible for you to shoot me in the first place. And it ensures there will be many, many more guns around for people to get shot with. Which is what actually happens. But that's OK--it's OK if my child might accidentally shoot himself or his friend/there is a huge proliferation of guns for me to get shot with/I am much more likely to shoot someone in rage when I am annoyed just so that it is possible for me, when confronted in a dark alley by you, to pull out my gun and shoot you.

And even though that is so unlikely, so incredibly unlikely, I just can't stand the idea that I might not have that option. Since it puts me, by myself in illusory control.

Then, of course, there is our remarkable tort system which has resulted in a wide variety of warnings on every possible scrap of plastic and object used by us. Even the cardboard thingies that you put in your car window to keep it cool say things like: DO NOT DRIVE WITH CARDBOARD THINGIE IN WINDOW.

If you doubt whether this drive for control is a central feature of the American ethos just try telling an American about someone acquiring some tragic disease (cancer especially). They will, at some point, wonder whether that event was the person's fault. Whether there was something that could have been done. Maybe they ate too much fat?

On the one hand the idea that everything can be controlled, nay CONQUERED, is an advantage in certain ways. It's undoubtedly the thing that makes the U.S. so crazily innovative, that Yankee ingenuity thing. There's a solution to every problem. When you think that way, you find the solution to many problems.

Of course, at the current time, it seems clear to me that this trait is going to get us all killed. Or at least it could get quite a large number of us killed (Americans but probably more non-Americans.)

It's quite obvious that this psychological quirk is behind the insane idea that dropping large bombs on some virtually random country could make you safer (I'm trying to think of another stereotype of people in another country and can only think of the one told to me by a friend about how people from the north of Korea--not necessarily North Korea, it's a regional rather than national thing--hold grudges. And that this explains their behavior in families. That's surely a stereotype but I need a better one for comparison. I guess my stereotype of Americans here is akin to the "Southern Europeans ARe Lazy" stereotype--explaining how everything turns out in some gigantic region by one little quirk of character.)

The whole thing runs so deep, much deeper than an interest in living with a sense of harmony or with a calm resignation about the vicissitudes of human existence, or an acceptance of the fact that you die, and there is, in fact, not that much which is actually controllable. All these things would make one's lack of safety more bearable but it smacks of resignation and resignation does not sell. And it seems to inhibit the realization that doing something, doing ANYTHING but doing it (with the added flash of technology) will not make you safe. Because the world? If there's one thing you can sum up the world with it is the phrase: NOT SAFE.

2006-09-12T12:28:00.000-07:00

FROM THE NEW YORKER

THE MASTER PLAN
by LAWRENCE WRIGHT
For the new theorists of jihad, Al Qaeda is just the beginning.
Issue of 2006-09-11
Posted 2006-09-04

Even as members of Al Qaeda watched in exultation while the Twin Towers fell and the Pentagon burned o September 11, 2001, they realized that the pendulum of catastrophe was swinging in their direction. Osama bi Laden later boasted that he was the only one in the group’s upper hierarchy who had anticipated the magnitude o the wound that Al Qaeda inflicted on America, but he also admitted that he was surprised by the towers’ collapse His goal, for at least five years, had been to goad America into invading Afghanistan, an ambition that had cause him to continually raise the stakes—the simultaneous bombings of the United States Embassies in Kenya an Tanzania, in August, 1998, followed by the attack on an American warship in the harbor of Aden, Yemen, i October, 2000. Neither of those actions had led the United States to send troops to Afghanistan. After the attacks o New York and Washington, however, it was clear that there would be an overwhelming response. Al Qaed members began sending their families home and preparing for war
Two months later, the Taliban government in Afghanistan, which had given sanctuary to bin Laden, was routed, and the Al Qaeda fighters in Tora Bora were pummelled. Although bin Laden and his chief lieutenants escaped death or capture, nearly eighty per cent of Al Qaeda’s members in Afghanistan were killed. Worse, Al Qaeda’s cause was repudiated throughout the world, even in Muslim countries, where the indiscriminate murder of civilians and the use of suicide operatives were denounced as being contrary to Islam. The remnants of the organization scattered and were on the run. Al Qaeda was essentially dead.
From hiding places in Iran, Yemen, Iraq, and the tribal areas of western Pakistan, Al Qaeda’s survivors lamented their failed strategy. Abu al-Walid al-Masri, a senior leader of Al Qaeda’s inner council, later wrote that Al Qaeda’s experience in Afghanistan was “a tragic example of an Islamic movement managed in an alarmingly meaningless way.” He went on, “Everyone knew that their leader was leading them to the abyss and even leading the entire country to utter destruction, but they continued to carry out his orders faithfully and with bitterness.”
In June, 2002, bin Laden’s son Hamzah posted a message on an Al Qaeda Web site: “Oh, Father! Where is the escape and when will we have a home? Oh, Father! I see spheres of danger everywhere I look. . . . Tell me, Father, something useful about what I see.”
“Oh, son!” bin Laden replied. “Suffice to say that I am full of grief and sighs. . . . I can only see a very steep path ahead. A decade has gone by in vagrancy and travel, and here we are in our tragedy. Security has gone, but danger remains.”
In the view of Abu Musab al-Suri, a Syrian who had been a member of Al Qaeda’s inner council, and who is a theorist of jihad, the greatest loss was not the destruction of the terrorist organization but the downfall of the Taliban, which meant that Al Qaeda no longer had a place to train, organize, and recruit. The expulsion from Afghanistan, Suri later wrote, was followed by “three meager years which we spent as fugitives,” dodging the international dragnet by “moving between safe houses and hideouts.” In 2002, he fled to eastern Iran, where bin Laden’s son Saad and Al Qaeda’s security chief, Saif al-Adl, had also taken refuge. There was a five-million-dollar bounty on his head. In this moment of exile and defeat, he began to conceive the future of jihad.

Suri was born into a middle-class family in Aleppo, Syria, in 1958, the year of bin Laden’s birth. Red-haired an sturdily built, he has a black belt in judo; his real name is Mustafa Setmariam Nasar. He became involved in politic at the University of Aleppo, where he studied engineering. Later, he moved to Jordan, where he joined the Musli Brotherhood, an Islamist group that opposed Syria’s dictator, Hafez al-Assad. In 1982, Assad decided that th Brotherhood posed a threat to his authority, and his troops slaughtered as many as thirty thousand people in the cit of Hama, one of the group’s strongholds. The ruthlessness of Assad’s response shocked Suri. He renounced th Brotherhood, which he held responsible for provoking the destruction of Hama, and took refuge in Europe fo several years. In 1985, he moved to Spain, where he married and became a Spanish citizen; two years later, he foun his way to Afghanistan, where he met Osama bin Laden
The two men have had a contentious relationship. Although Suri became a member of Al Qaeda’s inner council, he grew disillusioned by the fecklessness and the disorganization that characterized Al Qaeda’s training camps in Afghanistan. “People come to us with empty heads and leave us with empty heads,” he wrote. “They have done nothing for Islam. This is because they have not received any ideological or doctrinal training.”
In 1992, he moved back to Spain, where he helped to establish a terrorist cell that played a part in the planning of September 11th. Two years later, Suri moved to England. He soon became a fixture in the Islamist press in London, writing articles for the magazine Al Ansar, which promoted the insurgency in Algeria that resulted in more than a hundred thousand deaths. The magazine’s editor was Abu Qatada, a Palestinian cleric who has been characterized as Al Qaeda’s spiritual guide in Europe. Al Ansar was, in many ways, the first jihadi think tank; Suri and other strategists suggested tactics for undermining the despotic regimes in the Arab world, and they promoted attacks on the West even as American and European intelligence agencies were largely unaware of the threat that the Islamist movement posed.
Jamal Khashoggi, a Saudi journalist who is currently the press aide to the Saudi Ambassador in Washington, Prince Turki al-Faisal, met Qatada and Suri in the early nineties. They struck him as far more radical than Osama bin Laden; at the time, Al Qaeda was primarily an anti-Communist organization. “Osama was in the moderate camp,” Khashoggi recalled recently. He coined the phrase “Salafi jihadis” to describe men, such as Abu Qatada and Suri, who had been influenced by Salafism, the puritanical, fundamentalist strain of Islam. “Osama was flirting with these ideas,” Khashoggi said. “He was not the one who originated the radical thinking that came to characterize Al Qaeda. He joined these men, rather than the other way around. His organization became the vehicle for their thinking.”
Suri later wrote about bin Laden’s conversion to his ideas, which took place after bin Laden returned to Afghanistan, in 1996. Salafi jihadis spoke with him about a situation that angered him deeply: the presence of American troops on the holy soil of the Arabian Peninsula. Corrupt Islamic scholars had lent their authority to the Saudi royal family, the jihadis argued, and the royal family, in turn, had given legitimacy to the American incursion. There were two possible solutions: either attack the royal family—which would likely anger the Saudi people—or strike at the American presence. “This would force the Saudi family to defend it, thereby losing its own legitimacy in the eyes of Muslims,” Suri writes. “Bin Laden chose the second option.”
Suri believed that the jihadi movement had nearly been extinguished by the drying up of financial resources, the killing or capture of many terrorist leaders, the loss of safe havens, and the increasing international coöperation among police agencies. (The British authorities were pursuing him as a suspect in the 1995 Paris Métro bombings.) Accordingly, he saw the Taliban’s takeover of Afghanistan, in 1996, as a “golden opportunity,” and he went there the following year. He set up a military camp in Afghanistan, and experimented with chemical weapons. He also arranged bin Laden’s first television interview with CNN. The journalist Peter Bergen, who spent several days in Suri’s company while producing the segment, and who recently published an oral history, “The Osama bin Laden I Know,” recalled, “He was tough and really smart. He seemed like a real intellectual, very conversant with history, and he had an intense seriousness of purpose. He certainly impressed me more than bin Laden.”
In 1999, Suri sent bin Laden an e-mail accusing him of endangering the Taliban regime with his highly theatrical attacks on American targets. And he mocked bin Laden’s love of publicity: “I think our brother has caught the disease of screens, flashes, fans, and applause.” In his writings, Suri rarely mentioned Al Qaeda and disavowed any direct connection to it, despite having served on its inner council. He preferred to speak more broadly of jihad, which he saw as a social movement, encompassing “all those who bear weapons—individuals, groups, and organizations—and wage jihad on the enemies of Islam.” By 2000, he had begun predicting the end of Al Qaeda, whose preëminence he portrayed as a stage in the development of the worldwide Islamist uprising. “Al Qaeda is not an organization, it is not a group, nor do we want it to be,” he writes. “It is a call, a reference, a methodology.” Eventually, its leadership would be eliminated, he said. (Suri himself was captured in Pakistan in November, 2005. American intelligence sources confirmed that Suri is in the custody of another country but refused to disclose his exact location.) In the time that remained to Al Qaeda, he argued, its main goal should be to stimulate other groups around the world to join the jihadi movement. His legacy, as he saw it, was to codify the doctrines that animated Islamist jihad, so that Muslim youths of the future could discover the cause and begin their own, spontaneous religious war.

