The Christian Science Monitor reports that the US military is disciplining troops over an incident that provoked outrage in Afghanistan early this year, the burning of some copies of the Koran. In the wake of that incident some thirty people were killed during riots in Afghanistan.
It's unclear to me that US soldiers serving in Afghanistan need to abide by Islamic law while there; but if, according to US military guidelines, that is the case, so be it. Unfortunately, there may be some misunderstanding on the part of the US military, as well as those Afghans who rampaged, about the pertinent point of sharia law.
When the incident first happened I decided to ask the opinion of a friend who is a member
of one of London's leading chambers of barristers, is one of Europe's
leading experts on sharia law, and is a descendent of a Sufi saint... Sadakat Kadri, author of the best-selling Heaven on Earth: a Journey Through Sharia Law.
Kadri responded to me via email that the prescribed method for disposing of a Koran that can no longer be used is to burn it.
Let me re-state that, adding my own emphasis:
The prescribed method for disposing of a Koran that can no longer be used is to burn it.
Why, then, were the US soldiers who
disposed of those books under threat of a serious prosecution, and why are they being disciplined now?
First, of all, as a writer I believe all books should be treated with respect. Further, one should, of course, make a distinction here between burning as
an act of disrespect and burning to end the existence of a copy that,
for whatever reason, can no longer be used. Americans should easily be
able to understand the distinction between the burning of a flag in
protest or anger and the burning of a flag that is already damaged and
can no longer be displayed. In the later case, that is, indeed, the
prescribed way for handling an official flag, or a flag of a certain
size if it has been damaged, soiled or even touched the ground.
The copies of the Koran in question were apparently altered, or marked up, by Afghan prisoners in order to pass messages amongst themselves. As such, the books were unusable. The question remains whether the prisoners who marked up those books and made them unusable should be disciplined under Islamic law... but that seems a question we ourselves should turn away from.
In any case, as I've said, given the above, it seems very odd that these soldiers should be disciplined at all.
The Christian Science Monitor report, which improperly conflates the above incident with another incident in Afghanistan, may be read here.
My earlier posts on this topic can be found here and here.
Kadri's fascinating book on sharia, Heaven on Earth: a Journey Through Sharia Law, may be found here.
The Blu-ray edition of Bruce Beresford's classic film Breaker Morant can be found via here.
And more on the topic of etiquette around these matters by Lee Smith, from some years ago in Slate, here.
Showing posts with label Foreign Affairs. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Foreign Affairs. Show all posts
Tuesday, August 28, 2012
Saturday, August 25, 2012
Syria, an Arab Fall... and a Threat from Iran's Supreme Leader
Updated
Almost a year ago pundits noted how the Arab Spring of democratic uprisings in North Africa and the Middle East was fast turning into an Arab Winter... a winter of discontent and dashed hopes. Yet, soon ahead, we have an Arab Fall, that of the Assad regime in Syria. Not "a fall" in the sense of a season, of course, but rather a tripping up and an ending.
Syria has at times presented itself as all things to all people: a police state that has for the last five years marketed itself with astonishing success as a tourist destination for bien pensant westerners; a seemingly cohesive, multi-faith society that "held together" (or so Anna Wintour's Vogue told us) but did so via unimaginably brutal repression; Iran's closest ally and yet (some have suggested) a one-time covert ally of the US; a sponsor of terror and yet also at times a supposed ally in the War on Terror.
Soon it may all be different. Whereas thirty years ago Hafez al Assad put down an uprising in Hama, slaughtering more than 20,000 of its citizens, including women and children, his son Bashar, whose forces have already killed that number, will not be able to contain or defeat the current uprising led by the Free Syrian Army (FSA). A coalition of the West (including France, Britain and the US), along with Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar are now considering the imposition of a no-fly zone, which will protect the beleaguered population of Syria and also offer cover for FSA fighters. In the meantime, there has been considerable equivocation about proceeding with such a motion without the moral authority of China and Russia, such as it is, in the form of UN Security Council backing. Even without such a no-fly zone, the FSA will in time prevail, but at a cost: when guerrilla wars or civil wars are drawn out the most brutal elements within respective factions tend to rise to the top, with an attendant marginalization, or elimination, of those whose aims and skills are directed toward the creation of civil societies. If the result of a drawn out civil war and long-delayed regime change is simply the replacement of one degraded, brutal society for another, no one will have won.
Yet another factor in international involvement in events in Syria will be the reaction of its neighbor and ally Iran, who themselves are already deeply involved in the country. Iranian military advisers, and snipers from its Lebanese proxy militia Hezbollah, have been active for the past year in Syria. (An aside: I continue to hope for a western peace movement to emerge exclaiming: "Stop the War! Iran and Russia out of Syria now!" but so far no luck. Similarly, in European and American cities, many of the same who decades ago marched demanding nuclear disarmament of the US and the UK, in order presumably to induce the Soviet Union to disarm, now counter: "Well, why shouldn't Iran have nuclear arms?").
There has, of course, been wrenching debate about how best to handle Iran's ambition for nuclear weapons. However, in the short term, of much greater strategic importance for Iran is their maintenance of a reliable ally in Syria via the Assad regime, as well as (jointly with the Assads) with Hezbollah, who in their role as political actors are a prime mover, via the March 8 coalition, in the current government of Lebanon.
Keep all this in mind when reading Con Coughlin's scoop this week in the Telegraph:
Coughlin is a reliable journalist on these matters. Khamenei, as best one can tell, and it's not entirely clear, is in fact the highest power in that country. Does Iran have the capability to strike outside its region? Unfortunately, yes, given that in the 1990s it carried out an assassination program in the heart of Europe against Iranian dissidents, as well as terror attacks against Jewish social organizations in Argentina and elsewhere. What's more, and more to the point, last year the Iranian government was implicated in an assassination plot against the Saudi Ambassador to the US to be carried out in Washington, DC.
