"Taliban Man" at Yale

There is a whole bunch of ink being spilled, particularly by conservative editorialists, on the affront provided to Afghanistan and America by Yale's admission of a former Taliban spokesman and apologist as a student. Here are a couple of random examples, one from John Fund of the WSJ and other from Deborah Orin of the New York Post. But if you want a broader sampling, try googling "Taliban and Yale." The results range from the mostly querulous to the entirely vitriolic.

It seems to me that there are three things underlying all of this: one potentially legitimate, one probably fanciful, and one a bit ugly. And, only the last of these has anything at all to do with the merits of admitting Sayed Hashemi to Yale.

First, there are the questions as to why Yale would admit Hashemi yet turn down a number of Afghan women who have applied. That does seem to be a legitimate question. Since Hashemi's formal education ended at the fourth grade, it is unlikely that he was clearly more qualified academically than the Afghan women that were rejected. The thing that caught Yale's attention, no doubt, was Hashemi's history rather than his academics. But if that is the case, one would think that the history of the Afghan women would have been at least as compelling. Be that as it may, though, if we remove the fact that Hashemi's history was in support of the Taliban, then his acceptance and the rejection of the women would be no more or less inexplicable than the seeming randomness that surrounds much about the admission policies of universities like Yale. The point of the comparison between Hashemi and the Afghan women, in short, is to suggest that he should have been rejected because he was a Taliban and the women accepted because they were not --or even more compelling -- were actual or vicarious victims of the Taliban that Hashemi supported. The controversy, in short come down to the fact that Hashemi was a Taliban. Let's leave than point to one side for now.

The second thing that is lurking behind all of this is a suspicion of skullduggery. As Hashemi himself noted in the NY Times piece that first brought his admission to Yale to national attention: "In some ways I'm the luckiest person in the world. I could have ended up in Guantanamo Bay. Instead I ended up at Yale." People are rightly skeptical of this kind of "luck," so much so that their first impulse is to suspect a conspiracy or at least some form of undue influence (e.g. the Bush administration's desire to facilitate the construction of an oil pipeline across Afghanistan, or cabalistic plot by ultraliberal Yale to "smack" the hated George Bush "while preening their liberal feathers like peacocks"). John Fund, who seems to be a one-man band on this issue, is reported by The Conservative Voice to have claimed that "a congressional committee is now investigating potential corruption in the US State Department‚’s issuance of student visas."

Given that it is an election year and that banging on the Taliban is always good politics, a Congessional investigation of this issue would hardly be surprising, although I have not seen this reported elsewhere. But, before one has an investigation, one would think that there ought to be something approaching probable cause, and in this case, grounds for suspecting a conspiracy or other skullduggery seem sorely missing. If the original NY Times article is even a remotely complete account of Mr. Hashemi's history, it is awfully hard to find a motive for the administratrion or anyone else to help him get into Yale. Hashemi was not a high Taliban official even before the US invasion. He was a 22-year old neophyte who came to American attention primarily becuase he was one of the few Taliban who actually spoke English, and his function was to be a spokesman for the Taliban in the English-speaking world. That would hardly have made him an attractive target for US government assistance even before the invasion. The admission to Yale came nearly five years after the invasion and (not coincidnetally) five years after Mr. Hashemi fled Afghanistan. Cui bono in having such a person go to Yale? This is not to say that there was no conspiracy or whatever. It is only to say that, at least so far as I know, there is precious little reason to suspect a conspiracy. Sometimes (in fact most of the time) "a cigar is just a cigar." Yes, Hashemi was lucky to end up at Yale rather than Guantanamo, but at this point it appears that luck is all there is to it.

The last thing that is going on of course is simply this: "He was Taliban, fer chrissakes. Not only that, he was a spokesman and apologist for the Taliban. What the hell is he doing in this country, much less at Yale."

In a Scripps Howard News Service editorial entitled Send Yale's Taliban Student to Guantanamo, Deroy Murdock expresses what we all feel to an extent:

[T]he Taliban was "a brutal regime of retrograde, misogynist, terrorist-abetting, drug-running, Buddha-blasting, gay-murdering, freedom-hating tyrants." They expressed their feminism by banning the education of girls over age 8, closing Afghanistan's women's university, banishing females from their jobs, and forcing them into burqas. They also celebrated diversity by fatally collapsing brick walls onto the heads of gay men. . . .[etc.] . . . The State Department must explain how it gave a student visa to a top official of a government whose agents still blast away at U.S. personnel. Yale owes America an apology for giving aid and comfort to a former member of the government that gave aid and comfort to al Qaeda as it plotted the Sept. 11 massacre.

There's the real rub, of course, and I am not entirely immune to its power. But I am not entirely proud of that impulse either, for it tastes a bit like accepting the theory of "collective guilt." No one claims that Hashemi actually did any of the things that made the Talban regime so dispicable. His sin is that spoke out -- and to an extent may still be speaking out -- in defense of the regime. Does that fact disqualify him from admission to Yale? If it does, then you have to ask who else would be similarly excluded for similar reasons. Is Yale, or America, closed to people who used to, or even still do, defend what most of us consider indefensible? I hope not. I hope, instead, that we continue to invite such people into dialogue, for it in that dialogue wherein our best hope for change lies. There is some possibility that four years at Yale may transform this man into a spokesman for modernity who can, becuase of his history, speak with some authority to his former compatriots. If that happens, it will be all to the good. If it doesn't, nothing will have been lost.

I don't applaud Yale for admitting Hashemi. I suspect, indeed, that Yale was seduced by the sheer novelty of having someone like him at Yale and by a sense that this somehow burnished their treasured view of Yale as enlightened and open-minded. But, neither do I condemn Yale for admitting him, and I most certainly do not believe he should be either sent back to Afghanistan or to Guantanamo. In fact, rather than sending Hashemi to Guantanamo, I would go to Guantanamo and look for other potential Yalies.