In 2002, Suri, in his hideout in Iran, began writing his defining work, “Call for Worldwide Islamic Resistance, which is sixteen hundred pages long and was published on the Internet in December, 2004. Didactic and repetitive but also ruthlessly candid, the book dissects the faults of the jihadi movement and lays out a plan for the future of th struggle. The goal, he writes, is “to bring about the largest number of human and material casualties possible fo America and its allies.” He specifically targets Jews, “Westerners in general,” the members of the NATO alliance Russia, China, atheists, pagans, and hypocrites, as well as “any type of external enemy.” (The proliferation o adversaries mirrors Al Qaeda’s hatred of all other ideologies.
And yet, at the same time, he bitterly blames Al Qaeda for dragging the entire jihadi movement into an unequal battle that it is likely to lose. Unlike most jihadi theorists, Suri acknowledges the setback caused by September 11th. He laments the demise of the Taliban, which he and other Salafi jihadis considered the modern world’s only true Islamic government. America’s “war on terror,” he complains, doesn’t discriminate between Al Qaeda adherents and Muslims in general. “Many loyal Muslims,” he writes, believe that the September 11th attacks “justified the American assault and have given it a legitimate rationale for reoccupying the Islamic world.” But Suri goes on to argue that America’s plans for international domination were already evident “in the likes of Nixon and Kissinger,” and that this agenda would have been pursued without the provocation of September 11th. Moreover, the American attack on Afghanistan was not really aimed at capturing or killing bin Laden; its true goal was to sweep away the Taliban and eliminate the rule of Islamic law.
In Suri’s view, the underground terrorist movement—that is, Al Qaeda and its sleeper cells—is defunct. This approach was “a failure on all fronts,” because of its inability to achieve military victory or to rally the Muslim people to its cause. He proposes that the next stage of jihad will be characterized by terrorism created by individuals or small autonomous groups (what he terms “leaderless resistance”), which will wear down the enemy and prepare the ground for the far more ambitious aim of waging war on “open fronts”—an outright struggle for territory. He explains, “Without confrontation in the field and seizing control of the land, we cannot establish a state, which is the strategic goal of the resistance.”
Suri acknowledges that the “Jewish enemy, led by America and its nonbelieving, apostate, hypocritical allies,” enjoys overwhelming military superiority, but he argues that the spiritual commitment of the jihadis is equally formidable. He questions Al Qaeda’s opposition to democracy, which offers radical Islamists an opportunity to “secretly use this comfortable and relaxed atmosphere to spread out, reorganize their ranks, and acquire broader public bases.” In many Arabic states, there is a predictable cycle of official tolerance and savage repression, which can work in favor of the Islamists. If the Islamists “open the way for political moderation,” Suri writes, they will “stretch out horizontally along the base and spread. So they once again exterminate and jihad grows yet again! So then they try to open things up once again, and Islam stretches out and expands again!”
The Bush Administration has declared a “war of ideas” against Islamism, Suri observes, and has had some success; he cites the modification of textbooks in many Muslim countries. This effort, he writes, must be countered by the propagation of the jihadi creed—and this is what his book attempts to do, offering a minutely detailed account of the tenets of Salafi jihadism. Suri urges his readers to reject their own repressive governments and to rise up against Western occupation and Zionism. Although the leaders of Al Qaeda have long excused the slaughter of innocents, and many of its attacks have been directed at other Muslims, Suri specifically cautions against harming other Muslims, women and children who may be nonbelievers, and other noncombatants.
Suri addresses the issue of Israel, writing that “the Zionist presence in Palestine” is an insult to Muslims; but he also excoriates the secular Palestinian National Authority that governs the country. “Armed jihad is the only solution,” he advises. “Every mujahid must wage jihad against all forms of normalization—its institutions, officials, and advocates . . . destroying them and assassinating those who rely on them . . . while paying attention not to harm Muslims by mistake.”
There are five regions, according to Suri, where jihadis should focus their energies: Afghanistan, Central Asia, Yemen, Morocco, and, especially, Iraq. The American occupation of Iraq, he declares, inaugurated a “historical new period” that almost single-handedly rescued the jihadi movement just when many of its critics thought it was finished.

The invasion of Iraq posed a dilemma for Al Qaeda. Iraq is a largely Shiite nation, and Al Qaeda is composed o Sunnis who believe that the Shia are heretics. Shortly before the invasion, in March, 2003, bin Laden issued his ow list of targets, which included Jordan, Morocco, Nigeria, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and Yemen—not Afghanistan o Iraq. Presumably, he regarded the chances of a Taliban resurgence as remote; moreover, he was aware that an Iraq insurgency could ignite an Islamic civil war and lead to ethnic cleansing of the Sunni minority
The American occupation posed a major opportunity, however, for a man named Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. A former prisoner and sex offender, he was a Bedouin from Jordan. Neither an intellectual nor a strategist, Zarqawi acted largely on brute impulse, but he was a reckless warrior who gained the respect of the Arab mujahideen when he arrived in Pakistan, in the early nineties. In Peshawar, he met a Palestinian sheikh named Abu Muhammad al-Maqdisi, who transformed him from a foot soldier in jihad to a leader who, for a time, rivalled bin Laden.
Maqdisi was already one of the most renowned ideologues of the radical Islamist movement. Incisive, unpredictable, and sharp-tempered, he has a spiritual authority and an originality that make him stand out among jihadi thinkers. His puritanism has led him to denounce many Arab rulers. In “The Evident Sacrileges of the Saudi State,” his widely circulated book, Maqdisi declared a fatwa excommunicating the Saudi royal family—in essence, a license for any Muslim to murder them. (The book influenced the men who bombed a Saudi National Guard training center in Riyadh, in 1995, and also those who attacked American troops in Khobar the following year.) “Maqdisi is the most influential jihadi thinker alive,” Will McCants, a fellow at West Point’s Combatting Terrorism Center, told me.
Maqdisi and Zarqawi formed an immediate bond, an alliance of the man of thought and the man of action. In 1993, they returned to Jordan to start an Islamist group; the following year, both men were picked up by Jordanian authorities, who seized their weapons—grenades and a machine gun—and imprisoned them.
Jordanian prisons were full of radicals and prospective recruits, who were drawn to the cerebral sheikh and his ruthless assistant. Zarqawi soon emerged as the leader of the Islamist group, while Maqdisi continued to be the voice of authority. His decisions were often controversial; for instance, when Hamas began its suicide operations against Israel in 1994, Maqdisi denounced the attacks as un-Islamic—a position that Zarqawi supported at the time.
In March, 1999, Jordan’s new king, Abdullah II, granted amnesty to political prisoners. Zarqawi went to Afghanistan, but his defiant mentor chose to stay in Jordan, where he felt that he was doing productive work. He was soon back in prison.
Unruly and independent, Zarqawi refused to swear fidelity to bin Laden, and established his own camp in western Afghanistan, populated mainly by Jordanians, Syrians, and Palestinians. He was bluntly critical of Al Qaeda’s decision to wage war against America and the West rather than against corrupt Arab dictatorships.
After September 11th, Zarqawi and his followers were flushed out of Afghanistan by the invasion of the coalition forces. He took refuge in Iran and, eventually, in the Kurdish region of Iraq. In April, 2003, after the United States’ invasion of Iraq, he set up a new terror group, al-Tawid wal Jihad (Monotheism and Jihad). Unlike the senior members of Al Qaeda, Zarqawi was obsessed with fighting the Shiites, “the most evil of mankind,” thinking that he would unite the much larger Sunni world into a definitive conquest of what he saw as the great Islamic heresy. That August, shortly after he began his Iraq campaign, he bombed a Shiite mosque, killing a hundred and twenty-five Muslim worshippers, including the most popular Shiite politician in the country, Ayatollah Muhammad Bakr al-Hakim, who, had he lived, would probably have become Iraq’s first freely elected President.
In a letter to bin Laden in January, 2004, which was intercepted by U.S. intelligence, Zarqawi explained that “if we succeed in dragging [the Shia] into the arena of sectarian war it will become possible to awaken the inattentive Sunnis as they feel imminent danger.” He said that he would formally pledge allegiance to Al Qaeda if bin Laden endorsed his battle against the Shiites. Bin Laden told Zarqawi to go ahead and “use the Shiite card,” perhaps because his son Saad and other Al Qaeda figures were being held in Iran, and he hoped that Zarqawi would persuade the Iranians to hand them over; he hesitated, however, to formally ally himself with Zarqawi.
Meanwhile, Zarqawi’s operatives had spread into Europe, where they forged documents and smuggled illegal aliens into the continent while gathering recruits for Iraq. One of his lieutenants, Amer el-Azizi, is a suspect in the March 11, 2004, train bombings in Madrid. Like Zarqawi’s organization, the Spanish cell included former prison inmates and operated more like a street gang than like the highly bureaucratic Al Qaeda. Zarqawi and his men were putting into action the vision that Abu Musab al-Suri had laid out for them: small, spontaneous groups carrying out individual acts of terror in Europe, and an open struggle for territory in Iraq.
Suicide bombings became a trademark of Zarqawi’s operation, despite Maqdisi’s condemnation of the practice. And Zarqawi soon improvised a more gruesome signature: in May, 2004, he was filmed decapitating Nicholas Berg, a young American contractor. The footage was posted on the Internet, and it was followed by other beheadings, along with bombings and assassinations—hundreds of them.
Within radical Islamist circles, Zarqawi’s gory executions and attacks on Muslims at prayer became a source of controversy. From prison, Maqdisi chastised his former protégé. “The pure hands of jihad fighters must not be stained by shedding inviolable blood,” he wrote in an article that was posted on his Web site in July, 2004. “There is no point in vengeful acts that terrify people, provoke the entire world against mujahideen, and prompt the world to fight them.” Maqdisi also advised jihadis not to go to Iraq, “because it will be an inferno for them. This is, by God, the biggest catastrophe.”
Zarqawi angrily refuted Maqdisi’s remarks, saying that he took orders only from God; however, he was beginning to realize that his efforts in Iraq were another dead end for jihad. “The space of movement is starting to get smaller,” he had written to bin Laden in June. “The grip is starting to be tightened on the holy warriors’ necks and, with the spread of soldiers and police, the future is becoming frightening.” Finally, bin Laden agreed to lend his influence to assist Zarqawi in drawing recruits to his cause. In October, 2004, Zarqawi announced his new job title: emir of Al Qaeda in Iraq.
From that time until he was killed by American bombs, in June, 2006, Zarqawi led a murderous campaign unmatched in the history of Al Qaeda. Before Zarqawi became a member, Al Qaeda had killed some thirty-two hundred people. Zarqawi’s forces probably killed twice that number.
In July, 2005, Ayman al-Zawahiri, Al Qaeda’s chief ideologue and second-in-command, attempted to steer the nihilistic Zarqawi closer to the founders’ original course. In a letter, he outlined the next steps for the Iraqi jihad: “The first stage: Expel the Americans from Iraq. The second stage: Establish an Islamic authority or emirate, then develop it and support it until it achieves the level of a caliphate. . . . The third stage: Extend the jihad wave to the secular countries neighboring Iraq. The fourth stage: It may coincide with what came before—the clash with Israel, because Israel was established only to challenge any new Islamic entity.”
Zawahiri advised Zarqawi to moderate his attacks on Iraqi Shiites and to stop beheading hostages. “We are in a battle,” Zawahiri reminded him. “And more than half of this battle is taking place in the battlefield of the media.”
Zarqawi did not heed Al Qaeda’s requests. As the Iraqi jihad fell into barbarism, Al Qaeda’s leaders began advising their followers to go to Sudan or Kashmir, where the chances of victory seemed more promising. Al Qaeda, meanwhile, was confronting a new problem, which one of its prime thinkers, Abu Bakr Naji, had already anticipated, in an Internet document titled “The Management of Savagery.”