Will Iran strike against Western targets? For a country that has generally operated in a careful and strategic way that would seem unlikely, unless circumstances were to change drastically. As it happens, circumstances in the Middle East are in fact changing drastically right now and we have little idea precisely how matters will play out. This is certain: that sooner or later, gradually or faster, the Assad regime, which has been Iran's sole reliable ally for the last few decades, will end.
What will Iran do?
In the meantime, we should ponder, when the Assad regime goes in Syria, what will take its place?
One would like to be hopeful and see a democratic country with structured power-sharing and rights secured for all minorities, including the Christian and Alawite communities likely be threatened by the fall of this regime. (A model for this sort of structured power-sharing could be the Taif agreement of 1989 that ended the Lebanese Civil War.) So far, the Syrian civil war has not been primarily a sectarian affair. The FSA, though comprised of many fighters drawn from the disenfranchised Sunni communities, does encompass members from a variety of outlooks and backgrounds. Many of the FSA leaders have a strikingly modern, technocratic, and secular outlook. Late last week, however, the Syrian Army made a drive through Daraya, a predominantly Sunni suburb, reportedly slaughtering hundreds, including women and children. Reports recount the army searching house to house and killing men of fighting age unable to produce papers.
The longer the conflict in Syria grinds on the more likely it becomes that the government will be a Sunni majority dominated affair, with close ties to Saudi Arabia and the gulf states, as well as to the Sunni community in Lebanon, a country to which Syria has long been intimately, sometimes smotheringly, connected. (It is, of course, here worth noting that, in fact, Saudi Arabia played a relatively positive role in the supporting the pluralistic March 14th coalition that led Lebanon following the Cedar Revolution.)
A third possibility would be an extended civil war, extreme chaos, population movements and refugee crises, with a rump Alawite state forming in the northwest of the country... essentially a re-drawing the national boundaries delineated, for better or worse, in the Sykes-Picot agreement drawn up by Britain and France during WWI and refined in the 1920s. (For a primer on those agreements and what preceded them... events "long ago, in distant lands" that are somehow much alive and with us... I recommend watching David Lean's magnificent film Lawrence of Arabia, and reading in conjunction with that David Fromkin's classic book of history A Peace to End All Peace.) There are signs already of just such a rending of boundaries. Syria's Kurdish community (2.5 million, or 10% of the country's population, and concentrated in the north) have played a canny waiting game, delaying their participation in the uprising against the Assad regime. In the meantime, the Syrian army has withdrawn from that region, giving the Kurdish north of the country a de facto autonomy akin to that achieved by the Iraqi Kurds in 1991. In doing so, the Assad regime has put pressure on neighboring Turkey, the leader of the coalition backing the FSA and who have their own restive independence-minded Kurdish population, as well as on neighboring Iraq, who have been struggling to keep their own oil-rich Kurdish region within a tight federal framework. In essence, the Assad regime is holding out the threat of shattering the region and its long-delineated national boundaries. It also may be suggesting what is its fall-back plan, of a "lesser Syria," with micro nation-states drawn along ethnic and confessional lines, including an Alawite redoubt in the northwest of the country to which the upper levels of the government and the army would retreat.
When History is moving forward, and people are dying, it is unwise to stand still at the cross-roads. It is unconscionable as well.
Read Con Coughlin on Khamenei's statement HERE.
Study David Fromkin's A Peace to End All Peace, available HERE.
Watch David Lean's brilliant Lawrence of Arabia, available HERE, or via Apple itunes.
Hat tips to Now Lebanon, Lee Smith, and others, whose columns have been educational.
Remember that in a sense the Arab Spring began in Lebanon, with the Cedar revolution, in response to the 2005 murder of Lebanese Prime Minister Rafic Hariri. I was in Lebanon for the fourth anniversary of his death, and my interviews with Christopher Hitchens and others, conducted at a rally in Martyrs' Square, can be seen HERE.
The Vogue profile of Asma al Assad is no longer available via the Vogue or Conde Nast websites, but may be found at Bashar al Assad's official website. (Link not provided, and if you think about visiting it be very careful about those cookies.)
Almost a year ago pundits noted how the Arab Spring of democratic uprisings in North Africa and the Middle East was fast turning into an Arab Winter... a winter of discontent and dashed hopes. Yet, soon ahead, we have an Arab Fall, that of the Assad regime in Syria. Not "a fall" in the sense of a season, of course, but rather a tripping up and an ending.
Syria has at times presented itself as all things to all people: a police state that has for the last five years marketed itself with astonishing success as a tourist destination for bien pensant westerners; a seemingly cohesive, multi-faith society that "held together" (or so Anna Wintour's Vogue told us) but did so via unimaginably brutal repression; Iran's closest ally and yet (some have suggested) a one-time covert ally of the US; a sponsor of terror and yet also at times a supposed ally in the War on Terror.
Soon it may all be different. Whereas thirty years ago Hafez al Assad put down an uprising in Hama, slaughtering more than 20,000 of its citizens, including women and children, his son Bashar, whose forces have already killed that number, will not be able to contain or defeat the current uprising led by the Free Syrian Army (FSA). A coalition of the West (including France, Britain and the US), along with Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar are now considering the imposition of a no-fly zone, which will protect the beleaguered population of Syria and also offer cover for FSA fighters. In the meantime, there has been considerable equivocation about proceeding with such a motion without the moral authority of China and Russia, such as it is, in the form of UN Security Council backing. Even without such a no-fly zone, the FSA will in time prevail, but at a cost: when guerrilla wars or civil wars are drawn out the most brutal elements within respective factions tend to rise to the top, with an attendant marginalization, or elimination, of those whose aims and skills are directed toward the creation of civil societies. If the result of a drawn out civil war and long-delayed regime change is simply the replacement of one degraded, brutal society for another, no one will have won.