Movies: Expectations Matter

I have watched three of 2005's bigger movies this week: "A History of Violence," "Good Night, and Good Luck," and Pride & Prejudice." I enjoyed the last the most, surprisingly, perhaps because my expectations for it were lowest.

Pride & Prejudice is not a very good movie. Part of the problem is that it is so predictable, even for those who, like me, have never read the book(s). It's plotline is pure Harlequin Romance: beautiful, intelligent, spirited and iconoclastic but penniless girl from the ranks of second-rate gentry wins (after many false starts and misunderstandings and almost despite her own and his best efforts) the heart and hand of the rich, darkly handsome and (of course) brooding high society hunk to live happily ever after despite the impediments of the Victorian class structure. (Yawn). Another part of the problem lies in trying to reproduce in two hours the entire plot line of a Victorian novel. The elisions this requires makes the movie so choppy that you half expect to see Quentin Tarantino or David Lynch somewhere in the credits. And then there is the acting -- or much of it. Keira Nightly, as Lizzie Bennet, is luminous and the only consistently good thing about the movie. And Donald Sutherland, as the Bennet patriarch, has his moments, particularly in the very final scene in the movie when, with a palpable mixture of anguish and elation, he accepts his favorite daughter's protestations of love and "let's her go" to marry Darcy. The interplay between Nightly and Sutherland in that final scene is the highlight of the entire movie. But the rest of the cast, and particularly Matthew Macfadyen as Darcy and Brenda Blethyn as Mrs. Bennet are hard to watch. Ms. Blethyn is ridiculously emotive, even for the character she plays, and Macfadyen is so wooden that the attraction Lizzie is supposed to feel for him never seems remotely believable. From the moment he appears on the screen, you know that he and Lizzie will eventually be "an item," yet at no point can you bring yourself to believe that anyone like Lizzie would ever be anything but bored to tears with Macfadyen's Darcy.

Still, for all of that, I actually enjoyed P&P more than I did either of the other two, since I went into with far lower expectations.

"A History of Violence" got rave reviews and to read the reviews one would have thought that this movie would be a nuanced treatment of how violence breeds violence despite the best efforts of good men to avoid it. It really is nothing of the kind. It is a Dr. Jeckyl and Mr. Hyde remake, with Viggo Mortensen alternately playing Kevin Costner (think Message in a Bottle) and Steven Segal (think any movie he has ever made). The best part of the movie is the interplay between father and son, with the suggestion that the talent for mayhem the father is trying to escape has actually been passed down to the son, who starts like Costner and ends like Segal. After the emergence of the father's Mr. Hyde, the son beats the local high school bully senseless and then kills with a shotgun a man who is threatening his father. Since this is the only time in the entire movie that the father needs help killing everyone around no matter what the odds, the scene has the feel of having been entirely contrived and inserted into the movie solely to make the "sins of the father" point. Yet, still, Mortensen does a creditable job of conveying, without saying a word, both his gratitude for (and a certain pride in) his son's help and his angst at the realization that his son has turned out to be just like Dad.

There is so much in this movie that is just ridiculous that it is hard to credit it as being anything more than a pretentious martial arts movie. The hero, Tom Stall (fka Joey Cusak) has lived the Midwestern idyll long enough and convincingly enough to have a wife and a ~16 year old son who have no inkling that their husband/father was/is a ruthless killing machine. Yet, when a threat finally arises, Tom turns into Joey (Mr. Hyde) so quickly and smoothly -- and viciously -- that it is impossible to believe Joey had been in hiding for 20 years. The point of the movie, of course, is that "Joey" never was -- never could be -- really gone. The most he could be was repressed. But, one does not entirely repress Joey's types of talents, instincts and proclivities for close to twenty years and yet have them immediately available when needed. The relationship between Tom and his wife (a lawyer for some strange reason) is similarly weird. She has been married to this man for nearly 20 years, and tells him early in the movie he is "the best man she has ever known," yet becomes convinced he is a stranger and that their entire life has been a lie, almost literally at the drop of a body. And, the son. Covincingly presented at the outset as the 95 pound weakling whose only defense is a quick wit and a willingness to use that wit to abase himself to avoid having to fight, he suddenly turns entirely ruthless and entirely capable of killing with his bare hands at the flip of what we are invited to assume is some DNA-based switch. Then there is the whole question of how Tom/Joey got these skills in the first place -- skills sufficient, in the end, to kill bare-handed an entire house full of organized crime "made men" in about one minute. Tom can't be 40 when we see him, and he has lived the Indiana idyll for at least half of that without using the talents that end up saving him. One can understand, perhaps, the development of the requisite sociopathy for this sort of mayhem at an early age. But it is pretty hard to imagine that he was able to develop the sorts of skills required by the time he was 20 and then was able to maintain those skills in razor-sharp condition for another 20 years of living the simple life of a small-town diner owner, husband and father. The central dilemma of the movie has less to do with the history of violence than it does with the problem of creating a character who is old enough to have become first a highly skilled killer and then the father of a sixteen year old boy and is yet young enough to kill nearly a dozen armed tough guys 2, 3 qand then 6 at a time, mostly with his bare hands, the last six after being shot in the shoulder with a 9 mm. The "willing suspension of disbelief" will only go so far.

I won't deny that "A History of Violence" is a good watch. It is. Ed Harris is great, as usual, and Viggo Mortensen shows some acting range that one would not have expected given the previous performances I have seen (Lord of the Rings and Hidalgo). But for all of that, I was disappointed to have what I expected to be a complex treatment of violence and the difficulty of escaping one's past turn out to be little more than a decent martial arts movie dolled up with some heavy-handed efforts at social/generational commentary.