Naji’s identity is unknown. Other Islamist writers have said that he was Tunisian, but a Saudi newspaper identifie him as Jordanian. Will McCants, the West Point scholar, has translated Naji’s work. He said that “Abu Bakr Naji might be a collective pseudonym for various theorists of jihad. But, he added, Naji’s work has appeared on Sawt al-Jihad, the authoritative Al Qaeda Internet magazine, meaning that it reflects the prevailing views of the organization. Other analysts are cautious about giving too much weight to Naji’s words. Speaking at a conference earlier this year, David Kilcullen, the chief counterterrorism strategist at the U.S. State Department, highlighted the tendency of extremist movements to fragment into splinter groups based on ideological differences. “It’s important to realize that there are numerous competing points of view within the movement,” he said. “Not everything published in jihadist forums has the approval of the senior leadership.”
Naji’s document, which appeared in the spring of 2004, addresses the crisis and the opportunity posed by the tumult in the Arab world. “During our long journey, through victories and defeats, through the blood, severed limbs and skulls, some of the movements have disappeared and some have remained,” he writes. “If we meditate on the factor common to the movements which have remained, we find that there is political action in addition to military action.” Many Islamist groups have disparaged the notion of politics, considering it “a filthy activity of Satan,” but understanding the politics of the enemy, Naji suggests, is a necessary evil. “We urge that the leaders work to master political science just as they would work to master military science.”
Naji argues that Al Qaeda’s public image has suffered among Muslims because the organization has failed to carry the battle to the media. “The first step in putting our plan in place should be to focus on justifying the action rationally and through the Sharia,” he says. “Second, we must communicate this justification clearly to the people and the masses such that any means or attempt to distort our action through the media is cut off.”
The media is especially important in the chaotic period that the jihadi movement has entered, when people are understandably offended by the carnage. “If we succeed in the management of this savagery, that stage—by the permission of God—will be a bridge to the Islamic state which has been awaited since the fall of the caliphate,” he proclaims. “If we fail—we seek refuge with God from that—it does not mean an end of the matter. Rather, this failure will lead to an increase in savagery.”
Naji writes in the dry, oddly temperate style that characterizes many Al Qaeda strategy studies. And, like all jihadi theorists, he embeds his analysis in the tradition of Ibn Taymiyya, the thirteenth-century Arab theologian whose ideas undergird the Salafi, or Wahhabi, tradition; bin Laden frequently refers to Ibn Taymiyya in his speeches. The remarks of bin Laden and Zawahiri play only a modest part in Naji’s work. Indeed, Naji is a more attentive reader of Western thinkers: the thesis of “The Management of Savagery” is drawn from the observation of the Yale historian Paul Kennedy, in his book “Rise and Fall of the Great Powers” (1987), that imperial overreach leads to the downfall of empires.
Naji began writing his study in 1998, when the jihad movement’s most promising targets appeared to be Jordan, the countries of North Africa, Nigeria, Saudi Arabia, and Yemen—roughly the same countries that bin Laden later named. Naji recommended that jihadis continually attack the vital economic centers of these countries, such as tourist sites and oil refineries, in order to make the regimes concentrate their forces, leaving their peripheries unprotected. Sensing weakness, Naji predicts, the people will lose confidence in their governments, which will respond with increasingly ineffective acts of repression. Eventually, the governments will lose control. Savagery will naturally follow, offering Islamists the opportunity to capture the allegiance of a population that is desperate for order. (Naji cites Afghanistan before the Taliban as an example.) Even though the jihadis will have caused the chaos, that fact will be forgotten as the fighters impose security, provide food and medical treatment, and establish Islamic courts of justice.
After coalition forces overran Al Qaeda compounds in Afghanistan in late 2001, they seized thousands of pages of internal memoranda, records of strategy sessions and ethical debates, and military manuals, but not a single page devoted to the politics of Al Qaeda. Alone among Al Qaeda theorists, Naji briefly addresses whether jihadis are prepared to run a state should they succeed in toppling one. He quotes a colleague who posed the question “Assuming that we get rid of the apostate regimes today, who will take over the ministry of agriculture, trade, economics, etc.?” Beyond the simplistic notion of imposing a caliphate and establishing the rule of Islamic law, the leaders of the organization appear never to have thought about the most basic facts of government. What kind of economic model would they follow? How would they cope with unemployment, so rampant in the Muslim world? Where do they stand on the environment? Health care? The truth, as Naji essentially concedes, is that the radical Islamists have no interest in government; they are interested only in jihad. In his book, Naji breezily answers his friend as follows: “It is not a prerequisite that the mujahid movement has to be prepared especially for agriculture, trade, and industry. . . . As for the one who manages the techniques in each ministry, he can be a paid employee who has no interest in policy and is not a member of the movement or the party. There are many examples of that and a proper explanation would take a long time.”

Fouad Hussein is a radical Jordanian journalist who met Zarqawi and Maqdisi in 1996, when, he writes, “a caree of trouble led me to Suwaqah Prison.” He had published a series of articles criticizing the Jordanian government and, in response, the authorities locked him up for a month. Since Zarqawi and Maqdisi were being held at the sam jail, Hussein sought out interviews with them; eventually, Zarqawi served him tea while Maqdisi talked politics Zarqawi mentioned that he had been in solitary confinement for more than eight months and had lost his toenails as result of being tortured. The next week, Zarqawi was sent to solitary again, and his followers staged a riot. Hussei became the negotiator between the prisoners and the warden, who relented—an episode that cemented Hussein’ standing among the radical Islamists
In 2005, Hussein produced what is perhaps the most definitive outline of Al Qaeda’s master plan: a book titled “Al-Zarqawi: The Second Generation of Al Qaeda.” Although it is largely a favorable biography of Zarqawi and his movement, Hussein incorporates the insights of other Al Qaeda members—notably, Saif al-Adl, the security chief.
It is chilling to read this work and realize how closely recent events seem to be hewing to Al Qaeda’s forecasts. Based on interviews with Zarqawi and Adl, Hussein claims that dragging Iran into conflict with the United States is key to Al Qaeda’s strategy. Expanding the area of conflict in the Middle East will cause the U.S. to overextend its forces. According to Hussein, Al Qaeda believes that Iran expects to be attacked by the U.S., because of its interest in building a nuclear weapon. “Accordingly, Iran is preparing to retaliate for or abort this strike by means of using powerful cards in its hand,” he writes. These tactics include targeting oil installations in the Persian Gulf, which could cut off sixty per cent of the world’s oil supplies, destabilizing Western economies.
In an ominous passage, Hussein notes that “for fifteen years—or since the end of the first Gulf War—Iran has been busy building a secret global army of highly trained personnel and the necessary financial and technological capabilities to carry out any kind of mission.” He is clearly referring to Hezbollah, which has so far focussed its attention on Israel. According to Hussein, “Iran has identified American and Jewish targets around the world. This secret army is led by two professional Lebanese men who have pledged full allegiance to Iran and who hold enough of a grudge against the Americans to qualify them to inflict damage on Jewish and American interests around the world.”
Iran, he continues, has been cultivating good relations with other Palestinian resistance groups, including Hamas. “Iran views these parties as its entrenched wings in occupied Palestine,” Hussein writes, asserting that the peace talks between Israelis and Palestinians at the Egyptian resort town of Sharm al-Sheikh in February, 2005, were secretly aimed at countering Iranian influence on the Palestinian resistance. “Al Qaeda interpreted this as the first step toward launching an attack on Iran,” Hussein claims. Both the U.S. and Israel view Hezbollah, the Islamist group in Lebanon, as a creature of the Iranian state, and are intent on eliminating it. “The military campaign against Iran will begin when the United States and Israel succeed in disarming Hezbollah,” Hussein predicts.
Hussein claims, without offering evidence, that Iran already has thirty thousand intelligence agents in Iraq. “Since the Americans have not succeeded in eliminating the Sunni resistance, how can they deal with the situation if the Shiites join the resistance? Iran plans to incite its proponents in Iraq to join the anti-U.S. resistance in the event that the United States or Israel launches an attack on Iran. Iran plans to open its border to the resistance and provide it with what it needs to achieve a swift and major victory against the Americans.” Al Qaeda, he writes, also expects the Americans to go after Iran’s principal ally in the region, Syria. The removal of the Assad regime—a longtime goal of jihadis—will allow the country to be infiltrated by Al Qaeda, putting the terrorists within reach, at last, of Israel.
Hussein observes that Al Qaeda’s ideologues have studied the failure of Islamist movements in the past and concluded that they lacked concrete, realistic goals. Therefore, he writes, “Al Qaeda drew up a feasible plan within a well-defined time frame. The plan was based on improving the Islamic jihadist action in quality and quantity and expanding it to include the entire world.”
Al Qaeda’s twenty-year plan began on September 11th, with a stage that Hussein calls “The Awakening.” The ideologues within Al Qaeda believed that “the Islamic nation was in a state of hibernation,” because of repeated catastrophes inflicted upon Muslims by the West. By striking America—“the head of the serpent”—Al Qaeda caused the United States to “lose consciousness and act chaotically against those who attacked it. This entitled the party that hit the serpent to lead the Islamic nation.” This first stage, says Hussein, ended in 2003, when American troops entered Baghdad.
The second, “Eye-Opening” stage will last until the end of 2006, Hussein writes. Iraq will become the recruiting ground for young men eager to attack America. In this phase, he argues, perhaps wishfully, Al Qaeda will move from being an organization to “a mushrooming invincible and popular trend.” The electronic jihad on the Internet will propagate Al Qaeda’s ideas, and Muslims will be pressed to donate funds to make up for the seizure of terrorist assets by the West. The third stage, “Arising and Standing Up,” will last from 2007 to 2010. Al Qaeda’s focus will be on Syria and Turkey, but it will also begin to directly confront Israel, in order to gain more credibility among the Muslim population.
In the fourth stage, lasting until 2013, Al Qaeda will bring about the demise of Arab governments. “The creeping loss of the regimes’ power will lead to a steady growth in strength within Al Qaeda,” Hussein predicts. Meanwhile, attacks against the Middle East petroleum industry will continue, and America’s power will deteriorate through the constant expansion of the circle of confrontation. “By then, Al Qaeda will have completed its electronic capabilities, and it will be time to use them to launch electronic attacks to undermine the U.S. economy.” Islamists will promote the idea of using gold as the international medium of exchange, leading to the collapse of the dollar.
Then an Islamic caliphate can be declared, inaugurating the fifth stage of Al Qaeda’s grand plan, which will last until 2016. “At this stage, the Western fist in the Arab region will loosen, and Israel will not be able to carry out preëmptive or precautionary strikes,” Hussein writes. “The international balance will change.” Al Qaeda and the Islamist movement will attract powerful new economic allies, such as China, and Europe will fall into disunity.
The sixth phase will be a period of “total confrontation.” The now established caliphate will form an Islamic Army and will instigate a worldwide fight between the “believers” and the “non-believers.” Hussein proclaims, “The world will realize the meaning of real terrorism.” By 2020, “definitive victory” will have been achieved. Victory, according to the Al Qaeda ideologues, means that “falsehood will come to an end. . . . The Islamic state will lead the human race once again to the shore of safety and the oasis of happiness.”