Yet another factor in international involvement in events in Syria will be the reaction of its neighbor and ally Iran, who themselves are already deeply involved in the country. Iranian military advisers, and snipers from its Lebanese proxy militia Hezbollah, have been active for the past year in Syria. (An aside: I continue to hope for a western peace movement to emerge exclaiming: "Stop the War! Iran and Russia out of Syria now!" but so far no luck. Similarly, in European and American cities, many of the same who decades ago marched demanding nuclear disarmament of the US and the UK, in order presumably to induce the Soviet Union to disarm, now counter: "Well, why shouldn't Iran have nuclear arms?").
There has, of course, been wrenching debate about how best to handle Iran's ambition for nuclear weapons. However, in the short term, of much greater strategic importance for Iran is their maintenance of a reliable ally in Syria via the Assad regime, as well as (jointly with the Assads) with Hezbollah, who in their role as political actors are a prime mover, via the March 8 coalition, in the current government of Lebanon.
Keep all this in mind when reading Con Coughlin's scoop this week in the Telegraph:
According to Western intelligence officials, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei gave the order [to explore terror attacks] to the elite Quds Force unit following a recent emergency meeting of Iran's National Security Council in Tehran held to discuss a specially-commissioned report into the implications for Iran of the Assad regime's overthrow.
Damascus is Iran's most important regional ally, and the survival of the Assad regime is regarded as vital to sustaining the Iranian-backed Hizbollah militia which controls southern Lebanon.
The report, which was personally commissioned by Mr Khamenei, concluded that Iran's national interests were being threatened by a combination of the U.N. sanctions imposed over Iran's nuclear programme and the West's continuing support for Syrian opposition groups attempting to overthrow the Syrian government.
Intelligence officials say the report concludes that Iran "cannot be passive" to the new threats posed to its national security, and warns that Western support for Syrian opposition groups was placing Iran's "resistance alliance" in jeopardy, and could seriously disrupt Iran's access to Hizbollah in Lebanon.
It advised that the Iranian regime should demonstrate to the West that there were "red lines" over what it would accept in Syria, and that a warning should be sent to "America, the Zionists, Britain, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and others that they cannot act with impunity in Syria and elsewhere in the region."
Mr Khamenei responded by issuing a directive to Qassem Suleimani, the Quds Force commander, to intensify attacks against the West and its allies around the world.
Coughlin is a reliable journalist on these matters. Khamenei, as best one can tell, and it's not entirely clear, is in fact the highest power in that country. Does Iran have the capability to strike outside its region? Unfortunately, yes, given that in the 1990s it carried out an assassination program in the heart of Europe against Iranian dissidents, as well as terror attacks against Jewish social organizations in Argentina and elsewhere. What's more, and more to the point, last year the Iranian government was implicated in an assassination plot against the Saudi Ambassador to the US to be carried out in Washington, DC.
Will Iran strike against Western targets? For a country that has generally operated in a careful and strategic way that would seem unlikely, unless circumstances were to change drastically. As it happens, circumstances in the Middle East are in fact changing drastically right now and we have little idea precisely how matters will play out. This is certain: that sooner or later, gradually or faster, the Assad regime, which has been Iran's sole reliable ally for the last few decades, will end.
What will Iran do?
In the meantime, we should ponder, when the Assad regime goes in Syria, what will take its place?
One would like to be hopeful and see a democratic country with structured power-sharing and rights secured for all minorities, including the Christian and Alawite communities likely be threatened by the fall of this regime. (A model for this sort of structured power-sharing could be the Taif agreement of 1989 that ended the Lebanese Civil War.) So far, the Syrian civil war has not been primarily a sectarian affair. The FSA, though comprised of many fighters drawn from the disenfranchised Sunni communities, does encompass members from a variety of outlooks and backgrounds. Many of the FSA leaders have a strikingly modern, technocratic, and secular outlook. Late last week, however, the Syrian Army made a drive through Daraya, a predominantly Sunni suburb, reportedly slaughtering hundreds, including women and children. Reports recount the army searching house to house and killing men of fighting age unable to produce papers.
The longer the conflict in Syria grinds on the more likely it becomes that the government will be a Sunni majority dominated affair, with close ties to Saudi Arabia and the gulf states, as well as to the Sunni community in Lebanon, a country to which Syria has long been intimately, sometimes smotheringly, connected. (It is, of course, here worth noting that, in fact, Saudi Arabia played a relatively positive role in the supporting the pluralistic March 14th coalition that led Lebanon following the Cedar Revolution.)
A third possibility would be an extended civil war, extreme chaos, population movements and refugee crises, with a rump Alawite state forming in the northwest of the country... essentially a re-drawing the national boundaries delineated, for better or worse, in the Sykes-Picot agreement drawn up by Britain and France during WWI and refined in the 1920s. (For a primer on those agreements and what preceded them... events "long ago, in distant lands" that are somehow much alive and with us... I recommend watching David Lean's magnificent film Lawrence of Arabia, and reading in conjunction with that David Fromkin's classic book of history A Peace to End All Peace.) There are signs already of just such a rending of boundaries. Syria's Kurdish community (2.5 million, or 10% of the country's population, and concentrated in the north) have played a canny waiting game, delaying their participation in the uprising against the Assad regime. In the meantime, the Syrian army has withdrawn from that region, giving the Kurdish north of the country a de facto autonomy akin to that achieved by the Iraqi Kurds in 1991. In doing so, the Assad regime has put pressure on neighboring Turkey, the leader of the coalition backing the FSA and who have their own restive independence-minded Kurdish population, as well as on neighboring Iraq, who have been struggling to keep their own oil-rich Kurdish region within a tight federal framework. In essence, the Assad regime is holding out the threat of shattering the region and its long-delineated national boundaries. It also may be suggesting what is its fall-back plan, of a "lesser Syria," with micro nation-states drawn along ethnic and confessional lines, including an Alawite redoubt in the northwest of the country to which the upper levels of the government and the army would retreat.