The biggest disappointment of all, though, was "Good Night, and Good Luck." Of the three, this is probably the best movie. But I was again frustrated by my expectations. Edward R Murrow and his face-off with Joe McCarthy have a nearly iconic status for me. That was a battle against evil, and I have always taken the fact that Murrow prevailed as evidence of a fundamental ability of this country to eventually work its way out of hysteria and of the important role that a free, intelligent and principled press can plays in catalyzing that transformation. Given the importance I attach to that story, any 2-hour presentation of it was almost certainly doomed to be a disappointment. I knew that much going in. But (director) George Clooney's treatment of the history fell so far short of even my tempered expectations that I was left thinking, "This is one of the greatest stories in American history and THAT is all you could do with it!?"

For one thing, the movie begins and ends with a preachy speech by Murrow on the potential of television to educate and enlighten, and the degree to which it (even then, I guess) was falling far short of that ideal. I have no idea whether the speech attributed to Murrow was one he actually made or whether Clooney put these words into his mouth for his own purposes. But the net effect was the same: George Clooney sermonizing on how badly television has failed us. The irony of this, of course, is that this sermon begins and ends a movie about one case -- perhaps Clooney believes the only case -- when television generally and television news in particular did not fall short, when it did in fact serve exactly the purpose Clooney (and the rest of us to some degree or another) wish it more consistently would. To bookend a story about Murrow v. McCarthy with a speech about the failures of television to educate creates a remarkable cognitive dissonance. If Clooney had been able to find no better (i.e. less ham-handed) way than a sermon to deliver his indictment, he should have at least left the story alone and come up afterward (in color) to deliver the sermon himself. "Ladies and Gentlemen, you have just witnessed perhaps the greatest moment in television history and certainly one of the greatest moments in the history of journalism. Compare that to the wasteland that is today's television news; compare Edward R Murrow to William O'Reilly and weep for a "paradise lost." Or something to that effect.

But, I could have forgiven the preachy bookends if the middle had been better. Clooney decided to approach the story in his best Jack Webb imitation: "just the facts, ma'am; nothing but the facts." As a consequence, the movie has a sort of news-reel quality to it, alternating back and forth between news clips from the McCarthy hearings, portions of Morrow's own broadcasts, and re-enacted meetings among Morrow, Friendly, Paley and CBS staffers in which they plot their strategy and try (unsuccessfully) to convey the import of and risk inherent in what they are doing. The problem with this approach is that there are far too many facts. The story is too complex to be captured in a news reel. The result is that there is no drama worthy of the name. The destruction McCarthy wrought and the hysteria of the times never come through. Rather than creating a sense of the times and the risks, the movie settles for telling you McCarthy is bad and that what CBS is doing is risky. Unfortunately, the movie provides no reason to believe either of these points. McCarthy himself comes off as a clown, which of course significantly dilutes the believability of Murrow's and CBS's accomplishment in bringing him down. And, the efforts to convey a sense of the times fail utterly. The most important of these efforts is the suicide of one CBS journalist who had been branded as a "pinko" by McCarthy and his supporters. But, even this does not bring the stakes home because the movie provides so little sense of context that no believable reason for suicide is presented. Apart from that, the movie's efforts at conveying angst and risk are largely confined to long closeups of Murrow in what I assume is intended to be anguished contemplation. Yet, so little context is provided that the reason for Morrow's anguish -- and thus the believability of the anguish itself -- is almost entirely absent from the movie.

I'd actually encourage everyone to see all three of these movies, since for all of their flaws, they are all worth the investment of two hours of your time. Just don't have too many expectations. They will ruin all three.

Lou Dobbs: Fox News Wannabe

Is anyone as sick of Lou Dobbs as I am? His nightly harangue on "Broken Borders" is about as deomogagic campaign as I have ever witnessed outside of the Fox News' jihad against the supposed "War on Christmas." Here's just the latest example:

CNN posed the following question online and then dutifully reported (as if it were news) that over 90% of respodents answered "Yes":

Do you believe that the illegal employers of the 11 million to 20 million illegal aliens in the United States also should be granted amnesty?

CNN has caught the "Fox News" disease generally, but Lou Dobbs is damn near Bill O'Reilly's equal at taking complex, nuanced issues, distroring them nearly out of recognition and then fanning public opposition to their pet peeves. The best thing that could happen to America would be to outlaw TV news altogether. It is a far worse threat to American civics than the drivel shown in "regular progamming." At least the regular programming does not expicily pretend to be news.

You Can't Make A Silk Purse Out Of A Sow's Ear

Is there anything that better illustrates that:

• There is a difference between democracy and freedom;
• That the indespensible prerequisite for freeedom is tolerance;
• That what we want to build in the Middle East is not democracy but tolerance, and
• That achieving this goal is (in the near term, at least) damn near hopeless

than this: "Preachers in Kabul Urge Execution of Convert to Christianity."

These people are just hopeless.

And so are we for not being able to get past our own myths.

Respecting George Bush

I have to admit to feeling a twinge of respect for W tonight when I read this account of his press conference today:

President Bush said Tuesday that the war in Iraq was eroding his political capital, [but] suggested that American forces would remain in the country until at least 2009.

In a quick remark at a White House news conference about the reserves of political strength he earned in his 2004 re-election victory — "I'd say I'm spending that capital on the war" — Mr. Bush in effect acknowledged that until he could convince increasingly skeptical Americans that the United States was winning the war, Iraq would overshadow everything he did.

Later, in response to a question about whether a day would come when there would be no more American forces in Iraq, he said that "future presidents and future governments of Iraq" would make that decision.

That statement was one of the few he has made that provides insight into his thinking about the duration of the American commitment in Iraq, and signaled that any withdrawal of troops would extend beyond his term in office.

One can't help buy admire a guy who is so committed to doing what he believes is right that he will sacrifice his entire Presidency and the immediate future of his Party in order to stay the course. I just wish this level of commitment had been made to something actually worth fighting for.