Al Qaeda’s version of utopia has drawn the allegiance of a new generation of Arabs, who have been tutored on th Internet by ideologues such as Suri and Naji. This “third generation of mujahideen,” as Suri calls them, have bee radicalized by September 11th, the occupation of Iraq, and the Palestinian intifada. (Suri wrote this before the curren struggle in Lebanon.) Those jihadis fighting in the conflict in Iraq have been trained in vicious urban warfare agains the most formidable army in history. They will return to their home countries and add their expertise to the new cell springing up in the Middle East, Central Asia, the Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia, and many European nations
With a few troublesome exceptions, America has been free of the kind of indigenous Islamist terrorism that has recently visited Britain. It is a tribute to the American Muslim community, which is more integrated into American society than its counterparts in Europe. Relatively few Muslims in the U.S. have been imprisoned, and the typical Muslim household earns more than the national average. The situation in Europe is starkly different, which means that it will be an ongoing source of trouble, and may continue to be a launching pad for the kind of attacks against America represented by the alleged plot to blow up as many as ten airliners over the Atlantic.
In 2002, the Dutch government commissioned a study of the recruits to the Islamist movement. The report, titled “Recruitment for the Jihad in the Netherlands,” divides the jihadis into three groups. First are young men of Dutch descent who have converted to Islam—a phenomenon, noticed elsewhere in Europe, in which traditional forms of worship have lost their allure and radical Islam functions as an all-encompassing identity and as a form of protest. Many of these conversions take place in prison. The second category is composed mainly of illegal Arab immigrants who have little knowledge of the culture and language of their host country. The third and largest category is made up of the sons and grandsons of predominately Moroccan immigrants, native speakers of Dutch who speak little or no Arabic. This group, caught between cultures, identifies most profoundly with radical Islam.
After the murder of the filmmaker Theo van Gogh, in Amsterdam in 2004, the government published another study, “From Dawa to Jihad,” detailing the threats from radical Islam. This study notes a sharp difference between “traditional” radical political Islam and what the authors term “radical-Islamic puritanism,” which characterizes the new generation. Traditional radical Islam was homogeneous and organized; it had a detailed ideology with a specific vision of a non-Western alternative society. There was, in theory, a peaceful path to this idealized vision, but the traditional radical thinkers believed that this path had been cut off by the West, making jihad—which they saw as a political struggle carried out on the battlefield—the only alternative. The ideology of the new generation, comprising a mixture of ethnic identities, is alarmingly vague. Their only political goal is a return to the ideals of the seventh-century Prophet and his early successors; they spout messianic slogans about the caliphate and imposing Sharia, without a clear idea of what those goals entail. They categorically reject the possibility of a peaceful path. They believe that the world is divided between “sons of light” and “sons of darkness,” and that a fight to the end is the will of God.

Al Qaeda’s apocalyptic agenda is not shared by all Islamists. Although most jihadi groups approve of Al Qaeda’ attacks on America and Europe, their own goals are often more parochial, having to do with purifying Islam an toppling regimes in their own countries which they see as heretical. Many of these groups would be happy to see A Qaeda disappear, so that their campaigns can be understood as nationalist guerrilla struggles with specific politica goals
This rupture has grown increasingly apparent in the past five years. Sheikh Muhammad Hussein Fadlallah, Hezbollah’s spiritual leader, publicly denounced the September 11th attacks and condemned Al Qaeda’s use of suicide bombers, even though the tactic was employed in the 1983 attacks on the U.S. Embassy in Beirut and the barracks of American and French troops in Lebanon, both of which are believed to have been carried out by Hezbollah. After September 11th, leaders of the Egyptian Islamist organization, Gama’a Islamiya, which has worked closely with Al Qaeda in the past, publicly condemned Al Qaeda’s tactics and its goals of worldwide jihad. Even some of Zawahiri’s former colleagues in the Egyptian terror group he formed, Al Jihad, argue that Al Qaeda has undermined the cause of Islam by instigating anti-Muslim sentiment in the U.S. and the West.
It is notable how seldom these ideologues refer to the words of bin Laden or Zawahiri, the nominal leaders of the movement, perhaps because the declarations of Al Qaeda’s leadership are directed more at Americans and Europeans than at the jihadis. “Beware the scripted enemy, who plays to a global audience,” David Kilcullen, the counterterrorism strategist at the State Department, wrote in a paper now being used by the U.S. military in Iraq as a handbook for dealing with the insurgency. Al Qaeda, he wrote, propagates a “single narrative” aimed at influencing the West; but each faction within the jihadi movement has its own version of this narrative, often sharply different from the message being put forward by bin Laden and Zawahiri.
Although American and European intelligence communities are aware of the jihadi texts, the work of these ideologues often reads like a playbook that U.S. policymakers have been slavishly, if inadvertently, following. “The data don’t get to the top, because the decision-makers are not looking for that kind of information,” a policy analyst who works closely with the American intelligence community told me. “They think they know better.”
As the writings of Abu Musab al-Suri, Abu Bakr Naji, Fouad Hussein, and others make clear, the tradition of Salafi jihad existed before bin Laden and Al Qaeda and will likely survive them; yet, from the beginning of the war on terror, the strategy of the Administration has been to decapitate Al Qaeda’s leadership. Bruce Hoffman, who is the author of “Inside Terrorism” and a professor at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service, told me, “One of the problems with the kill-or-capture metric is that it has often been to the exclusion of having a deeper, richer understanding of the movement, its origins, and our adversaries’ mindset. The nuances are absolutely critical. Our adversaries are wedded to the ideology that informs and fuels their struggle, and, by not paying attention, we risk not knowing our enemy.”

The Next War

2006-09-01T22:53:00.000-07:00

Just surfing the web, I read some Israeli blogs. The weird thing was that on two of them, they mention the "next war."

One said something like: We shouldn't look askance at the war in Lebanon. It may have been useful in planning for the next war.

The other one. I don't remember what it said.

Busy busy busy calls the "Committee on the Present Danger" the Committee To Precipitate WWIII or IV. They aren't sure whether to call it WWWIII or IV. (Those in favor of IV probably like to consider the Cold War WWIII so that we can say we won that one, too! Three world wars in A ROW! We're on a roll now!)

I would dismiss these things but it's hard to dismiss anything these days. The next war.

I used to wonder what would cause the decline of the American empire. Now, of course, it is obvious. The American Empire will cause it's own decline. It will probably self-destruct. You would hear that terrorism was going to destroy Israel or that Israel would no longer function but that seemed kind of silly. But it looks like Israel and the United States may actually do the terrorist's work for them--self implode in some sort of WWIII conflagration.

I have longer arguments about this but don't have time to make them.

I wish the rest of us didn't have to go down with them, but that might be inevitable too.

UPDATE: All I can say is "oh, shit." Glenn Greenwald analyzes the rhetoric of the president's current speeches and suspects we have another war in our immediate future.

Oh, God. This is rather horrifying. Are things as bad as I think? I think: Not just more wars but is this country really going to remain a democracy? Is the tide turning? At least they are not like a Latin American junta. I have my doubts the pentagon supports them. Kind of hard to have a coup without the army on your side. But, really. What is going to happen? Where does all this madness lead?

What Is Complicity?

2006-08-31T01:01:00.000-07:00

Juan Cole says that the sprinkling of cluster bombs in a civilian area right before a cease fire is a war crime. I don't know what the law is on this but it is without a doubt a moral crime.

He also says.

"The American people are complicit in these war crimes, insofar as they provided the cluster bombs and supported Olmert to the hilt in his dirty war, which was only occasionally about actually combating Hizbullah fighters (there weren't any, in a lot of the places that were bombed)."

I wish I knew what complicity was or how complicit the American people are here. America contributes to Israel, Israel buys weapons with US tax dollars and buys US weapons with US tax dollars. Do most people even know what a cluster bomb is? Does some of the excusable ignorance excuse? What about the inexcusable ignorance. Just what are your duties?

This seems like it is too far away for the American people to be complicit. I find it disturbing for two reasons. (1) It echoes Bin Ladin's claims about U.S. taxpayers. It echoes justification for terrorism in the idea that no civilians are innocent. That's a dark path to go down. It runs in both directions and turns political and military conflict into a blood feud. Also, it's not true. (2) It does not seem plausible to me and I don't think it would to most people, except those who hate the U.S. But there is some real complicity. There is some real guilt. I don't know how far it goes or what it means. I think an account of it is harder to give than some might think. I suppose this is because I doubt the average American's ability to influence his government in any meaningful way.

But when you charge complicity on matters like this--things that American people have absolutely no ability to control or perhaps even to know about, you water responsibility down in such a way that it becomes meaningless. The only good that does is that it makes you able to demonize groups of people, to vent your rage. But it doesn't do any real good if your goal is to actually get people to take responsibility, to see connections, to create change.

There needs to be some word for such a state--where voting occurs but real democracy is absent. I can't think of one. Well, clearly there are oligarchic and plutarchic elements in the U.S. but that doesn't quite capture it.

But even if you don't take on that controversial assumption you need a better account of complicity. Seeing innocent people die and have their lives destroyed, like the people in Lebanon, seeing what seems like it can only be indifference to the value of their lives, this makes us angry. I would hope it does. But I just don't think the knee jerk attempt to blame everyone in sight really accomplishes anything except to license more horrific violence.

2006-08-07T14:59:00.000-07:00

Human Rights Watch: Civilian Casualties of IDF

Question of the Month

2006-08-03T09:16:00.000-07:00

or maybe the year: What do we do when the democratic process is entirely subverted?

What do we plan to do? The last six years has demonstrated the weaknesses in our institutions--from the first and possibly second stolen election to the signing statements to the outright refusal to abide with treaties the U.S. is a signatory to, to the suspension of civil rights, to the conspiracy to torture people, to the flagrant violation of the law.

Does anyone wonder if there will be a peaceful handover? Is anyone doubting whether these people will actually leave office in the usual way? I'm really starting to wonder about this!

2006-08-02T23:16:00.000-07:00

Good Samaritan rescuers arrested

There are many questions I have about the justness of U.S. immigration policy. One of these is how to argue that the funneling of Mexican migrants through the desert in order to discourage illegal border crossings is simply wrong.

Can you argue this without a complex economic argument? To oversimplify, because as usual, I need to do my real work--is it simply wrong?