When History is moving forward, and people are dying, it is unwise to stand still at the cross-roads. It is unconscionable as well.
Read Con Coughlin on Khamenei's statement HERE.
Study David Fromkin's A Peace to End All Peace, available HERE.
Watch David Lean's brilliant Lawrence of Arabia, available HERE, or via Apple itunes.
Hat tips to Now Lebanon, Lee Smith, and others, whose columns have been educational.
Remember that in a sense the Arab Spring began in Lebanon, with the Cedar revolution, in response to the 2005 murder of Lebanese Prime Minister Rafic Hariri. I was in Lebanon for the fourth anniversary of his death, and my interviews with Christopher Hitchens and others, conducted at a rally in Martyrs' Square, can be seen HERE.
The Vogue profile of Asma al Assad is no longer available via the Vogue or Conde Nast websites, but may be found at Bashar al Assad's official website. (Link not provided, and if you think about visiting it be very careful about those cookies.)
Wednesday, March 7, 2012
On Handling Copies of the Koran
I wrote earlier below about the handling and burning of Korans:
I would add that one should make a distinction here between burning as an act of disrespect and burning to end the existence of a copy that, for whatever reason, can no longer be used. Americans should easily be able to understand the distinction between the burning of a flag in protest or anger and the burning of a flag that is already damaged and can no longer be displayed. In the later case, that is, indeed, the prescribed way for handling an official flag, or a flag of a certain size if it has been damaged, soiled or even touched the ground.
It seems very odd, then, that these soldiers should be under threat of prosecution.
What with the recent unrest following the burning of Korans in Afghanistan, I decided to ask the opinion (as one does) of a friend who is a member of one of London's leading chambers of barristers, is one of Europe's leading experts on Sharia law, and is a descendent of a Sufi saint. My friend wrote me via email that the prescribed method for disposing of a Koran that can no longer be used is to burn it.
I would add that one should make a distinction here between burning as an act of disrespect and burning to end the existence of a copy that, for whatever reason, can no longer be used. Americans should easily be able to understand the distinction between the burning of a flag in protest or anger and the burning of a flag that is already damaged and can no longer be displayed. In the later case, that is, indeed, the prescribed way for handling an official flag, or a flag of a certain size if it has been damaged, soiled or even touched the ground.
It seems very odd, then, that these soldiers should be under threat of prosecution.
Apologies to President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan
What with the recent unrest following the burning of Korans in Afghanistan, I decided to ask the opinion (as one does) of a friend who is a member of one of London's leading chambers of barristers, is one of Europe's leading experts on Sharia law, and is a descendent of a Sufi saint.
My friend wrote me via email that the prescribed method for disposing of a Koran that can no longer be used is to burn it.
One wonders, then, why President Obama has apologized so abjectly to President Karzai. What's more, one asks: why are the US soldiers who disposed of those books now under threat of prosecution?
Meanwhile, I'd like to present this alternative apology to President Karzai, offered by Kira Davis.
More from Kira Davis HERE.
My friend wrote me via email that the prescribed method for disposing of a Koran that can no longer be used is to burn it.
One wonders, then, why President Obama has apologized so abjectly to President Karzai. What's more, one asks: why are the US soldiers who disposed of those books now under threat of prosecution?
Meanwhile, I'd like to present this alternative apology to President Karzai, offered by Kira Davis.
More from Kira Davis HERE.
Wednesday, June 25, 2008
Good News, and HARD QUESTIONS on Iraq for Obama
As we've noted before, Barack Obama, the Democratic Party, the mainstream media have been slow to recognize the progress in stabilizing Iraq and building a civil society there.
They've refused to acknowledge a distinction between the war to overturn the regime of Saddam Hussein, which Obama and some others were against, and the recent counter-insurgency effort to support the democratically-elected, pluralist government now sitting in Baghdad.
Today brings news that Anbar Province, the heartland of the Sunni insurgency, the Sunni Tribal region, the so-called "Wild West" has been handed over to Iraq control.
Read the Reuters report, HERE, and also see AFP report.
Rather than adopt an isolationist posture, the Democratic Party needs to address the Hard Questions.
Hat tip to the Times for the photos.
Friday, March 2, 2007
more from Chilean finance minister, Andres Velasco
JSL: We mentioned that you were away from your country for many years…
Andres Velasco: I was away from the country for many years, because one Friday… August 6, 1976… as I was coming out of a football game at school, someone told me my father had been kidnapped. Chile, then, was a dangerous place. My father was a prominent lawyer and academic, and head of the Social Democratic Party. After the coup, he became very active in the defense of people who’d been arrested. In June of 1976, some foreign delegations were convening in Chile, and he arranged to have a say among them. He and some other lawyers provided the visiting foreign ministers with evidence of killings and torture. This, as you can imagine, caused quite an uproar. Soon after the foreign ministers left, my father was arrested, and taken illegally to Argentina. Argentina, then, under that regime, was not a good place for someone who’d been arrested by the Pinochet government. Somehow, he was smuggled into the Venezuelan embassy, left Argentina on a Venezuelan plane, and eventually made his way to Los Angeles.
JSL: What an awful time. That feels far away.
