Obsidian Wings

How Wahhabism Gets Spread

You wouldn't think that a guy with a name like Stephen Schwartz would be a Sufi Muslim, but he is, having converted to the faith during his time in Bosnia. In his latest piece at techcentralstation, Schwartz examined the anticipated spread of a harsher brand of Islam in Athens, all centering around the "proposed construction of the first state-recognized mosque in the vicinity of Athens in modern times."

The Islamic Center in the Athenian suburb of Peania, more than 15 miles northeast of Athens near the new international airport, will be financed directly by the King Fahd Foundation of Saudi Arabia. According to the Arab News, an English-language Saudi daily, some 8.5 acres were donated by the Greek government for the structure. Foreign assistance for the radicalization of Islam in Greece will inevitably be a central element of the activities at the mosque, which will be very large, intended, it is said, to accommodate all of the estimated 120,000 Muslim faithful in the capital city. The total number of Muslims in Greece is estimated at more than 500,000.

This new mosque will introduce Wahhabism to Greek society, the very ideology that western civilization is at war with. The name "King Fahd" rang a bell with me because he also funds madrassas in Britain, Germany and untold other places, offering dis-assimilation and the oppression of females in its coursework. Are we really at war with Wahhabism? I believe we are, and that we should be outspoken in saying that this form of Islam is heretical. As I wrote here, the sect is too closely entwined with the House of Saud, and its precepts are disturbingly similar to those preached by al Qaeda. There is also quite a bit of overlap with Qutbism, which is highly influential in the Muslim Brotherhood and al Qaeda. The butchers of Beslan were also Wahhabi influenced.

And Now For Something Completely Different

Well, not really.  The nub of it is this.  Von and Edward asked me to contribute some writings to Obsidian Wings and I said "yes", and I extend a heartfelt thanks.  At Tacitus, I was under the moniker of "Bird Dog" and, since a new era is being ushered in over there, I thought I'd usher in some small changes as well, such as using my real name.  So what's the point of this post?  To introduce myself, something I've never really done before on a weblog, so here goes.

Anatomy of a PR Disaster

I know, I know, this will strike some as "let's just agree Bush is a bad man and move on" sort of post, but really, could they get out ahead of this Asia disaster relief press, please?

UPDATE: I haven't clarified very well the main point here, so I'll insert this:

I'm certainly not trying to build the argument that the US government is not working hard on this, just that they can't seem to get out ahead of the story PRwise.

Consider the lastest headline regarding our relatively much smaller ally:

Britain triples tsunami aid pledge to 96 million dollars

Meanwhile, in the land where $2 billion is spent on lobbying our government is still struggling to get this right:

The United States, faulted by critics for a slow and miserly response to the Asian tsunami, is preparing an aid package to be introduced in Congress early next year, lawmakers said on Thursday. 

An amount of money has not yet been agreed upon but it would be in addition to the $35 million pledged by President Bush on Wednesday, congressional aides said.

In a statement, Rep. Henry Hyde, an Illinois Republican said he is drafting legislation to assist victims that he plans to introduce after the new Congress starts work on Jan. 4.

"The challenges of coping with suffering on this magnitude are almost unfathomable, and we will act" said Hyde, who chairs the House International Relations Committee.

He said a congressional delegation will visit Thailand and Sri Lanka next week.

Sen. Richard Lugar, an Indiana Republican, speaking on CNN said he had prepared a resolution for the return of the new Congress that will set the stage for "very generous appropriations."

We will act? Can we change the tense of that statement to the present continuous please? The New York Times Editioral page rang in today with:

In Praise Of New Year's Resolutions

About ten years ago, my sister and I were sitting in a restaurant at about this time of year, contemplating the fact that while each of us was basically very happy with our life, both of us felt that there was room for improvement. We decided to make New Year's resolutions together, resolutions that would not be a list of aspirational gestures but a serious attempt to consider our lives as a whole and deploy what intellectual resources we could muster on the question: what concrete steps, deliberately taken, would cause them to improve? What ruts were we in, and how could we get out of them? What interesting new habits of mind would be likely to do us good, and what, exactly, could we do to develop them? Each of us came up with rather long lists of steps to take, and every year since then I have had a list of something like thirty resolutions which I undertake.