The immigration policy leads to death. Rather horrifying death, in fact. Dying of heat exhaustion in the desert or in the trunk of a car is not a pretty thing. Yet, for each person that dies it can be said that they took a risk--there is some sort o informed consent. It is unlikely that they have no idea what might face them--although one expects they underestimate the risk. It's shocking to think they are in a situation where that risk is worth it, given their other options. But people constantly take those sorts of risks when they are poor. They work in mines or with lead paint or contaminants or do sex work when AIDS is prevalent. Those harms are often attributable to unjust economic structures--so is the death of the migrants in the desert.

So maybe it takes some kind of economic argument after all. Perhaps not a highly complex one. As much as I believe that the poverty in Mexico and Central America is tied to U.S. economic policy, I am doubtful that it is an easy thing to prove. I'm not sure it is provable. I'm not sure it is possible to prove to even a reasonable skeptic many of the claims of global justice activists with respect to clear causal connections to wealth countries in every case of poverty in the global south.

This is sort of prima facie reasoning on my part--a worry about disentangling causes. There's certainly correlations and then inference to the best explanation--maybe you can go that route. How much economics machinery does one need there?

The Administration Has Committed War Crimes

2006-08-01T08:43:00.000-07:00

Detainee abuse charges feared.

War crimes have been committed, but of course, there is no expectation of any prosecution. Yet, here is a U.S. law that could conceivably be used against those involved in detainee abuse. What about the people who wrote all those memos approving torture? Would they be liable?

No, because congress will gut this law. A law that makes the greatest sense given the U.S. self-image of 10 years ago. And now? The country is apparently supposed to accept the role of torturer.

What Might Be True

2006-07-21T00:38:00.000-07:00

I'm not interested in writing about what I think, my opinion or what I think is true. Currently, this would not be a good use of my time. What I care about is what I don't understand, what I need to learn.

Right now, when I read of the Israeli incursion into Lebanon, there are some things I worry might be true--the main one is that people in the U.S. government will ride this current crisis to a larger war.

Like the U.S., it seems Israel is not doing nearly enough to prevent civilian casualties. Preventing civilian casualties requires some refusal to bomb or fire upon possible threats. It often requires putting one's soldiers in harms way since bombs dropped from the air are more likely to be indiscriminate than ground attacks. It requires a very measured military response--e.g., prohibition against firing upon civilian targets that provide support to fighters. This is something the U.S. does not do enough of and this is why they can be blamed for many of the deaths they cause. The 'shock and awe' was a perfect example of a failure to take sufficient care to protect civilians. The bombing of Serbia and Kosovo had similiar problems. The bombings in Vietnam were horrific.

Wars against insurgents or guerillas tend to create much larger numbers of civilian casualties because insurgents hide in civilian areas and they depend upon non-military bases of support. The thing is that the attackers--those with planes, for example, have much greater firepower. They are, in a word, more powerful. Thus, the invaders are usually doing the worst things. It generally doesn't matter for just war theory (for issues of jus in bello) but in Iraq, for example, the U.S. has options. We are not defending our families and schools and hospitals and food supply. This makes the civilian casualties even more unacceptable. (If more unacceptable makes sense--since killing civilians deliberately or through disregard is always unacceptable.)

I don't think the same thing is entirely true for Israel right now. They do not have many good options but may have better options than the ones they are pursuing. I don't know about the jus ad bellum arguments. But it seems to me that the response is disproportionate and it seems clear that the Israeli military is not doing enough to prevent civilian casualties, even if they are justified in being there in the first place. Now they may invade Lebanon.

It really seems that there are factions that want to stamp out the threats by using disproportionate force. As in, this is our chance, let's take it. They gave us a pretext, now they will see the mistake they made. I wonder what it means that I find this idea tempting: Wouldn't it be cool if one side in this ongoing conflict was so weakened it pretty much eliminated the conflict? Except I know that, like a lot of other things that involve killing human beings for the betterment of society, it requires horrifying means and almost never works.

Hizbollah--I don't understand what they are up to (why now?) but their aggression might be thought an attempt to stay relevant, to justify their continued existence and influence. I think they welcome these civilian casualties. Anything that makes Israel look illegitimate in its response benefits them.

Historically, it appears to be the case trying to stamp out one's enemies doesn't work well in the middle east. People who are just as bad or worse rush in to fill the vaccum. It works sometimes, in other contexts. Usually, it involves massacres of innocents and other immoral action.

The world's sympathies seem to be turning quickly to the people of Lebanon and against Israel. This is understandable--the Lebonese are dying in large numbers, dying horrifically, cast out of their homes, terrified, deprived. Once again, Israel may feel misunderstood. Israel has a right to defend itself but the extent of that right is what is being questioned by many. (Some people do question the right of Israel to exist but I am not one of them.) Is the price of being Israel a constant low level of devastating violence? Is that the inevitable price? I can see why some find that unacceptable--but what if that is just the price unless Israel engages in immoral and near constant warfare? What if there is nothing better than that? Until, by some miracle, the two state option gets revived and implemented correctly. After the death of many, many innocent Lebonese, will Israel be safe, finally? Will things somehow be better? I doubt it. So I think perhaps the views one has about Israel's right to defend itself are a distraction unless you are thinking of something beyond the right to self-defense; something more like the right to punish, the right to retaliate, the right to total and utter safety by the decimation of your enemies and whoever else lives near them? I don't know. I question whether a widening of the conflict will make Israel safer in the long run. You aren't going to get a pro-Israel Syria.

Reflexively blaming Israel also seems like a distraction of sorts. Everyone is rushing to that bandwagon.

I say this without knowing whether a cease fire or agreement will work to keep Hizbollah from sending bombs into Israel. I think, if this ends with some kind of buffer zone with international troops that prevents Hizbollah from firing into Israel then some Israeli response might have been unavoidable. But what do you say about all the civilian casualties? They can't be justified.

See, that's what I don't even know--how much space is needed for a buffer zone? What do you have to create geographically to protect Israel? (I mean--reasonably--Israel is obviously under threat of weapons all around it--but from Hizbollah, right now?) Does Israel have to invade Lebanon and wipe out Hizbollah to prevent the rockets from firing into Israel? And how extensive will the invasion have to be? If it does, then this again becomes a tragic situation. I fear it isn't just tragic. I fear Israel and then the U.S. are going to exploit the situation no matter what better options are available. Then it will be tragic for a different reason. I hope this doesn't happen butt I fear it will.

Should Mention That

2006-07-18T13:27:00.000-07:00

I barely know what the fuck is going on. Want to think straight but I can't. Want to bail water from the giant inland sea that is my ignorance and can.t. Too much work.

I think, how do I find out? But if things are as bad as they seem, we will all find out soon enough. Since we live in the U.S. and are stuck with our media, many of the things we will be told will also be false.

On an unrelated point. Again, for the ten-thousandth time, we discover that it actully does matter who is president.

On The Face: I've decided arbitrarily to rely entirely on this blog for all information.

I have a 35 page paper to revise in 3 days. Can't screw around on the internet trying to find out what the hell is happening. Pretty sure that things are going to hell quickly. I'll find out soon enough, I suppose.

WWIII

2006-07-18T12:54:00.000-07:00

Hey, it's WWIII. Let's hope it's a short one. Strange how WWIII is supposed to be the end of the world. If this gets to be WWIII and we survive it, will we move on to WWIV or will we recycle WWIII?

Oh, wait. It might even be WWV.

Digsby's comment

Hizbollah ready to attack U.S. Such a snappy title!

Why international law matters. I couldn't write this if I tried. Or maybe I could. But it would take me all day.

I assume I needn't explain too much here since the reader I care about (the only reader I have) is my future self. I take it, future self, you will remember the context.

This Was Odd

2006-07-16T20:55:00.000-07:00

I actually thought the other day--good God am I a realist?

There's no getting around the power of the U.S. and what do you do with all that power? An isolationist foreign policy seems like an impossibility at this point. It would have to be better than what we've currently got going--almost anything would besides overt world takeover which is where the U.S. may be heading-- but it will never fly.

Then there is the 'moral' foreign policy. It used to be that the assertion of concern with democracy in the non-U.S./non-Europe part of the world meant leave them alone. It often meant that. Now it means all out war.

There's one thing that I find striking and that is that a calculated measure of what was in the interest of the U.S. would have resulted in a much more 'moral' foreign policy. A cool-headed and rational and informed calculation. Perhaps those never happen which is why this meta-realist argument might not work. The argument is: If the Imperial Government of the United States would only think of its interests and its interests alone---primarily geopolitical, not economic (I think)--then what the actions it would engage in would be far more morally palatable than if it actively acted to promote 'moral' foreign policy aims.

Now what we have here could very well be a fake moral foreign policy wrapping with a crunchy economic-driven center. But the rhetoric has turned things on its head. It starts to look a little crazy to say 'I want a moral foreign policy.' What we have now is a moralizing foreign policy. But it's enough to put you off the whole idea of a moral foreign policy.

I often engage in these 'if I ran the world' flights of fancy. If I ran the world and if I were not the ethically concerned person I am with many qualms about war but some old craggy hardcore state department-ish pro-United Statesan. Well, from where I sit now, I would have invaded Afghanistan. With a large number of troops. I would have secured and rebuilt the country, poured bucketloads of money into it. I would have made Afghanistan into Panama, pretty much. And unceasingly, relentlessly attempted to track down Bin Laden. Really, for the public relations angle more than anything else. The simple formula: He attacked the U.S. The U.S. found him, put him on trial, killed him and now he is dead. It's very powerful, that little narrative. Not the solution to all problems, but a nice clear story arc.

As my craggy hardcore patriotic and yet reasonable self (the old and wise--where are they? They are nowhere to be found. Especially not in Washington, D.C. They've all retired.) I would have stayed very far from Iraq. Very far. Would I mess with Iran? Not directly. No, my craggy old white male self would do everything sneakily, smartly behind the scenes.

And I think--except for global warming, the empire would have lasted--although not remained untroubled--for decades. Decades and decades, a century or more. If I were Marcus Aurelius in the State Department.

Scary

2006-07-13T21:09:00.000-07:00

OK, my post below lacks context since it is very clear that some rather small acts by those without much (planes, for example) have the capacity to start very large wars. I hope to God that's not what's happening in Israel and Lebanon right now.

Hilzoy's post gives some background as to the events leading up to the kidnappings. And mentions that the absence of U.S. diplomacy is a very bad thing right now.

Chris Bertram flatly states the Israeli response was wrong.

This very detailed post makes the point it's not so clear. By Jonathan Edelstein. The rules of war were not violated initially by either side (Hamas or Israel), he claims. True perhaps if we assume, I think, that the Gaza border itself was a war zone. Are there no agreements as to engagement after the initial Gaza pullout? I guess anything agreed to is long ago obliterated. It all starts to seem like splitting hairs. Here is where you might want to focus on outcomes. If a larger war results from Israel's reaction and we assume (as we have to, I think) that there were alternatives to Israel's choice then doesn't Israel bear some responsibility for that war?

Hamas?

2006-07-12T23:30:00.000-07:00

I don't know the first thing about Hamas other than the obvious, which is that they support terrorism against Israelis.

This is sort of an odd review. It barely mentions the book at all!

Its point is to describe Hamas, how bad they are, how nefarious their plan is.

What seems strange to me is when people talk about how the Muslim [somethings...'supremicists' seems as good a word as any] have this grand plan to conquer the earth, Dr. Evil style. Is it not relevant at all that the Muslim Supremicists are hardly in any kind of position to conquer the earth Dr. Evil style? At least not at the moment.