AV: This is a country with a deeply-rooted tradition of electoral politics. When I was a little boy, on election day, my father would put me on his shoulders and take me to vote. That was part of life here. You go, and even if it's hot, or even if it's cold, you stand in line and you vote. There's been concern recently about why voting has gone down from 95 to more recently 80-something vote, which is still very high. Election day is always a Sunday. The country stops and that’s all you talk about. They’re typically in December, which is early summer here, so the weather's nice, just like today. Some people put on a barbecue, and everyone pulls out their TV, and while you grill your fish, you watch the election results as if it were a sporting event. My father died in 2001, and one of the last things we did together was, when the election came, he said, “Take me to vote.” I wheeled him out, pushed his wheelchair to the school where voting always takes place, and stood outside the booth while he cast his ballot. That's the essence of this country. And that's why it was such a painful shock, at a time when we were the only country in Latin America with a democracy, a country with a democratic tradition stretching back almost two hundred years, to have that taken away… taken away for seventeen years. If you're Chilean that's the one thing that you're allowed to get teary-eyed about.
--Sunday, 14 January 2007, Santiago, Chile
... an edited version of this entire conversation appears in the March issue of Monocle magazine, on newsstands now.
Andres Velasco: I was away from the country for many years, because one Friday… August 6, 1976… as I was coming out of a football game at school, someone told me my father had been kidnapped. Chile, then, was a dangerous place. My father was a prominent lawyer and academic, and head of the Social Democratic Party. After the coup, he became very active in the defense of people who’d been arrested. In June of 1976, some foreign delegations were convening in Chile, and he arranged to have a say among them. He and some other lawyers provided the visiting foreign ministers with evidence of killings and torture. This, as you can imagine, caused quite an uproar. Soon after the foreign ministers left, my father was arrested, and taken illegally to Argentina. Argentina, then, under that regime, was not a good place for someone who’d been arrested by the Pinochet government. Somehow, he was smuggled into the Venezuelan embassy, left Argentina on a Venezuelan plane, and eventually made his way to Los Angeles.
JSL: What an awful time. That feels far away.
AV: This is a country with a deeply-rooted tradition of electoral politics. When I was a little boy, on election day, my father would put me on his shoulders and take me to vote. That was part of life here. You go, and even if it's hot, or even if it's cold, you stand in line and you vote. There's been concern recently about why voting has gone down from 95 to more recently 80-something vote, which is still very high. Election day is always a Sunday. The country stops and that’s all you talk about. They’re typically in December, which is early summer here, so the weather's nice, just like today. Some people put on a barbecue, and everyone pulls out their TV, and while you grill your fish, you watch the election results as if it were a sporting event. My father died in 2001, and one of the last things we did together was, when the election came, he said, “Take me to vote.” I wheeled him out, pushed his wheelchair to the school where voting always takes place, and stood outside the booth while he cast his ballot. That's the essence of this country. And that's why it was such a painful shock, at a time when we were the only country in Latin America with a democracy, a country with a democratic tradition stretching back almost two hundred years, to have that taken away… taken away for seventeen years. If you're Chilean that's the one thing that you're allowed to get teary-eyed about.
--Sunday, 14 January 2007, Santiago, Chile
... an edited version of this entire conversation appears in the March issue of Monocle magazine, on newsstands now.
Wednesday, February 21, 2007
Peretz: Political expediency and the nonbinding resolution
Our political imagination of evil is impoverished, and nowhere is it more impoverished than in Iraq. Even today, when the blood of innocents flows so richly and regularly, we do not seem to grasp its origins, or its power. That is, we do not seem to grasp the centrality, and the perdurability, of culture. And in this regard, the president and his party, as well as the Democratic Party, are equally blinded by their respective orthodoxies.
...
from Sunday's WSJ, read it all at opinionjournal.com
...
from Sunday's WSJ, read it all at opinionjournal.com
Monday, February 12, 2007
Baghdad Nights: by Omar Fahdil of Iraq the Model
Omar Fahdil of Iraq the Model, one of the most interesting Middle East blogs, checked in, as things turn grim:
Last night was a sleepless one for me. It dragged on until around 4 in the morning and though exhausted I couldn’t sleep. I’ve come to actually like these times because at this hour 99% of Baghdad’s private generators are shut down and the city becomes, for a brief period, enjoyably silent.
It was dark in my room except for a pale ray of moonlight coming through the window. Suddenly the floor began to tremble and a loud roaring sound broke the silence “What the…!” I thought. Then something really creepy happened. That pale ray of moonlight vanished leaving me in total darkness.
“First an earthquake and now the moon has vanished. Is this the end of the universe?”
Not a pleasant thought for a very secular person like myself.
I finally found the courage to get up and look out through my window. Two meters from me was a line of Stryker Armored Combat Vehicles that for some reason had pulled over in our street.
“Phew! Not the end of the universe yet!”
After some time, the convoy moved off, their engines fading slowly as the streets swallowed them up. I stood for a moment thinking about the men in those vehicles who stay up at night patrolling the dangerous streets of Baghdad to protect the few insomniacs like myself, and the millions of other sleeping Baghdadis. I said a prayer (in my own way) for their safety and went back to toss and turn in my bed.Baghdad is still enjoying some days of relative calm interrupted only with minor sporadic incidents. In general there’s a feeling that these days are better than almost any other time in months. This is more evident in the eastern side of Baghdad than the western part, because the former part has received more US and Iraqi military reinforcements than the latter.
Read the whole thing HERE.
Last night was a sleepless one for me. It dragged on until around 4 in the morning and though exhausted I couldn’t sleep. I’ve come to actually like these times because at this hour 99% of Baghdad’s private generators are shut down and the city becomes, for a brief period, enjoyably silent.
It was dark in my room except for a pale ray of moonlight coming through the window. Suddenly the floor began to tremble and a loud roaring sound broke the silence “What the…!” I thought. Then something really creepy happened. That pale ray of moonlight vanished leaving me in total darkness.
“First an earthquake and now the moon has vanished. Is this the end of the universe?”
Not a pleasant thought for a very secular person like myself.
I finally found the courage to get up and look out through my window. Two meters from me was a line of Stryker Armored Combat Vehicles that for some reason had pulled over in our street.
“Phew! Not the end of the universe yet!”