Some of my resolutions are specific to a given year; they are commitments to myself to do something specific that I might otherwise never get around to. (Next year, for instance, will finally be the year that I redo my front walkway, and also the year in which I figure out how to get my state rep. to introduce legislation banning the private ownership of primates in Maryland.) Some of them are the usual (exercise and the like), though I tend to try to make them more specific than that (e.g., exercise a certain number of days a week.) Some of them involve trying not to lose skills that might otherwise atrophy: living alone, for instance, it takes a resolution to get me to seriously cook once a week, rather than relying on the excellent prepared food at my local market. Some involve things I would otherwise wish I did more of: I usually resolve to go out and see some form of art at least once a month, since otherwise, my life being what it is, this might fall through the cracks.

But many of them are, as I said, attempts to figure out how to instill in myself habits of mind that I want to have. And since there are a few of these that have, over the years, been really good, I thought I'd share a couple. (Note: if anyone finds them useful, I should say that most of the credit for these goes to my sister.)

First: every year I resolve to do something new every day. It is, of course, important to be clear on what counts as a new thing. When my sister and I first made this resolution, it made for amusing comparisons between our circles of friends. The philosophers I know tended to think that this was trivial: just count things like, 'I drew breath on Jan. 1 2005' as a new thing, and you're set forever. My sister's friends, by contrast, tended to think of 'new things' as 'huge new things', like going to Antarctica, and wondered how she could possibly have made such an enormous resolution. But we take a middle ground: 'new things' include, for instance, taking a new way home, trying a new flavor of soda, and the like.

The point of this resolution is just to make sure that whenever I am not in some situation in which novelty comes naturally (e.g., in another country), I am on the lookout for ways of doing things that I have not done before, and that when I have a choice between something I've done before and something I haven't, I'm less likely to go with the familiar. Because I have this resolution (and because it does lead to moments when I think, oh no, it's 8:30 p.m. and I have not done a new thing, groan), I tend to keep my eye out for ways of satisfying it, and thus I am always asking myself: is there some different way of doing this? Some other thing I might try? Which buildings on campus have I not yet set foot in? Which kinds of cheese have I never tried? Which neighborhoods in my city are completely unknown to me? Why not try this different bike path? And so forth. And this makes my life better, both by introducing all sorts of new things into it (some of the cheeses I will never try again, but some were wonderful discoveries), and by instilling a particular cast of mind that I value.

Another resolution: I will do some unnecessary good thing every week. 'Unnecessary' is not the right word here; what it means is, basically, a good thing that I would not have done without this resolution. Helping out my friends and my students, giving money to tsunami relief, and so forth, are all things I would do anyways. The point of this resolution, as with the previous one, is to get me to be on the lookout for other good things I might not have noticed, and might not otherwise have done. They don't have to be particularly large or striking -- before I found out that it was illegal, I used to count putting coins in all the expired parking meters -- but they must exist. And while it's OK to have a few fallbacks (for me: driving off to some park where the trash is never picked up, and filling up a bag of trash), I try to think of new ones. Again, it's both the actual deeds and the cast of mind that I value. (And without this resolution, I would not have a clear idea of which parks are not regularly maintained -- hint, in the inner city -- and this sort of concrete knowledge of the place I live in also matters to me.)

I suppose one might regard this as an oblique reply to Sebastian's last post: it's hard to divide the world into people who want to try to achieve some particular goal and people who believe in dynamism once you realize that dynamism is among the things you might try to achieve through technocratic means (which I think is an unattractive, but probably accurate, way of describing what I do with New Year's resolutions). Unless you restrict the goals of technocrats to absolutely static states of affairs, like my living in my current house forever, or my having exactly one car, you can't rule out such attempts; and if you can't, I think the distinction collapses.

But be that as it may, resolutions have made my life a lot better. And while most of the people who learn that I have somewhere around thirty resolutions regard this as evidence of some hitherto unsuspected totally anal streak, I just think it's fun.

Old Men and Their Epiphanies

Read biographies of the world's "warrior-kings" who live into old age and you'll notice a weariness set in for many of them. A desire to give up the fight and spend the rest of their days appreciating the finer things in life. Often they turn to the arts or focus on spending time with their family. Often they discover that what seemed like "truth" to them earlier in life was an illusion. That war, for example, is a horror worth working to prevent when possible. One of my favorite examples of this is this quote by Eisenhower:

I hate war as only a soldier who has lived it can, only as one who has seen its brutality, its futility, its stupidity.