OK, maybe they will be in such a position after some sort of cataclysmic upheaval we can't foresee. Rising seas, chaotic weather, a rogue nuclear weapon followed by a total economic collapse and then a plague that wipes out the overwhelming global supremacy of the U.S., Europe and most of Asia. But right now, is it even relevant that the Muslim [whatever you want to call them] have a grand plan to conquer the world. We must act now, before it is too late. They want Spain back!!

It would surprise me if Hamas weren't extremist but this review, it's a kind of genre you see lately. The "hide your children, the Muslims are coming!" genre. It is depressing and scary that Islamic terrorists pose a threat to my child, a statistically small threat but a real threat. And God, it is horrible to think of what the Israelis must live with. But doesn't it also matter that the children of 'Islamists' as the author calls them are currently being killed and terrorized by bombs in Iraq or Palestine and/or desperately poor? Their rhetoric seems to strike such terror in the heart of this reviewer. But why not just do a little comparison for a minute?

This is not to deny that Hamas's rhetoric, even if misrepresented by the reviewer, is not militant at the least and whacko anti-semitic or even genocidal at the most. But then what's the implication? What is to be done? It always seems to me that the implication when someone emphasizes just how out of bounds some elements are that there's only one option: Wipe 'em out.

Basically, the hope is that by emphasizing the unsavory elements of their politics our wiping them out is justified. We are wiping them out because they wanted to wipe us out first.

I always wonder why groups like Hamas take root. It's not all injustice on its own that makes any group take the road of violent extremism. Its injustice plus an unhealthy cultural ferment that tends to lead to extremism. Forgive the stereotype, but lots of Cubans in Miami are kind of nutty while the ones in New Jersey are relatively sane. Something about the exiled community in Miami drives some people around the bend. Exile alone is not sufficient.

Still, why is the actual situation--that Muslims have absolutely no hope of currently taking over the world-- never relevant, I wonder? Is it reasonable for those who beat these drums to say 'but the current takeover of large portions of the Islamic world is just a side effect of self-defense. As long as we don't plan to take over the Islamic world, the fact that we are taking over a part of the Islamic world is unobjectionable? Don't you see, they plan to take over the world."

Yes, their plans are crazy as hell and who knows how many Muslims are on board with these batshit plans to take over the entire world? Millions, undoubtedly. Isn't it always millions? It's a bit of a problem and will become an increasing one if people obsessed with the evils of Islamic radicalism are drivivng the boat. It's as if Islamic Supremacy is a disease that affects both its proponents and its opponents in almost the exact same way.

Crucial Climate Change Case Now Before The Court

2006-07-09T01:00:00.000-07:00

Editorial--NY TIMES
Global Warming and the Courts

Published: July 8, 2006
In a move that has caused both delight and apprehension among those who worry about global warming, the Supreme Court has agreed to rule next fall on whether the Environmental Protection Agency has the authority under the Clean Air Act to regulate carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. The case is among the most important environmental disputes ever to come before the court.

The outcome will have much to say about whether the country will be able to act more aggressively on a problem with potentially grave consequences for the earth and its inhabitants. It could also determine whether states that have acted on their own to limit global warming emissions from vehicles — as California and 10 other states have done — can proceed without fear of a federal veto.

President Bush has advanced many reasons for not pressing for strong controls on greenhouse gas emissions from vehicles, power plants and other industrial sources. But his ace in the hole has been the claim that the federal government has no authority to regulate greenhouse gases.

The case turns largely on a simple reading of the Clean Air Act. The administration argues that the act mentions carbon dioxide only in passing, and that if Congress had been truly worried about global warming it would have given the gases that cause it more emphasis and instructed the E.P.A. to take aggressive steps to control them, as it did with sulfur dioxide and other pollutants. The administration argues further that the science on global warming is too "uncertain" to justify anything more than a voluntary effort to deal with it.

The plaintiffs — a formidable collection of state governments and environmental groups — argue that the plain language of the Clean Air Act gives the government jurisdiction over "any air pollutant" that threatens "public health or welfare" and, further, that "welfare" specifically includes effects on climate and weather. This interpretation of the act was first set forth by President Clinton's E.P.A. and stood as agency policy until Mr. Bush reversed it (without consulting his own E.P.A.) in 2001.

As for the science that the administration finds so shaky, the plaintiffs will argue that the science has grown steadily more persuasive since the Clean Air Act was last revised in 1990; that the administration has cherry-picked arguments about details while ignoring the vast preponderance of the evidence; and that the consensus among mainstream scientists — a consensus reinforced by a recent National Academy of Sciences report — is that the earth is inexorably heating up and that industrial emissions are largely responsible.

This is a case of global importance, not least because America's failure to act decisively has discouraged the rest of the world from acting decisively. On the face of it, the law plainly gives the government the power to regulate greenhouse gases. A ruling that tells the administration that it has that power does not mean that it will actually use it. But it will no longer be able to hide behind a legal fiction.

Full text above--link to NY Times Opinion Page

If the administration's position is what this editorial says it is, that's freaking absurd.

London Bombings: One Year After

2006-07-08T02:26:00.000-07:00

I don't know why but I wasn't afraid after 9/11. I was after the London bombing.

7/7 made me realize how inevitable it is that more attacks will happen and more innocent people will die. It also made me realize something frightening: That ordinary people can and will become suicide bombers. Some may even be idealists. Manipulated by others with darker aims, but ordinary people nonetheless. Of course, I don't agree with where their ideals take them. I don't say it's understandable in the sense it can be justified. But it can be understood in the framework of expected human behavior. And this is what frightens me.

Strange, I was in London and rode the tube about a week or so--two weeks?--after the bombing and I wasn't afraid. No one else appeared to be. How quickly things go back to normal for those who didn't suffer or weren't directly affected. For those affected, it's hard to imagine what they go through. But that's to be expected. We live in a world where we are constantly made aware of unthinkable tragedies and still we have to go collect the mail or eat a bowl of shredded wheat or everything else pointless or necessary.

Still, you have to stop sometime and think about it and today I did. There's nothing I can do from so far away to alleviate the pain of 52 people dead and so many people injured. I just it wish that wasn't so.

Round Up On Hamdan

2006-06-30T13:54:00.000-07:00

Here's a great set of links by firedoglake on Hamdan.

I felt great relief at the decision. Then, of course, some people had to remind me that it doesn't matter, really. Will make no difference. Not a big deal.

When I think about the alternative decision, though, it is clear to me that it's a big deal.

Unspeak made me laugh about the dissenting opinions but they can really give you nightmares if you think about it too long.

I wonder if Bush's absolute power in emergencies is going to extend to term limits as well.

Behind the Times, As Always

2006-06-27T01:02:00.000-07:00

I was telling someone about the mosquito ringtone. So I googled it and found a toddler wandering by to experiment upon but while I was running this nefarious experiment I realized that I could hear the damn thing. It was painful to listen to.

But I'm as old as the hills. Why can I hear it? Found another mid-thirties person. He could hear it also.

What is up with the mosquito ringtone?

It was a bit surprising since it really sounds like a high pitched electrical squealing noise and I was expecting to hear something...like a ringtone so I almost didn't think it was what I was hearing at first.

I spent my entire youth sitting virtually inside the 8 foot speakers at punk rock shows. I have hearing loss in one ear due to a horrendous ear infection. Or so I thought.

Is it the vitamins? Am I some kind of super non-aging creature? A vampire? One of the Highlanders? Or is it some sort of emperor's new clothes type phenomenon?

I should mention that I'm actually pretty sure my eyesight is going--I can't see very small print right in front of my face anymore. I had 20/20 vision at one point, then 20/40. Alas. Death awaits after all.

2006-06-21T09:58:00.000-07:00

Examining Camp X-Ray

I'd like to understand the specifics of the treatment of prisoners at Guantanamo. I have this sense that there is a type of imprisonment that amounts to torture. I think that U.S. prisons are mostly horrifying and unacceptable.

Of course, torture is notoriously hard to define in terms of its actions. Perhaps it has to be defined in terms of its goals.

The Amnesty International Statement

I am struck by Jeff Sessions claims to the effect that we cannot release these prisoners because they are prisoners of war. One doesn't release prisoners of war so that they can go back and kill your own troops. Jeff Sessions, "The Treatment of Prisoners at Guantanamo" They've 'only' been there about 3 years or so.**

The odd thing, of course, is that they are not being extended the Geneva conventions. So they are not prisoners of war. Nor are the criminals. They exist in the grey zone of the illegal combatant.

And, of course, the U.S. declared war on Afghanistan but not all the foreign nationals in Afghanistan were there to fight the U.S. Some got stuck there, some were there specifically to fight the U.S., some were there to be trained as terrorists, some were there to fight in the local struggle between Taliban and Northern Alliance. Etc. Well, we'd know more if we were allowed to know more but we are allowed to know very little about these prisoners and their circumstances.

A few others notable claims Sessions makes. (1) We've spent a lot of money on that prison. He seems to think this shows the prisoners must be getting humane treatment. That's absurd. (2) He claims the prisoners have been screened carefully so that we can be sure those left are 'the worst of the worst.' That could be true. If anyone was able to know the specific facts--if they were put on trial, for example, then we could be sure it was true. That's why we have trials. (3) 12 of those who were released were then rearrested as they attempted to engage in acts of terrorism. I've never heard that so I plan to do more research.

My own speculative view is that we put these prisoners there without much clear thinking and that it was somebody's very bad idea to refuse them the Geneva conventions. (Granted, there were some grounds for that because of the issue of illegal combatancy. But they should not have been allowed to carry the day.) Now they are a major public relations nightmare, they are in a position to become able spokespersons in their home countries for anti-U.S. sentiment. And trials are problematic because of their irregular treatment. (Which, I think, seems both cruel and demeaning.) However, I've been advised that some Afghan visitors did not find it cruel.

Afghans declare Gitmo conditions humane.

This is also interesting. These memos by the DoD about the Int'l Red Cross Visit state that the IRCC found the conditions at Guantanamo to be what the Geneva conventions require.

Memos Re: International Committee of the Red Cross. (The memos are written by Staff Judge Advocates and other Army lawyers.

I think my views of Guantanamo have been very influenced by the images of prisoners, the statements of lawyers and the fact that U.S. soldiers engaged in what is clearly cruel and inhuman treatment of prisoners who really ARE under the Geneva Conventions.

Here's an example.

Lawyer for Australian citizen David Hicks.

Of all things, the U.N. report is the most damning.

U.N.: U.S. Tortures Guantanamo Detainees.

**(Irrelevant at the moment but in a few days going to explain the comfort that one can find in these statements of Republicans. They always seem to say what I wish were true.)

What Do Dick Cheney and Howard Hughes Have In Common?

2006-06-21T01:16:00.000-07:00

One of the many strange things in the last 5 years is how certain people have influenced major events. Strange, crazy people. Or fanatics. Bin Laden, the 9-11 hijackers. Then you have Chalabi's ridiculous influence on the administration. Maybe we would have gone into Iraq the way we did without Chalabi. But perhaps not. And of course, the administration itself with its band of men-who-want-to-be-world-historical-figures. The ones with the Ph.D.s in political science especially.