On a not entirely unrelated point, Tom Friedman said something I think is REALLY inportant in his Op-Ed piece a couple of days ago (subscription required). His take-off point was the Dubai ports deal, which he (quite rightly) characterized as the most "ignorant, bogus, xenophobic, reckless debate" imaginable. This is right, of course, but that is not what caught my eye. In the very next sentence he goes on to capture, in a sentence, what is truly wrong about so much of the American weltanschauung right now:

If you had any doubts before, have none now: 9/11 has made us stupid.

As is (sadly) so often the case with Friedman, he misses his own point, for he spends the rest of the article first quoting the now infamous interview Dr. Wafa Sultan gave to Al Jazeera (this is not a war between religions or civilizations; it is a clash between medievalism and modernity, between civilization and backwardness, between the civilized and the primitive, between barbarity and rationality, etc., etc.) and then argiung that in this sort of war Dubai is precisley the type of Arab country we ought to be cultivating.

But I want to go back to that one sentence: "9/11 has made us stupid." Was ever anything truer said? That sentence has haunted me ever since I read it. And it came back to me again when I read about Bush's press conference.

Random Thoughts

I haven't written much this month. Mostly because I again find I have little new to say. But, if you interested, here, in no particular order, are some random thoughts:

Scary Israelis:

A lot of press was given to the poll results indicating that Americans had a negative view of Islam. Surprise, surprise. But I would not have thought any American left of a skin-head would have thought, much less said, what was in the following article that appeared in my in-box last week, courtesy of the "Truth Provider", Yuval Zalihouk:

Dear friends,

Here is a must read article.

Recently I sent you the incredible interview on Al-Jazeera of Wafa Sultan, the most courageous Arab woman alive. I also sent you the defeatist text of one of Ehud Olmert's 'we are tired of fighting' speeches.

The question is, who among Israeli and Jewish commentators possesses the same amount of courage as Wafa Sultan, namely, the courage to ignore the popular hype and media sound-bites and state the less popular truth.

The answer is that there are the prominent few, but among the best of them I nominate Professor Paul Eidelberg for the prize. Yes, what he writes feels uncomfortable at times, but I challenge you to point to anything he says which is not true?

Your Truth Provider,
Yuval.

DEJA VU

PROF. PAUL EIDELBERG

Remember what was said about Yasser Arafat and the Fatah-led PLO at the end of the 1980s? Something like this: Once Arafat and the PLO are invested with the responsibility of providing services for the Arabs in the West bank and Gaza like collecting the garbage they will transcend their terrorist past and become 'moderates' (i.e., bourgeois). Israel will then have a negotiating partner for peace and for drawing the final borders of the state.

Well, we are hearing the same drivel today about Hamas. These bloody jihadists, having been voted into power by a large majority the poor-little-people, the Palestinians, will also morph into garbage inspectors, and thus become a negotiating partner for peace. Such are the glad tidings from Jews in Israel and America.

What an insult to Hamas! What prevents these benighted Jews from taking the killer-mentality savage acts of Hamas seriously? No, it's not merely a matter of denial. These deniers are moral cowards. Period! They haven't the guts to face and fight unmitigated evil, that is, to destroy the enemies not only of Israel, but of civilization.

All the blather about a Palestinian state, whether mouthed by Israelis such as Ehud Olmert, Benjamin Netanyahu, and Natan Sharansky, or by Americans such as Seymour D. Reich (president of the Israel Policy Forum) and Abraham Foxman (director of the Anti-Defamation League), betrays a deep-seated fear which prevents them from standing up and stating the obvious: The murderous hatred manifested by Hamas and exploding throughout the entire Arab-Islamic world can only be overcome by the use of overwhelming force.

It goes on and on like this, calling for a jihad against jihad. It is truly scary to think that the people talking like this think they are on our side.

Moussaoui Trial: Can you believe how badly DOJ has screwed up the Moussaoui trial? The thing was misbegotten from the start: the so-called 20th hijacker turned out to be a crackpot Al Queda wannabe whom even Al Queda didn't trust, who would plead guilty to anything and everything, and whose primary goal seems to have been to make himself a legend in his own mind: the more the government charged him with the better he liked it. It proved what a bad ass he was, even though the reality appears to have been that he was less competent and less dangerous that the shoe bomber. Desperate to convict someone of something in connection with 9/11, DOJ threw the kitchen sink at him only to find (to their considerable consternation and disappointment) that they still would not get their show trail because he was willing, even eager to plead guilty to everything. If they had charged him with kidnapping the Lindbergh baby, he'd have agreed so long as DOJ fashioned some connection with Al Queda. But wait, they say to themselves: there is still a chance. We can have a trial after all on the penalty phase by seeking the death penalty! "On what grounds," someone doubtless asked at some point. "Yeah, that a problem," comes the reply. "But how about this? We'll prove that, had he fessed up when we caught him, we would have prevented 9/11!" Does anyone, anywhere believe that?

Ask yourself: Why do we want to kill this guy? He has pled guilty to everything under the sun and is going to get a hard-time sentence that will violate the rule against perpetuities (lives in being plus 21 years). Yet the government in bound and determined that that isn't enough. He must DIE! Even though even DOJ now admits he had nothing to do with 9/11.

Four and 1/2 years later, the government is still flailing around trying to punish someone, anyone, for 9/11. The fact that the only person they have had nothing to do with that is a mere technicality. He's a bad guy who wanted to be part of that plot, so he must die. It's beyond sad. It's a farce.

Congress Raises The Debt Ceiling to $9 Trillion: That's more than $30,000 for every man, woman and child in America. The Toledo Blade published some comparisons today trying to convey the enormity of one trillion dollars. Multiply all of these by nine to get a sense of what the government is now allowed to borrow:

• If you spent a million dollars a day for a million days (2,739 years), you’d hit $1 trillion.