After some time, the convoy moved off, their engines fading slowly as the streets swallowed them up. I stood for a moment thinking about the men in those vehicles who stay up at night patrolling the dangerous streets of Baghdad to protect the few insomniacs like myself, and the millions of other sleeping Baghdadis. I said a prayer (in my own way) for their safety and went back to toss and turn in my bed.Baghdad is still enjoying some days of relative calm interrupted only with minor sporadic incidents. In general there’s a feeling that these days are better than almost any other time in months. This is more evident in the eastern side of Baghdad than the western part, because the former part has received more US and Iraqi military reinforcements than the latter.
Read the whole thing HERE.
Wednesday, January 31, 2007
Extra Hot
In the news today... the nuclear power sector in Russia and across the former Soviet Union is inviting female employees to compete in Miss Atom-2007. A contest, presumably, to discover the industry's most "radiant" beauty. Find out how to vote on-line at www.nuclear.ru.
Quite a public relations campaign. Perhaps they need a slogan as well. "Russian Nuclear Power... we're not glowing, we're growing."
Quite a public relations campaign. Perhaps they need a slogan as well. "Russian Nuclear Power... we're not glowing, we're growing."
Saturday, January 27, 2007
Interview with Chilean finance minister Andres Velasco
On a Sunday evening two weeks ago we visited Chilean finance minister Andres Velasco and his wife at their home in Santiago. In a quiet neighborhood, their 1960s low-slung modern was furnished with Saarinen furniture, abstract paintings, and an overflow of books.
JSL: Can a country's natural resources be a curse?
AV: It’s a problem when your economy is held hostage to their price cycles. Taking account of the effects of commodity cycles has been a key to our policy. When your commodity income is high, you save. When your income is low, because the economy is low, because the price of copper is low, you spend more than you would otherwise to move against the cycle. It's known as a counter-cyclical fiscal policy.
…the entirety of this interview with Andres Velasco will run in the debut issue of Monocle magazine, available February…
JSL: Can a country's natural resources be a curse?
AV: It’s a problem when your economy is held hostage to their price cycles. Taking account of the effects of commodity cycles has been a key to our policy. When your commodity income is high, you save. When your income is low, because the economy is low, because the price of copper is low, you spend more than you would otherwise to move against the cycle. It's known as a counter-cyclical fiscal policy.
…the entirety of this interview with Andres Velasco will run in the debut issue of Monocle magazine, available February…
Thursday, January 25, 2007
Caleb Carr on conflict analogy
military historian and novelist Caleb Carr writes to TMP:
Well, what we already know is that the Cold War is a bad one: Russia was an intensely centralized state, and the whole Reagan/Thatcher thing is, I fear, hogwash; the Soviets were absolutely imploding on their own, as evidenced by the fact that the people who thought we needed to do all those questionable things to bring them down still believed they had many years of fearsome strength left.
The problem is we really do have a slightly unique situation: you can't compare it to the uprising of a tribe or a group, because the connection among Islamic fundamentalists is religion -- but were not really fighting fundamentalism (if we were half the White House would be in Gitmo), what we're fighting is a BEHAVIOR, an aberrant belligerent tactic that has no precise precedents. What I suggested in my book were the examples of slavery, piracy, and genocide, all once staples of war, now considered either anachronisms or outright crimes and rarely seen. So we look to those examples and what do we get?
Here's the problem: we get tactics that CAN be fought militarily, that indeed MUST be, but that CANNOT be DEFEATED militarily -- because when you fight a behavior, the ultimate solution is not the defeat of its practitioners, it is convincing the world that the behavior itself is an abomination.
It is here that that Western Left, and now the Bush administration, have done so much damage: by trying to paint terrorism as the "force equalizer of the weak," the Left not only makes an absurd, self-defeating argument (for if it is the weapon of the weak, then the strong cannot by definition be terrorists, which the Left rightly claims they on occasion ARE), but makes it that much harder to rally public opposition by romanticizing it. And now Bush has played into this by failing to understand that the war against terror is, at heart, an ethical and not a moral struggle: that is, that what we are fighting is not "evil," are not the complaints of these people, but rather their methods. Even Osama has justifiable goals -- the removal of US troops from Saudi Arabia -- as do the Palestinians; but we now declare that we will not consider any such arguments until the terrorists change their behavior. But that will not happen, because their behavior is their existence, and the more you engage them militarily WITHOUT engaging them diplomatically (or rather engaging more responsible opposition groups) the more life you breathe into them, because LONG-TERM YOU WILL END UP DOING BAD THINGS, TOO. Al Qaeda's life blood is the struggle with the US; remove it, and they wither and die, and they know it; maintain it, and American forces will get so tired and furious that they will begin fucking up.
That's why Afghanistan was important: it was quick, it was in conjunction with indigenous groups on the ground, and it didn't give Al Qaeda time to redefine the conflict as they are trying (and to some extent succeeding) in doing in Iraq. We CANNOT have protracted campaigns in this war. We have to strike hard at those who strike at us, do what we can to help the friendlies, and get out; the democracy idea in Iraq was a disaster that will have no result any different from what the original RUMSFELD plan was (six weeks to handover), and had we been talking to the RIGHT people on the ground from the start -- i.e., Sistani -- we could have made it work. Bremer and Wolfowitz put the poison in Bush's ear, and the little man saw a path to greatness. He wanted to be Lincoln and free the slaves; and while there are similarities, as I say, to the fight against slavery, there aren't any exact parallels.
So where does that leave one? Searching in OTHER PLACES for answers. This is, unfortunately, the kind of war they understand in the East, the kind of war they've been fighting since ancient times. Machiavelli, as those who know KNOW, was a piker compared to Sun-tzu in the area of war, particularly when it came to understanding that war and diplomacy are inextricably interwoven: and Clausewitz, who is a God in America, was dead wrong, you don't stop negotiating and then start fighting, you MUST do both at once constantly. Doing so would have mitigated even the Second World War, or could have; but we never considered it.