I suppose it would be absurd to think that past events weren't shaped in the same way by individuals--Hitler and Mussolini. But Stalin? You have to wonder if someone Stalinish might have come out of the U.S.S.R. even if it hadn't been Stalin particularly. Maybe someone not quite so paranoid. But maybe someone worse.

There are some events where the presence of particular individuals and their personalities might not be a primary cause. Would we have had the Civil War without Lincoln? Maybe, eventually. There are many events, wars even, that seem collective in nature, the product of whole societies or of social forces beyond anyone's personal dictates.

Or maybe I only think that because I wasn't around at the time and things look fuzzier from way out. It just strikes me that the war in Iraq wasn't like this. The war on terror, that's a bit harder to say. But the war in Iraq seems very much a product of a small group of people and their very bad ideas.

This book review I link to below is somewhat terrifying in its descriptions of adminstration stupidity and wanton disregard for rights but it seems also to reveal that the particular characteristics of those in power matter very much in explaining events. The description of the torture of Abu Zubaydah shows how much a matter of happenstance this whole mess is. And how much it will remain so.

The 1% solution. This is Cheney's absurd attempt at practical rationality: "If there's a one percent chance that Pakistani scientists are helping al Qaeda build or develop a nuclear weapon, we have to treat it as a certainty in terms of our response."

I've written about this before (on another site I wimpily abandoned). During the buildup to the Iraq war members of the administration made claims to the effect that: If one anticipates a very great harm and the probability of that harm is very low one must act as if the probability of that harm is very high. Because it's a very great harm.

Basically, if you followed this principle, you would never leave your house. This was Howard Hughes' motto. And look where it got him.

Alas, they forgot to calculate the probability of harm involved in preventing the harm.

The Shadow War, In a Surprising New Light

One example out of many comes in Ron Suskind's gripping narrative of what the White House has celebrated as one of the war's major victories: the capture of Abu Zubaydah in Pakistan in March 2002. Described as al-Qaeda's chief of operations even after U.S. and Pakistani forces kicked down his door in Faisalabad, the Saudi-born jihadist was the first al-Qaeda detainee to be shipped to a secret prison abroad. Suskind shatters the official story line here.

Abu Zubaydah, his captors discovered, turned out to be mentally ill and nothing like the pivotal figure they supposed him to be. CIA and FBI analysts, poring over a diary he kept for more than a decade, found entries "in the voice of three people: Hani 1, Hani 2, and Hani 3" -- a boy, a young man and a middle-aged alter ego. All three recorded in numbing detail "what people ate, or wore, or trifling things they said." Dan Coleman, then the FBI's top al-Qaeda analyst, told a senior bureau official, "This guy is insane, certifiable, split personality."

Abu Zubaydah also appeared to know nothing about terrorist operations; rather, he was al-Qaeda's go-to guy for minor logistics -- travel for wives and children and the like. That judgment was "echoed at the top of CIA and was, of course, briefed to the President and Vice President," Suskind writes. And yet somehow, in a speech delivered two weeks later, President Bush portrayed Abu Zubaydah as "one of the top operatives plotting and planning death and destruction on the United States." And over the months to come, under White House and Justice Department direction, the CIA would make him its first test subject for harsh interrogation techniques.

How could this have happened? Why are we learning about it only now? Those questions form the spine of Suskind's impressively reported book.

In interviews with intelligence officers, Suskind often finds them baffled by White House statements. "Why the hell did the President have to put us in a box like this?" one top CIA official asked about the overblown public portrait of Abu Zubaydah. But Suskind sees a deliberate management choice: Bush ensnared his director of central intelligence at the time, George J. Tenet, and many others in a new kind of war in which action and evidence were consciously divorced.

"The One Percent Doctrine" takes its title from an episode in late November 2001. Amid fears of a "second wave" attack after 9/11, Tenet laid out for Vice President Cheney and national security adviser Condoleezza Rice a stunning trove of new intelligence, much of which Suskind reveals for the first time: Two Pakistani scientists who previously offered to help Libya build a nuclear bomb were known to have met with Osama bin Laden. (Later, Suskind reports, the U.S. government would discover that bin Laden asked pointedly what his next steps should be if he already possessed enriched uranium.) Cheney, by Suskind's account, had been grappling with how to think about "a low-probability, high-impact event." By the time the briefing was over, he had his answer: "If there's a one percent chance that Pakistani scientists are helping al Qaeda build or develop a nuclear weapon, we have to treat it as a certainty in terms of our response."

This "Cheney Doctrine" let Bush evade analytic debate, Suskind writes, and "rely on impulse and improvisation to a degree that was without precedent for a modern president." But that approach constricted the mission of the intelligence and counterterrorism professionals whose point of view dominates this book. Many of them came to believe, Suskind reports, that "their jobs were not to help shape policy, but to affirm it." (Some of them nicknamed Cheney "Edgar," as in Edgar Bergen -- casting the president as the ventriloquist's dummy.) Suskind calls those career terror-fighters "the invisibles," and he likes them. His book is full of amazing, persuasively detailed vignettes about their world. At least a dozen former intelligence officials speak frankly in public here, as did former treasury secretary Paul O'Neill in Suskind's previous book, "The Price of Loyalty."

from
Crooked Timber

Answers: (A) Both dated Ava Gardner. (B) Their fear of a harmful thing makes them do something more harmful than the thing they feared. (C) Leo Di Caprio played both in movies about their 'sane period.' (D) Microphobia! (E) Poor delegators.

2006-06-17T20:43:00.000-07:00

Big Ten

After watching this Stephen Colbert clip I wondered if I knew all 10. My problem was that I forgot the graven images one--thought that would be included under 'thou shalt have no other Gods before me.' They seem a natural fit.

Stephen Colbert asks Lynne Westmoreland whether he knows all 10 of the commandments.

I don't see why this is such a big deal. NO WONDER Westmoreland sponsored the bill! He of all people knows how easy it is to forget the tricky ones.

Now lets see--seven deadly sins 1. Sloth 2. Lust 3. Greed 4. Gluttony 5. Pride 6. Anger ??? Can't remember the 7th. ENVY. How could I forget envy? Thanks google.

2006-06-09T00:42:00.000-07:00

Conspiracy Theory

I found myself entertaining a conspiracy theory the other day. Virtually believing it. I have always ridiculed conspiracy theories. The most amusing among these are the ones about the Trilateral Commission and Standard Oil (I can't really remember how it goes). Since of course, Standard Oil doesn't really need a conspiracy to have a huge influence. I mean, no one needs a conspiracy. It's all OUTRIGHT. The scheming is right in front of you.

In fact, what is a 'conspiracy theory.' I suppose the definition would have to do something with the appearances/reality. That situation X appears to be one thing (a democracy, a complex world of nation states which have opposing interests) but turns out to be something else (run by a secret cabal/all the nation states are in the service of Group X). It also makes events which seem a bit like happenstance part of a large plan. It substitutes single human agency (or some kind of 'board of conspirators') and choice for events that probably have complex multiple causes-- the ones we can't always figure out or know or be certain of.

The reason it is silly to develop conspiracy theories about corporations ruling the world is that corporations rule the world outright. (Well, I exaggerate a bit. But only a bit.) I guess the appearance/reality thing is that they have even more influence over elections than they appear to. The whole 'election' thing is a total sham instead of just sort of a sham.

It was a long rant that got me to the conspiracy theory place. I have a lot of these rants although I'm trying to cut down. I find it hard to believe that most people who read the newspaper who are at all reasonable don't succumb to the rant urge at least weekly.

This was the rant that goes (I advise skipping the rant entirely): So what if we killed Zarqawi? SO THE F WHAT? This war is such a mess I can't believe that anyone is the least bit optimistic about it! They can't LITERALLY believe that it is going well, can they? I mean, can they? DO THEY NOT REMEMBER WHAT THEY THOUGHT BEFORE? Before the war started? Do they not remember their thoughts of several years ago about being greeted with flowers and so forth and then realize that they had false beliefs? Doesn't recollection of your past false hope become a kind of lesson for current and future false hope? Isn't that a necessary step any intelligent person takes? Come to think of it, I changed my mind after the invasion of Afghanistan. I thought it would lead to massive carnage and accomplish nothing and although it accomplished less than it could have, the carnage was not massive. And it even looked as though--if it had not been done so sloppily--it might have actually accomplished something good, like the capture of Osama Bin Laden. Less oppressive government. Possible democracy. So I was wrong about Afghanistan. Putting aside the possibility that a diplomatic solution might actually have worked if given a try and there was nothing to lose by giving it a try maybe it might have been a good idea to go to war in.... Etc. Wait, speaking of Osama Bin Laden...

Then I had this flash of a conspiracy theory. Yeah, why DIDN'T we catch Osama Bin Laden? Maybe they don't want to catch Osama Bin Laden!

The unfortunate person who was near me during this rant replied

--Yeah, it is a little weird. He's in a very remote location. It's so remote. Maybe instead we should overthrow this dictator we think has powerful weapons and a big army and then somehow create a democratic U.S.-friendly state between three groups that have despised one another for centuries. After all, that would be easier, wouldn't it than finding Bin Laden in that remote location that he is in. Can't find a needle in a haystack and that dictator is sitting RIGHT THERE. He's eeeeaaassssy to find! Like picking apples. Bin Laden--TOO HARD.

This of course finally led me to sort of kind of entertain the conspiracy theory that one of my lefty students advanced in class. (the only pacifist I've had in class. He also has a Muslim background but I doubt he is a practicing Muslim. His background may not be relevant but he has a fascinating skepticism and lots of surprising views.) This student argued that they actually GOT Osama and they didn't want anyone to know because they need him as a figurehead for this whole endless war thing they have going.

I mean, you have to wonder. How did we get here? Why have things become so surreal such that we were attacked and we went to war about the attacks and yet somehow everyone has nearly forgotten the attacks themselves and who did them? And you have to wonder: Could they screw up THIS bad? Is there some plan, after all? Maybe it's not sheer incompetence. Maybe THIS--the trillion dollar war that looks completely hopeless and has clearly made things worse-- IS ALL PART OF A MASTER PLAN!

Things are so strange sometimes conspiracy theories start to make sense. I now feel guilty for my scorn for all the people I made fun of when I lived in California. I'm worried that I'm going to be like Mel Gibson in that movie. I'll accidentally invent the conspiracy theory that is true and then they'll have to silence me.

Epistemic Conditions For Foreign Engagement

2006-05-31T09:39:00.000-07:00

Alan Kuperman's editorial (see below) may not be right about Darfur. Two claims struck me the most. (1) Sudanese rebel groups now try to provoke genocidal actions because they believe that humanitarian intervention would favor their cause. The more concern is expressed, the less incentive they have not to do thinkgs that will result in reprisals on civilians. (2) In the history of Sudan, the Arab ethnic groups have not always dominated. They have a history of being dominated. Some of their resentment is caused by their loss of grazing rights.

The rebels are not 'the good guys.' (I'm not sure I heard anyone claim this.) They are not inclined to participate and abide by peace agreements. They want to get into power. The well-being of civilians is not their primary concern.