• To spend $1 trillion in the average American life span of 77 years, you’d have to be on a lifetime spending spree of about $35,580,857 every day from birth.

• President Ronald Reagan dramatized the size of $1 trillion as “a stack of $1,000 bills 67 miles high.”

• 454 dollar bills weigh a pound. A trillion dollars weighs 2.2 billion pounds.
ThatÂ’s over a million tons. An average-sized car weighs 2,500 pounds. A trillion dollars weighs the same as 880,000 cars.

The first two of these bullets ignore the interest problem. of course. At even a modest interest rate of 4%, you would actually have to spend about $110,000,000 per day to get rid of a trillion dollars in a million days. And that's only one trillion.

Iraq, Iraq, Iraq: One of the reasons I have written so little recently is that it seems like there is noting to write about except Iraq and I have a hard time finding something new to say. It just seems to be the same-old, same-old. A couple of interesting tid-bits though:

In a moment of seeming introspection that is extraordinarily rare for this Administration, Condi Rice acknowledged that, while she personally thought it was the right decision, she recognizes that "the outcome, the judgment, of all of this needs to await history."

No such humility was evident in Bush's reissue of the National Security Staretgy, reaffirming, again, the pre-emption doctine that brought us Iraq.

USA Today (which, by the way, is actually becoming a pretty good newspaper for all of its glitz) had an editorial on this subject today that pretty much speaks for me. An excerpt:

The Iraq invasion, far from being a success, provides a cautionary tale about just why strike-first needs to remain, as in the past, the final option. In Iraq, it vaulted to the top of the agenda. Key administration figures — notably Vice President Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld — had been itching for a war with Iraq long before 9/11. After the terror attacks, they asserted links between Saddam and al-Qaeda where there was none. Because the administration rushed into war without building alliances, few countries joined in.

After three years of turmoil, Iraq stands on the brink of civil war. Al-Qaeda operatives who weren't in Iraq before have gone there to fight U.S. forces. Neighboring Iran is increasingly influential with Iraqi Shiites, compounding the nuclear threat Iran presents.

Worse, because of Iraq, the U.S. ability to use pre-emption in the future, when it might really be needed, is weakened. Most of the world sees the USA as a global bully and its intelligence as suspect. U.S. forces are overstretched. And getting backing for a new pre-emptive attack from a public made wary by the Iraq experience would be difficult. . . .

In Iraq, the Bush Doctrine has been much like that Wild West dictum: Shoot first, ask questions later. Now it's time to return pre-emption to its proper place in U.S. foreign policy: for use only when the threat is imminent, the intelligence is bulletproof, and the use of military action is the last resort, preferably with allies on board. Then make sure you have a plan for what to do next.

Yet, in the same issue of USA Today, there was a tantalizing article about progress being made in Iraq:

Qaisar Mohammed Abed sat in his living room the other day watching former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein's trial.

As important as the trial is in demonstrating just how much Iraqi life has changed, it may have been just as telling that Abed was watching a broadcast on his new television set, picked up by his new satellite dish, from a new TV network with new media freedoms.

Abed, 38, says he enjoys the new sports and news programs — and he has plenty of time to watch them: He has no job. Interpreters such as him have become a prime target for insurgents.

“I can't even look for a job,” Abed says, “because if I find one, I may lose my life.”

Such is the paradox of Iraqi life three years after the U.S.-led invasion. Daily activities such as going to work remain difficult and dangerous, and gas lines are mile-long crushes of frustration that sometimes boil into gun-waving flare-ups. Yet many Iraqis smile at their new freedoms and are optimistic, though not necessarily confident, that the future will bring stability.

Consumerism and mass media are embraced with gusto. Iraqi's have snapped up satellite dishes, cellphones and cars and can choose from nearly 300 news publications, 91 radio stations and 44 TV stations.

However, if Iraqi private enterprise is racing into the 21st century, the country's basic services remain mired in the 1930s. Power outages are incessant as skyrocketing demand has far outstripped the slight increase in electricity production since 2003.

Abed understands this. There are five new air conditioners in the house he shares with five relatives.

I find it strangely encouraging that they are generating more electricity than before the war yet becuase of rampant consumerism and the economic possibilities of a budding capitalism, the shortages are actually worse. There is no greater force for peace and stability than an awakening of consumerism coupled with a realization that, if the violence could just be stopped, they could actually have the things they lust after.

Still, my darker side is evdienced in this note I sent to one of my nieces in response to a question about what would have to happen to avoid a civil war in Iraq:

Truth be told, I don't know what to think. What would it take for there not to be a civil war? Well, there are three possibilities. The first is that the Iraqis develop a consensus that their identity as Iraqis is more important that their identity as Shiites, Sunnis, Kurds, etc. If the consensus were strong enough (e.g. the way we think of ourselves as Americans first and Ohioans, Minnesotans, Swedes, Germans, Protestants, Catholics, etc. second) they might just come to the realization that the cost of maintaining that identity is to let go of 1300 years of sectarian hatred and grievance. The possibility seems so remote as to be delusional. However, it is the hope Bush et al says they have (although I kind of doubt that even they really believe that any more.)

The seocnd is that thr prospect of civil war "scares" them into compromise. One could hope that they would look at the horrors of modern civil wars -- especiall those driven not by economic ideology (e.g Vietnam, Korea) but by religious and ethnic hatred (e.g Bosnia-Serbia-Kosovo, the Sudan, Rwanda and even Afghanistan) and recoil from the near certainty that a sectarian civil war in Iraq will almost inevtibaly have the same kinds of results. If they did, then maybe they would be so scared of the alternative that they would be willing to compromise. That is where the current Iraqi leadership (or much of it, anyway) is today and way down deep that possibility is probably the thing that allows Bush to still have hope. But while those sorts of fear-induced compromises might hold for a while, they are not durable. Without the consensus referred to above, they fall apart and the more radical and violent elements, who do not share that fear, eventually drive out (and very often kill) the moderates who initially cobbled together the compromise.