We have to, now. Everyone's racing around trying to find "the War Model" that works for this situation, but my central point that there is NOT one -- not in the West, at any rate. Remember that the East has a good record of success against America: the only times we succeeded were when the enemy fought like us (Japan, Korea) or we fought like them -- in the Philippines, which MAY be one of the best hints we have to fighting this. (Certainly it is the unfortunate parallel in terms of what it did to American society.) The Vietnamese, on the other hand, as well as the Muslims thus far, have been able to put a modern spin on the ancient notion of how to deal with an enemy by reaching across his army and to his people, both with and without force; "the greatest general is he who wins wars without fighting battles"; and we don't have an answer, yet, because we're still violently searching for the Clausewitzian "center of gravity" in the enemy, without realizing that he has once again been clever enough to deposit that item within us.
Well, what we already know is that the Cold War is a bad one: Russia was an intensely centralized state, and the whole Reagan/Thatcher thing is, I fear, hogwash; the Soviets were absolutely imploding on their own, as evidenced by the fact that the people who thought we needed to do all those questionable things to bring them down still believed they had many years of fearsome strength left.
The problem is we really do have a slightly unique situation: you can't compare it to the uprising of a tribe or a group, because the connection among Islamic fundamentalists is religion -- but were not really fighting fundamentalism (if we were half the White House would be in Gitmo), what we're fighting is a BEHAVIOR, an aberrant belligerent tactic that has no precise precedents. What I suggested in my book were the examples of slavery, piracy, and genocide, all once staples of war, now considered either anachronisms or outright crimes and rarely seen. So we look to those examples and what do we get?
Here's the problem: we get tactics that CAN be fought militarily, that indeed MUST be, but that CANNOT be DEFEATED militarily -- because when you fight a behavior, the ultimate solution is not the defeat of its practitioners, it is convincing the world that the behavior itself is an abomination.
It is here that that Western Left, and now the Bush administration, have done so much damage: by trying to paint terrorism as the "force equalizer of the weak," the Left not only makes an absurd, self-defeating argument (for if it is the weapon of the weak, then the strong cannot by definition be terrorists, which the Left rightly claims they on occasion ARE), but makes it that much harder to rally public opposition by romanticizing it. And now Bush has played into this by failing to understand that the war against terror is, at heart, an ethical and not a moral struggle: that is, that what we are fighting is not "evil," are not the complaints of these people, but rather their methods. Even Osama has justifiable goals -- the removal of US troops from Saudi Arabia -- as do the Palestinians; but we now declare that we will not consider any such arguments until the terrorists change their behavior. But that will not happen, because their behavior is their existence, and the more you engage them militarily WITHOUT engaging them diplomatically (or rather engaging more responsible opposition groups) the more life you breathe into them, because LONG-TERM YOU WILL END UP DOING BAD THINGS, TOO. Al Qaeda's life blood is the struggle with the US; remove it, and they wither and die, and they know it; maintain it, and American forces will get so tired and furious that they will begin fucking up.
That's why Afghanistan was important: it was quick, it was in conjunction with indigenous groups on the ground, and it didn't give Al Qaeda time to redefine the conflict as they are trying (and to some extent succeeding) in doing in Iraq. We CANNOT have protracted campaigns in this war. We have to strike hard at those who strike at us, do what we can to help the friendlies, and get out; the democracy idea in Iraq was a disaster that will have no result any different from what the original RUMSFELD plan was (six weeks to handover), and had we been talking to the RIGHT people on the ground from the start -- i.e., Sistani -- we could have made it work. Bremer and Wolfowitz put the poison in Bush's ear, and the little man saw a path to greatness. He wanted to be Lincoln and free the slaves; and while there are similarities, as I say, to the fight against slavery, there aren't any exact parallels.
So where does that leave one? Searching in OTHER PLACES for answers. This is, unfortunately, the kind of war they understand in the East, the kind of war they've been fighting since ancient times. Machiavelli, as those who know KNOW, was a piker compared to Sun-tzu in the area of war, particularly when it came to understanding that war and diplomacy are inextricably interwoven: and Clausewitz, who is a God in America, was dead wrong, you don't stop negotiating and then start fighting, you MUST do both at once constantly. Doing so would have mitigated even the Second World War, or could have; but we never considered it.
We have to, now. Everyone's racing around trying to find "the War Model" that works for this situation, but my central point that there is NOT one -- not in the West, at any rate. Remember that the East has a good record of success against America: the only times we succeeded were when the enemy fought like us (Japan, Korea) or we fought like them -- in the Philippines, which MAY be one of the best hints we have to fighting this. (Certainly it is the unfortunate parallel in terms of what it did to American society.) The Vietnamese, on the other hand, as well as the Muslims thus far, have been able to put a modern spin on the ancient notion of how to deal with an enemy by reaching across his army and to his people, both with and without force; "the greatest general is he who wins wars without fighting battles"; and we don't have an answer, yet, because we're still violently searching for the Clausewitzian "center of gravity" in the enemy, without realizing that he has once again been clever enough to deposit that item within us.
Sunday, January 14, 2007
Caleb Carr note II: "Life in the Double Lightning Bolts vs. Life in Iraq"
First, as to the facts of Grass' case: 10th SS Panzer Division and its sister, the 9th, were called into being toward the end of the war as prime examples of desperation units. The average age of their troops was reportedly eighteen, but it was well-known that many were a good deal younger, and some were quite a bit older. Their first task, significantly, was to try to plug the proliferating leaks on the Eastern front. Now, a word about the Eastern front: Especially toward the end of the war, the German practice of shipping all "undesirables," i.e. nearly all indigenous peoples and certainly all Jews, gypsies, Poles, and anyone displaying personal "imperfections" back to Germany for slave labor was increasingly giving way to the practice of executing such people in larger and larger numbers on the spot. As Anthony Beevor makes irrefutably clear in his masterful study of "Stalingrad," there was NO German soldier -- regular army, SS, Waffen SS, whatever -- who did not or could not know about all these programs, no matter how hard he tried, and no German officer who did not know of the details. Therefore, to assert that Grass could have been involved in action on the Eastern front, especially in a Waffen SS division, yet simply have been a dutiful soldier ignorant of what was going on around him... It doesn't work. You would have a much harder time making that case for someone working in Abu Ghraib and not knowing what Lynndie England and her boyfriend(s) were up to; and, as some of you have so indignantly pointed out, that case can't be made, either.