What's more important, actions designed to promote protection of civilians might endanger them more. This was what happened after U.S. involvement in the Kosovo conflict.

This may be right. I don't know. That's the thing--I DON'T KNOW. The major obstacle facing would-be imperial powers like the U.S. (OK, more than would-be) is the one that doubtless faced all empires--How the hell do you know what happens after you invade an occupy a country? What are the factors in play? Which of these will matter?

In a certain way, this question is the question we ask in a tacit way before any significant action: How do you predict the future?

The question is doubly tricky (in a presumably different version), for the lovely dream of multinational humanitarian intervention, military or otherwise.

There are some difficult, maybe insurmountable problems that I think pile up. I'd like to say condition 1 (epistemic, not moral) for foreign engagement is: (1)Know the country's history. But then, when I think about Iraq, I think: Know history generally. Know your own history. Know what tends to happen in similar situations or even not that similar. The history of Rome is still a bit instructive. (Unfortunately, one of the things it shows is that it doesn't work to use minimal brutality. Half-hearted brutality has a host of problems that full-blown brutality avoids. Then again, that shows: Full-blown brutality is horrifying.)

Anyone who mentioned history during the buildup of Iraq was roundly jumped on. People would say 'Vietnam' and for some reason that didn't get to count. Not count? WHY, you might ask? How could anyone ever think that Vietnam was not relevant? Because it was history? Is there ANYTHING more relevant than history when contemplating war? (Even if it's not relevant in terms of the decision to go to war it is surely relevant in what you decide to do and how you engage. But of course, in Iraq, it would have been nice if someone had thought clearly about both these questions.)

Unfortunately, I think it might have been even dumber reasons that Vietnam was ruled out of court. Things like: That was a jungle. Iraq is a desert.

The problem is that if you contemplate history with a gimlet eye it will make you much less likely to expect success in any foreign conflict.

A second problem is: History according to whom? Surely there are many histories that point in vastly different directions. When I hear that Kuperman is an assistant professor I can't help but wonder: Where does he get his information. Field work? Books? Whose books? He must know Sudanese people, but what is their interest and agenda. But maybe this is because I once met an American scholar on the Andes region who vehemently supported the Shining Path.

What is compelling about his answer I think is less that it is obviously the right solution (it doesn't sound bad to me) but that it is reversable and causes less damage than humanitarian intervention. It is cautious. If there's anything you should be when it comes to giving guns to a bunch of people and sending them to face off with other people with guns, it's cautious.

In fact, it's quite easy to see how problematic the whole epistemic question when you think what conclusions you would draw if you asked two Americans about anything and compared their answers. Even the Sudanese might now know, fully, where cause and effect lie on the political dimension. (Sometimes it is obvious and this is one of those cases. But other times all you can do as an outsider--or sometimes as an insider--is make an educated guess.) That guess should include all that you know about history but not just all that you know about history but all that you know about the current situation, all that you know about human psychology and the general tendencies of people (e.g., people tend to resent foreign occupation). In the long run, you need to try and know almost everything. How you get there, I haven't a clue. Or not a good one, anyway.

How we got in Iraq I have quite a good idea. There were too many unknowns. The unknowns were knowable. In fact, they were known by quite a lot of people. Alas, they were known by the wrong people. I remember NPR interviewing a woman--someone in Iraq, I can't remember when or how--and she predicted virtually the exact chain of events that left us where we are now. I'm not talking about an expert. I'm talking about someone who sounded frightened, someone very ordinary, maybe even uneducated. Much of what she said--the resentment of the occupation, the internal turmoil between Sunni and Shia, the descent into chaotic violence--were things that seemed to me likely to happen. This may be why I remember it. So maybe sometimes it's not that hard. And yet it must be hard because why the hell do these people keep %#%$ing up? The Best and the Brightest. Now the Worst and the Slimiest.

So maybe condition (1) Leads to: Don't. Just, don't. Not if you can help it.

Op-Ed ContributorStrategic Victimhood in Sudan

By Alan J. Kuperman
Published: May 31, 2006
Austin, Tex.

THOUSANDS of Americans who wear green wristbands and demand military intervention to stop Sudan's Arab government from perpetrating genocide against black tribes in Darfur must be perplexed by recent developments.

Without such intervention, Sudan's government last month agreed to a peace accord pledging to disarm Arab janjaweed militias and resettle displaced civilians. By contrast, Darfur's black rebels, who are touted by the wristband crowd as freedom fighters, rejected the deal because it did not give them full regional control. Put simply, the rebels were willing to let genocide continue against their own people rather than compromise their demand for power.

International mediators were shamefaced. They had presented the plan as take it or leave it, to compel Khartoum's acceptance. But now the ostensible representatives of the victims were balking. Embarrassed American officials were forced to ask Sudan for further concessions beyond the ultimatum that it had already accepted.

Fortunately, Khartoum again acquiesced. But two of Darfur's three main rebel groups still rejected peace. Frustrated American negotiators accentuated the positive — the strongest rebel group did sign — and expressed hope that the dissenters would soon join.

But that hope was crushed last week when the rebels viciously turned on each other. As this newspaper reported, "The rebels have unleashed a tide of violence against the very civilians they once joined forces to protect."

Seemingly bizarre, this rejection of peace by factions claiming to seek it is actually revelatory. It helps explain why violence originally broke out in Darfur, how the Save Darfur movement unintentionally poured fuel on the fire, and what can be done to stanch genocidal violence in Sudan and elsewhere.

Darfur was never the simplistic morality tale purveyed by the news media and humanitarian organizations. The region's blacks, painted as long-suffering victims, actually were the oppressors less than two decades ago — denying Arab nomads access to grazing areas essential to their survival. Violence was initiated not by Arab militias but by the black rebels who in 2003 attacked police and military installations. The most extreme Islamists are not in the government but in a faction of the rebels sponsored by former Deputy Prime Minister Hassan al-Turabi, after he was expelled from the regime. Cease-fires often have been violated first by the rebels, not the government, which has pledged repeatedly to admit international peacekeepers if the rebels halt their attacks.

This reality has been obscured by Sudan's criminally irresponsible reaction to the rebellion: arming militias to carry out a scorched-earth counterinsurgency. These Arab forces, who already resented the black tribes over past land disputes and recent attacks, were only too happy to rape and pillage any village suspected of supporting the rebels.

In light of janjaweed atrocities, it is natural to romanticize the other side as freedom fighters. But Darfur's rebels do not deserve that title. They took up arms not to stop genocide — which erupted only after they rebelled — but to gain tribal domination.

The strongest faction, representing the minority Zaghawa tribe, signed the sweetened peace deal in hopes of legitimizing its claim to control Darfur. But that claim is vehemently opposed by rebels representing the larger Fur tribe. Such internecine disputes only recently hit the headlines, but the rebels have long wasted resources fighting each other rather than protecting their people.

Advocates of intervention play down rebel responsibility because it is easier to build support for stopping genocide than for becoming entangled in yet another messy civil war. But their persistent calls for intervention have actually worsened the violence.

The rebels, much weaker than the government, would logically have sued for peace long ago. Because of the Save Darfur movement, however, the rebels believe that the longer they provoke genocidal retaliation, the more the West will pressure Sudan to hand them control of the region. Sadly, this message was reinforced when the rebels' initial rejection of peace last month was rewarded by American officials' extracting further concessions from Khartoum.

The key to rescuing Darfur is to reverse these perverse incentives. Spoiler rebels should be told that the game is over, and that further resistance will no longer be rewarded but punished by the loss of posts reserved for them in the peace agreement.

Ultimately, if the rebels refuse, military force will be required to defeat them. But this is no job for United Nations peacekeepers. Iraq, Afghanistan and Somalia show that even the United States military cannot stamp out Islamic rebels on their home turf; second-rate international troops would stand even less chance.

Rather, we should let Sudan's army handle any recalcitrant rebels, on condition that it eschew war crimes. This option will be distasteful to many, but Sudan has signed a peace treaty, so it deserves the right to defend its sovereignty against rebels who refuse to, so long as it observes the treaty and the laws of war.

Indeed, to avoid further catastrophes like Darfur, the United States should announce a policy of never intervening to help provocative rebels, diplomatically or militarily, so long as opposing armies avoid excessive retaliation. This would encourage restraint on both sides. Instead we should redirect intervention resources to support "people power" movements that pursue change peacefully, as they have done successfully over the past two decades in the Philippines, Indonesia, Serbia and elsewhere.

America, born in revolution, has a soft spot for rebels who claim to be freedom fighters, including those in Darfur. But to reduce genocidal violence, we must withhold support for the cynical provocations of militants who bear little resemblance to our founders.

Alan J. Kuperman, an assistant professor of public affairs at the University of Texas, is an editor of "Gambling on Humanitarian Intervention: Moral Hazard, Rebellion and Civil War."

Just Immigration

2006-05-27T14:16:00.000-07:00

What would a just immigration policy look like? In what ways is the U.S. immigration policy unjust?

Five Possibilities

1. Exclusions on membership are themeselves unjust. This could be either (a) The idea that borders themselves lack moral status (b) Once people are here they should be granted the same civic status as everyone else given certain things about participation (so obviously tourists would not have this status). Or (c) Something else because I'm tired and can't remember what it is.

2. Immigrants lack due process in hearings?

3. U.S. is responsible for poverty, corruption, social breakdown in some countries with high levels of undocumented in U.S. Most obviously true for El Salvador but arguably for all of Latin America and some of Africa. Not that plausible when it comes to China.

4. The U.S. sets up enforcement in a particular way that means immigrants risk their lives to get here. People are driven to take risks based on desperation and the U.S. maximizes their risks.

5. Issue of refugees generally. We might need to take on many more political cases than we do. Have we illegitimately restricted the number of people we take on political grounds?

There are probably more. I need to think this through much more.

God, this is why I want to go to law school. There's so much that would be easier to research if I had a knowledge of how to do legal research. I can't believe I'm even saying that. But it's true.

I'm not sure any of these are true. I have this gut feeling that there is something terribly morally wrong with someone dying crossing the desert because they wanted to get to the U.S. to work washing dishes in a restaurant. Is it just the complex economic case of global inequality or are there more specific things about the immigration policy that make it wrong.

2006-05-13T22:13:00.000-07:00

Academic Blog?

On academic blogging.

Don't want to do the whole academic blog with my name on it and my real research right now. Main reasons: (1) I won't be able to shut about something absurd in the news. Or about crazy shit I see in academia. I want to use this space to work out my ideas but (2) Damn, do I ever want to be anonymous. I crave anonymity in real life, let alone the internet. If I could have any superpower, I'd choose invisibility. (3) I don't want to have to proofread carefully or spend a lot of time editing carefully or do anything carefully.

Nevertheless, I don't have perfect confidence in the invisibility cloak of the internet. So I'm not going to say any damn thing I want, alas. Although that would be fun.

2006-05-06T20:40:00.000-07:00

I'm the Decider. Dig the impressive production values.

http://decider.cf.huffingtonpost.com/I'm the Decider. Koo koo kachoo.

Goss's firing: http://billmon.org/archives/002429.html

2006-05-04T23:53:00.000-07:00

Test