The third and (of the three) most likely way to avoid a civil war is for the powers surrounding Iraq - Syria, Iran and Turkey -- to divy up the country either explicitly (ala what the allies did to Germany after WWII) or implicitly by formation of spheres of influence. It is possible that breaking the country into client states e.g. the sunni west under the control of sunni Syria, the shiite south and east under the control of shiite Iran, and a mostly autonomous kurdish north surrounded by enemies on all sides (becuase Turkey is no friend of the kurds) would avoid a civil war. However, that would mean the end of Iraq as a separate state (perhaps not all that bad an idea since it was an artificial British-French creation to begin with). But in reality, the Syrians and Iranians are not likely to intervene diectly until after a civil war has gone on for a number of years, much like the Syrians went in to Lebanon to end the Lebanese civil war. So, while partition might be a way to end a civil war, it does not seems likely to be a way to prevent one.

In short, I can't really see any resonable way to prevent a civil war eventually. As long as there are significant numbers of American troops there, we might be able to delay it, or at least tamp it down to the level of violence we see today. But we are not going to be there very much longer, and once we leave, I would be very surprised in we didn't see al hell break lose pretty quickly. And, after a couple years of unimaginable violence and cuelty --think Hotel Rawanda if you have seen it -- one gorup probably will begin to dominate over the other. Since the Shiites are a large majority and since we, through our insistence on democracy have assured that they hold most of the levers of power in what little government there is there, the most likely prospect is that the Sunnis, with Iranian support, will dominate, will start something that looks like an ethnic cleansing of what is now central Iraq (Bagdhad and environs, which are very mixed) and will gradually begin to assert dominance over the entire country. At that point there will be two possibilities. Either the West will restarin both Syrai and Iran -- in which case the Sunnis will dominate a country wracked by a never sending civil war -- or the West will back awayfrom (or fail in the effort to) restrain Syrian and/or Iran, and Syria will intervene to prevent the genocide of the Iraqi sunnis and then Iran will intervene to protect its clientst (the Shiites) from Syria. At that point, Iraq will effectively cease to exist and Iran and Syria will come face to face. From the point of view of the Iraqis, of course, all of this is horrible. But from the standpoint of the West, it might not be so bad to have Syria and Iran locked in a death struggle over a never ending sectarian struggle that neither one can win but form which neither one can extract itself

How can we (or anyone) "help" Iraq (indeed the entire Arab world) to develop the "tolerance" that is requried to form a multi-ethnic society? I don't think we can. I do believe it will happen eventually, but it might well be hundreds of years. Compared to Judaism and even Christainity, Islam is a fairly young religion: 1300 years vs 2000 years vs 4000 years (or so). If you want to see where Judiasim and Christianty were at the same ages, look at medieval Europe (for Christianity) and the Book of Joshua (for Judaism). Neither looks a heck of a lot different that what we see today in the Arab world. In some sense, I am afraid we will just have to wait for them to kill enough of each other that they get tired and start to grow up. Our task in the meantime is to quarantine them, in much the same way that we worked (more or less successfully( o contain the Soviet Union for 50 or so years after WWII.

True believers! Yuck. It doesn't matter what the belief is. Anyone who believes his is the only right way and is willing to try to impose that belief on other s dangerous and should be treated as the rabid dog he is.

As all of this indicates, I am horribly conflcited on Iraq. I so want to believe there is a happy ending here that I am encouraged by the fact that Iraqis are buying satellite dishes and air conditioners. But I just cannot quite bring myself to belief that a happy ending is possible.

We Are A Lot Less Important Than We Think: Finally (at least for tonight), there is this, again from USA Today:
"The universe expanded rapidly — growing from the size of a marble to billions of light years across — within the first trillionth of a second after its cataclysmic birth, astrophysicists reported Thursday."

That's amazing enough. But what really blew my mind was this:

WMAP "is telling us that the universe is vastly bigger than we ever imagined — so big that we no longer have any reason to believe that our tiny patch of it is representative of the whole thing," said Stanford University physicist Leonard Susskind via e-mail.

"We, and all we can see, are at most a tiny dot in an unimaginably large sea of space and time," Susskind said.

I find that strangely exhilerating. We are "the Who" without a Horton. We are responsible for ourselves.

The Future Of Iraq

[Ed Note: This post was/is actually written to respond to the comments from billy bob and Left Coast Rob to my previous post. I wrote it three times as a response to those comments but each time something went wrong either at my end or blogger and it didn't get posted, so I thought I'd try to do it at an original post].

From Bill to billy bob and Rob (that's a heck of a lot of B's isn't it?):

I am rarely very far from my e-mail, so I actually saw your comments fairly soon after they came in. I hesitated to respond, though, becuase it was not at all clear what I wanted to say. billy bob asked (perhaps rhetorically, but I will ignore that possibility) whether I "have any thoughts?" Sure. Lots of them. But they are so confused and conflicting that they rarely make much sense even to me. That is hardly a good starting point from which to write something (although that sort of problem does not seem to be a deterrent for many people).

The aswer to one of billy bob's question does seem clear to me, though: we will not be using 100,000+ troops for anything in Iraq for very much longer. The American people are simply not going to put up with the sort of investment in life and lucre that entails IOT (he he) "help" a people who do not want to be "helped". (I put "help" in quotes to indicate that our idea of what "helps" the Iraqis is pretty ethnocentric.)

In terms of our troop presence in Iraq, I see two possibilities. First, Bush may succumb to pressure exerted by members of his own his own Party who are terrified by the prospect of having to stand for re-election this year. If so, we will soon begin to hear how our mission in Iraq has now been accomplished (again) and a significant draw down of troops will begin prior to the elections. Second, (and I actually think this is more likely given his character) Bush may "stay the course," in which case the drubbing the Republicans will take in November will be even worse than it already appears likely to be. In either event, we will start to see a significant "reduction in force" in Iraq within the next 6 to 12 months.