Another warrior-king of sorts has stirred up controversy by offering his version of the late-life awakening. USA Today founder Al Neuharth, offered the following in his 12/22/04 column:

Despite unhappy holidays, nearly all of us who served in WWII were proud, determined and properly armed and equipped to help defeat would-be world conquerors Hitler in Germany, Mussolini in Italy and Hirohito in Japan.

At age 80, I'd gladly volunteer for such highly moral duty again. But if I were eligible for service in Iraq, I would do all I could to avoid it. I would have done the same during the Vietnam War, as many of the politically connected did.

"Support Our Troops" is a wonderful patriotic slogan. But the best way to support troops thrust by unwise commanders in chief into ill-advised adventures like Vietnam and Iraq is to bring them home. Sooner rather than later. That should be our New Year's resolution.

A Sontag in Full.

I'll join Judith Weiss of Kesher Talk:  "Josh Trevino [nee' Tacitus] has written the blogosphere's only graceful and sensible reflections on Susan Sontag."  Give it a read.

Strange Bedfellows.

Kim du Toit has a point (or, to complete the rhyme, perhaps it's a "poit"):

Longtime Readers of this website will be familiar with the queasiness with which I greeted passage of the various anti-terrorist laws, and most especially the Patriot Act.

My reasoning then, as now, was that laws meant to squash Islamist assholes intent on blowing up the George Washington Bridge would, sooner or later, be applied against people not remotely connected with actual terrorism as we know it. Call it the "RICO Effect", whereby, for instance, laws passed to deal with Al Capone and his ilk ended up being used against anti-abortion groups. 

And, now, we have gang members being prosecuted as terrorists:

Morales, 22, was indicted on murder and other charges as acts of terror in May, along with 18 other members of the St. James Boys Gang, a Mexican and Mexican-American street gang.

Morales faces the most serious charge of second-degree murder as a terrorist act. A New York grand jury returned the charges against him in connection with the shooting death of 10-year-old Melanie Mendez, who died from gunshot wounds two years earlier.

Pass for the moment whether Morales is bad guy, or whether deserves to be punished if convicted of murdering Melanie Mendez.  Murder, after all, was just as illegal before 9-11 as it is illegal today.  The question is whether this is the kind of crime that an anti-Terrorism statute is meant to address.  Should Morales be subject to the penalties that the law intended for folks who help others to fly jetliners into office buildings?   If so, why?  And why shouldn't he have been subject to those same penalties prior to 9-11?  Did 9-11 really change everything, as some are fond of saying?

I'm not suggesting an ultimate answer, here -- I'm far too wishy-washy for that -- but I do think that du Toit has a point.  Nearly every broadly-worded statute has the potential to be read in a way that exceeds or defeats its intent. 

In a legal system based on zealous advocacy, it is seldom a question of whether you should read a statute to reach a desired end.  (Here, the end is presumably sentence enhancement.) The question generally is, can you read a statute to reach that end.  And, if you can, you do.

[Note:  The "RICO effect" exists, but it is not exactly as du Toit describes.  RICO's peculiar evil -- or genius, take your pick -- was to allow private parties to sue for treble damages in a civil RICO action.  A treble damages claim is an awfully tempting pot 'o gold, and thus has induced a bunch of ill-fitting rainbow chasin' plaintiffs' attorneys and activists, including those who brought the anti-abortion cases.  Criminal RICO cases, on the other hand, have generally -- though not universally -- been more restrained, targeting mafia or mafia-like behavior (e.g., street gangs), or wide spread fraud.]

The Future and Its Enemies

While in vacation mode, I'm still reading.  Today's entry is about my airplane book, The Future and Its Enemies:  The Growing Conflict Over Creativity, Enterprise and Progress by Virginia Postrel.  I know I'm about two years late to this book.  I've been meaning to read it for some time, and ran across it in a bargain bin near my sister's house in Colorado. 

Virginia has a key idea which clarifies some of the difficulties we have in analyzing  polticial cleavages along a left-right split.  She speaks of dynamists and stasists.  In her description, dynamists are willing to embrace the messy nature of unguided social and technological change, while stasists do not.  In her terminology stasists come in two major varieties--reactionaries and technocrats.  Reactionaries wish to control change by reversing it and returning to a previous (and quite possibly mythical) golden age.  Patrick Buchanan is used throughout the book to give examples of reactionary thinking.  I think the choice of 'stasist' is revealed to be a bit poor when Virginia goes on to describe technocrats.  Technocrats attempt to tightly control change, often with the idea that an elite number of top-down experts can efficiently control and direct the important changes in society. 