But let's say that Grass joined 10th SS Panzer later, after it returned to Germany; it was then involved in the follow-up offensive to the Battle of the Bulge, "Nordwind," during which it came under the PERSONAL command of Heinrich Himmler. If anyone is in any doubt as to what that means in practical terms, let's just say that on at least one occasion a surrounded American armored unit was driven to any and every extreme to avoid massacre -- the same kind of massacre that Waffen SS troops had committed at Malmedy during the Battle of the Bulge. No one familiar with the Waffen SS will be surprised by any of this; it is only the worst kind of Nazi freaks and biker morons that keep the imagery and "romance" of the fighting arm of Himmler's private army alive; for the rest of us, the mere fact that Grass chose to join ANY unit of the Waffen SS is sufficient to nullify any social commentary he may have chosen to make during the rest of his life, UNLESS he had chosen to admit his past FIRST.
Now, as to the charge that Amir Taheri's commentary cannot be taken seriously because he believes in the American-led invasion/liberation/occupation of Iraq: Well, one can only say that Himmler would be very pleased by that argument; although perhaps less so than Goebbels, and I do NOT mean that in any George Bush sense -- quite the contrary. It is not that rational people cannot disagree on this difficult subject, they certainly can, and I think everyone's opinions, or every sane person's opinions, have undergone great change during the last three years. But it is the perfection of propaganda to be able to link utterly disconnected topics, to use one subject's difficulties to supposedly reveal the fallacies of another that is, in fact, in no way connected to it. What Taheri believes about Iraq is immaterial to his analysis of Günther Grass, and vice-versa. But the larger point I was trying to make -- i.e., that an entire generation of now-senior German intellectuals have, to a very large extent, ignored their own history (whether during the war or after it, when their mistreatment of Muslims created the problems that Europe is now faced with) while focusing on every misdeed of the United States -- is, I still think, encapsulated very well in what Taheri says, WHATEVER you believe about the Iraq war and its origins; in truth, the German intelligentsia since the war, as Grass has revealed, have practiced the same techniques that their nation perfected before and during the war. This has NOTHING to do with the merits (or lack thereof) of Iraq; it has to do with the merits of German social and political commentary.
- Caleb
But let's say that Grass joined 10th SS Panzer later, after it returned to Germany; it was then involved in the follow-up offensive to the Battle of the Bulge, "Nordwind," during which it came under the PERSONAL command of Heinrich Himmler. If anyone is in any doubt as to what that means in practical terms, let's just say that on at least one occasion a surrounded American armored unit was driven to any and every extreme to avoid massacre -- the same kind of massacre that Waffen SS troops had committed at Malmedy during the Battle of the Bulge. No one familiar with the Waffen SS will be surprised by any of this; it is only the worst kind of Nazi freaks and biker morons that keep the imagery and "romance" of the fighting arm of Himmler's private army alive; for the rest of us, the mere fact that Grass chose to join ANY unit of the Waffen SS is sufficient to nullify any social commentary he may have chosen to make during the rest of his life, UNLESS he had chosen to admit his past FIRST.
Now, as to the charge that Amir Taheri's commentary cannot be taken seriously because he believes in the American-led invasion/liberation/occupation of Iraq: Well, one can only say that Himmler would be very pleased by that argument; although perhaps less so than Goebbels, and I do NOT mean that in any George Bush sense -- quite the contrary. It is not that rational people cannot disagree on this difficult subject, they certainly can, and I think everyone's opinions, or every sane person's opinions, have undergone great change during the last three years. But it is the perfection of propaganda to be able to link utterly disconnected topics, to use one subject's difficulties to supposedly reveal the fallacies of another that is, in fact, in no way connected to it. What Taheri believes about Iraq is immaterial to his analysis of Günther Grass, and vice-versa. But the larger point I was trying to make -- i.e., that an entire generation of now-senior German intellectuals have, to a very large extent, ignored their own history (whether during the war or after it, when their mistreatment of Muslims created the problems that Europe is now faced with) while focusing on every misdeed of the United States -- is, I still think, encapsulated very well in what Taheri says, WHATEVER you believe about the Iraq war and its origins; in truth, the German intelligentsia since the war, as Grass has revealed, have practiced the same techniques that their nation perfected before and during the war. This has NOTHING to do with the merits (or lack thereof) of Iraq; it has to do with the merits of German social and political commentary.
- Caleb
Caleb Carr writes on Gunter Grass
[in response to Amir Taheri's "Grass and his Dark Secret"] And it bears repeating that the unit Grass joined, 10th SS Panzer, was one of the most vicious at that time, responsible for some of the most serious war crimes at the end of the conflict.
There's almost no way that he could himself have played no part in those crimes;
Important mostly because of what it tells us about so much of the elder German intellectual leadership today, and the underpinnings of its anti-U.S. moral posturing.
So, one can hate Taheri all one likes; usually right, though, from all I've been able to tell...
There's almost no way that he could himself have played no part in those crimes;
Important mostly because of what it tells us about so much of the elder German intellectual leadership today, and the underpinnings of its anti-U.S. moral posturing.
So, one can hate Taheri all one likes; usually right, though, from all I've been able to tell...
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