Unfortunately, I am not sure that offers much comfort to billy bob personally. After all, from his personal point of view, the timing and magnitude of the draw down is far less important than its order. Unless there are some unique factors that justify withdrawing the 34th BCT before those who have been there longer, billy bob may well end up doing his full tour (at least, God forbid). After all, someone has to hold the door open while the rest of the troops leave.

Rob, I don't disagree that the cause of this mess is, at least in part, a result of the fact that we have (once again) assigned to our armed forces a "task" for which they were not designed, equipped, or trained. I would quibble a bit with the idea that the modern US Army is incapable of doing more than "crushing other armies." That, of course, is what they are really, really good at (as they keep demonstrating), but I have come to believe that they are sufficiently competent, intelligent and dedicated to give us reason to believe they can "pull our fat out of the fire" even when we misuse them. In fact, I tend to think that the armed forces are SO damn capable, that they are their own worst enemy: their sheer competence allows us to delude ourselves into beliving that there is nothing they can't do. (As you can tell, I am a HUGE fan of our armed forces, Abu Grahib etc. notwithstanding. )

In this case though, the task we have assigned them -- building a stable, western-leaning, liberal democratic society in the heart of the Arab world -- is simply beyond the pale, unachievable by any organization no matter how competent and dedicated. We might as well have asked them to build us a stairway to heaven.

Let's take one element of that goal: western-leaning. It takes a lot of self-delusion to suppose that you can make a country your friend by conquering and occupying it. In WWI, did the Gemans come to love the British and the French? In WWII, did the French, Polish, Austrians, Czechs, Romanians, etc., etc, come to love the Germans; did the Ethiopians and Albanians come to love the Italians; did the Chinese, Koreans, Malaysians, Indonesians and Burmese come to love the Japanese? More recently, did the Palestinians come to love the Israelis or the Kosovars the Serbs? Why, then, would we expect the Iraqis to come to love us?

The contrary examples provided by the reconstruction of Japan, Germany and Italy after WWiI get frequently cited as examples of the conquered coming to align themselves with their counquerors. But there are some core differences that make these the exceptions that prove the rule.

First, the people in these countries all had to recognize, at least at some level, that they were the ones who "started it" and that, therefore, they had to some extent brought their troubles on themselves. It's hard to see how to make that case to the Iraqis. After all, they didn't attack us. We attacked them.

Second, and even more important, by the end of the WWII, the former Axis powers felt far more threatened by the East (Russia and China) than they did by their occupation by the West. It is much easier to align yourself with one conqueror when there is another even more fearsome conqueror sitting on your border against whom you are utterly defensless without the aid of the conqueror you already have. There is no comparable countervailing threat facing the Iraqis. To the contrary, the other powers in the region (Iran, Syria, Jordan) look to the Iraqis more like friends than enemies. The Iraqis, in short, are much more like the inumerable peoples who have loathed and resisted their occupiers than they are like the Germans, Japanese and Italians after WWII.

Another goal we have set for oursleves is to create a liberal democratic society in Iraq. This goal is perhaps even more fanciful than the goal of winning frends through conquest. "Deomcracy" we may be able to establish, at least for a while. But democracy, in the sense of free and fair elections, is pretty easy to arrange and, despite all the rhetoric, is not really what we are about. After all, both Iran and the Palestinian Authority are thoroughly democratic, yet their regimes are hardly what we hope to establish in Iraq. On the other hand, Jordan and Egypt are hardly models of democracy, but we would give our eye-teeth at this point if Iraq could end up like either one of those. Democracy may be a part of the "end-state" we want to reach, but it is at most a step along the way. The true end-state we are pursuing, almost without knowing it, is liberalism (in the clssic sense). Liberalism in this sense includes such things as the rights guaranteed by the US First Amedment (freedom of speech, press, assembly, religion and petition) as well as the right to be free from unreasonable intrusions by the government into our private lives. But what lies at the bottom of all of these freedoms -- what is essential to make such freedoms real and what we are really trying to achieve in Iraq-- is tolerance: a willingness, indeed commitment to, letting others think, believe and (within limits) act as they see fit even though we ourselves believe such thoughts, beliefs or actions are msiguided or simply wrong. Unless a people develops a shared commitment to such tolerance, liberalism (i.e. freedom) cannot exist. And this is exactly what makes the hope of establishing liberal democracy in Iraq -- or indeed anywhere in the Arab world -- such a pipe dream. The Arab world is simply not ready to be tolerant of people who think, believe and act differently from what they believe to be "right."

Finally, there is the even more fundamental illusion: that we can establish Iraq as a country. The problem here is that there is no such thing as "Iraq" except in the minds of the West and some Iraqis who have spent so much time in the West that they are more American or European than they are Iraqi. Indeed, except in the minds of the West, there is are no such things as Iraqis. There are only people who live in an area that, by convention, we call Iraq. If you ask most of these people what they "are," they will tell you they are members of a given tribe or that they are Kurds, of Sunnis or Shiites, long before they will tell you they are Iraqis. The people whom we want to call Iraqi actaully identify much more with their own tribes and religions than they do with what we choose to think of as their state.

In this regard, the Iraqis are much like pre-civil war Americans. If, in 1860, you had asked Robert E. Lee what he "was," he would have told you he was, first and foremost, a Virginian. Certainly that was true of most Southerners and probably it was true of most Northerners as well. Prior to the Civil War, people identified much more with their States than they did with their Nation. It took a civil war and its aftermath to create the idea that people were Americans first and Ohioans, or Virginians, or Minnesotans, or Texans second. And, the way that happened was this. The Civil War forced the residents of states to recognize, and give their allegience to, a larger entity: the Union in the North and the Confederacy in the South. Once the war was over, the allegience to the larger-than-state entity remained. It took another hundred years before the residents of the South became willing to transfer their allegience yet again from the Confederacy to the Union, but on both sides, the Civil War killed, once and for all, the notion that one's first loyalty was to one's state rather than to a larger entity.