Our new awareness of how dynamic the world really is has united two types of stasists who would have once been bitter enemies:  reactionaries, whose central value is stability, and technocrats, whose central value is control.  Reactionaries seek to reverse change, restoring the literal or imagined past and holding it in place.  A few decades ago, they aimed their criticism at Galbraithean technocracy.  Today they attack dynamism, often in alliance with their formier adversaries.  Technocrats, for their part, promise to manage change, centrally directing "progress" according to a predictable plan.  (That plan may be informed by reactionary values, making the categories soewhat blurry;  although they are more technocrats than true reactionaries, (William) Bennett and Galston inhabit the border regions).

I think this concept is useful to think about, but I suspect it is more distracting to describe both concepts as adhering to stasis than it would be if she called it something else.  The choice is made somewhat more understandable because many technocrats are utopian--they desire a beautiful endpoint.  Both technocrats and reactionaries believe that they know or can find the one best way to do things.  They then attempt to use the government to enforce that way of doing things.  Thinking about this helps me to clarify some of the strange twists that modern American politics takes.  The bulk of conservatives are dynamist with respect to economic thinking.  They have a split with respect to social issues.  Some of them are dynamist, a few are technocratic, and many are reactionary.  Some of those who are reactionary are also reactionary with respect to economic issues (e.g. Buchanan).  Liberals tend to by dynamist with respect to social organization.  They have a split in the economic sphere.  Many are technocratic, many are reactionary, and a few are dynamist in orientation. 

This post is about to get rather long because I intend to use extensive quotes.  So I am hiding it below the extended body.

Strategy and Tactics

Reuel Gerecht, writing in the Weekly Standard, is a puzzle.  First, he offers sound advice in Iraq:

[W]e are losing the "war of the roads" in Iraq. If the Sunni insurgency controls the principal arteries in and out of Baghdad and can kill with ease on major thoroughfares elsewhere, there is no way the United States and its Iraqi allies can win a counterinsurgency campaign in the country's heartland.

The administration really should not use here the refrain, of which it is becoming ever more fond, that "only Iraqis can secure their country." Clearing the roads adequately, which means suppressing the occasional bombings, brigandage, and assassinations, really has nothing to do with "standing up" Iraqi security forces. ... It beggars the mind to believe that the U.S. military cannot deploy sufficient forces to secure the highway between Baghdad and the capital's international airport. ...

.....

[W]e have reached a point in Iraq where our first priority must be to guarantee Iraqis--not Americans--a minimum of security on the major highways. A greater American presence and firepower on the roads could kill more innocent Iraqis. The American death toll could climb. Yet it is an excellent bet that most Iraqis would be willing to absorb the losses provided they can see improvement in their daily security. If we do not do this, and do it fairly quickly, we are likely to damage irreparably moderate political forces in the country, especially within the Sunni heartlands, as we and our allies occupy ever smaller, disconnected, fortified oases surrounded by insurgents, their sympathizers, and a fearful population who know better than to cast their lot with men who only fly above them.

He who rules the roads rules commerce, and thereby rules the land.  The corollary to this claim is that the oil infrastructure also needs to be better protected.

But those are obvious points. The knowledge that we must protect Iraq's roads and pipelines is not restricted to certain privileged offices and cubicles at the Weekly Standard.  Heck, I'd venture to say that even a few of the troops on the ground might suspect that it's important to secure Iraq's infrastructure. 

Mr. Gerecht's sanguinity that we have enough troops in Iraq is thus naive at best.  The U.S. military has not refused to protect Iraq's commercial infrastructure; it has been unable to.  It needs more manpower.  It needs troops.  Preferrably yesterday, but I suppose today will do.

All of which means that Mr. Gerecht's subsequent musings regarding the benefits of a first strike against Iran are little more than masculine poses of fancy.  Sure, I'd love to "get tough" with the Mullahs, but with whose troops?  Such things are fine to say at cocktail parties, when the blood is hot and the drink is in you -- and, hopefully, everyone's so drunk that they pay you no mind.  They're not so great, however, to put in the sober pages of a magazine. 

(HT:  Yglesias.)

Stan LS Memorial Top 10 Lists for 2004: Open Thread

Yes, it's that time of year again, when everyone gets to pretend they write for David Letterman and offer their Top Ten lists on their favorite topics. Rather than limit it to movies or events, however, I'm opening up the concept to anything that strikes your fancy. What were your favorite "things" about the past year? Here's mine (things that made me happy this year):