It is this more than anything else that convinces me that our prospects of building an Iraq -- much less a western-leaning, liberal democratic Iraq -- are essentially nil. It may be that, by overthrowing Saddam, we kicked off a process that may eventually lead to an Iraqi nation-state. But I suspect that this process will take at least as long in Iraq as it did in America, and that it will involve at least as much bloodshed. Even then, though, I think the prospects are dim. The formation of America as a nation rather than an amalgamation of states required "only" that the citizens subordinate their loyalties to a political entity (their State). In Iraq, it will require the subordination of tribal and religious allegiences. In this reagrd, the Balkans would appear to provide a better -- and far more depressing -- analogy even in a millenial time frame, to say nothing of the year or so we have left to make a difference.

Now that I have started, I actually find I have more I want to say about all of this. But I have run out of time and steam. So I will post this and pick up tomorrow.

I'm Beginning To Feel Sorry For Bush

The man is pathetic. He has become a laughing stock. His bravado, so long his best ally has betrayed him and has now become his caricature. "Brownie, you're doing a heck of a job," will be to Bush what "I am not a crook" was to Nixon, a defense that is turned by reality into a metaphor for what is wrong with the entire administration.

The brouhahas over the new Kartina tapes, the ports issue, the Indian nuclear deal, etc. etc. are all actually unfair. There was nothing new in the Katrina tapes. The ports deal is a non-event. And the Indian deal might well be a great move given the potential India has as both an economic powerhouse and a political and economic counter-weight to China. But Bush can now do nothing right. No matter what he says or does, he is a laughing stock.

It's about time Bush started to reap the whirlwind. But I could still wish that public opinion could be more discriminating.

Max Boot Has An Epiphany

Max Boot just got back from Iraq and now thinks that "Up close, Iraq gets blurry."

Oh really? Sorry Max, but Iraq has always been more than a bit "blurry" even from afar.

Max's epiphany may be a bit late, but better late than never I guess. His piece comes as close as anything I have read recently to articulating my own angst over the situation. The fact that Iraqi security forces did not cut and run during the violence that followed the Samarra mosque bombing is a hopeful sign. The fact that many of them stood around and watched and that others apparently took off their uniforms and participated is not. The intensity, brutality and sectarianism of that violence is the stuff of despair, yet I take some comfort from the fact that, despite the far greater provocation, this violence was significantly briefer than that triggered by the Danish cartoons.

Afghanistan, it seems, is getting "blurry" as well. The progress toward stability and reconstruction in Afghanistan has always seemed to be far greater than in Iraq. But now, the head of the DIA is bluntly telling Congress that the "[e]scalating insurgent violence in Afghanistan has placed the fledgling government there in greater peril than at any time since the aftermath of the U.S.-led invasion in 2001."

I cannot help but think that this danger is due, at least in part, to the decision to go into Iraq. How different things might have been if only Bush had decided to win one war before he started another. To quote myself from a 2004 piece on what might have been:

[Regarding their proposal to invade Iraq,] Bush says to Rummy and Wolfy, "Are you nuts?! As much as I despise Saddam (for both family and geopolitical reasons), two wars (in Afghanistan and against al Queda) are quite enough for now, thank you. Sure he's a bad man, and sure, he hates America (not to mention my family), and sure he wants to get WMDs. But, there's not really all that much evidence that he has WMDs, and even less that he could use them against the United States even he has. The threat is there, of course, but it is not imminent. So, for the moment, I want to do everything I can short of war to keep the international pressure on Saddam but focus our primary efforts on capturing or killing bin Laden, drying up al Queda's sources of support, and winning the war in Afghanistan. You all know I am not a big fan of nation-building. It's just too hard to do. But we got forced into an invasion of Afghanistan and that's where I want to try to set up a functioning democracy; a democracy that will serve both as a model for other Arab nations and a counterweight to both Iran and Iraq. I don't want to try to take on yet another country at the same time. Also, I want to do something real to remove some of the causes of Arab antipathy toward the United States -- something like genuinely supporting the right of Palestinians to their own State. If we go off invading another Arab country we will inevitably dissipate our credibility and our resources, take our eye off the two really important balls -- Afghanistan and al Queda -- and further alienate the Arab world as well as our friends."

Perhaps pursuing that course would not have made any difference. It may be that the relative (very relative) progress in Afghanistan has been due to the fact that Al Queda et al. chose to make their stand in Iraq and that, but for the invasion of Iraq, the level of the Afghan insurgency would have been much greater than it has been. But at least we would have been mired down in only one war, with significantly greater international support both moral and logistical. And, at least that war would have been seen by the Nation and the world to have been far more justified. As such, this course would unquestionably stood a far greater chance of success that what Bush in fact did.

While the "good news" from Iraq and Afghanistan doesn't get the press coverage it almost certainly deserves, I do not doubt that there are positive things is going on in both places. Yet, I want so badly for things to work out in Iraq and Afghanistan that I may well be investing this good news with far more hope than it deserves. Good news -- signs of progress toward stability -- is incremental. It is like building a wall, one brick at a time. Bad news is sudden and devastating -- like blowing up the wall. Eventually, if the wall gets blown up enough times, the brick layers will quit trying. And then there will be nothing but bad news.

My heart wants to believe we are not there yet and that the brick layers will eventually prevail over the bomb throwers. My head tells me I am probably kidding myself. It is hard to build a wall when the bricklayers hate each other and are more concerned about who will own the wall than about whether it gets built.