Mondoweiss

McCain's Pastor Friend Calls for Destruction of Islam

John McCain has campaigned with a Rev. Rod Parsley, who has called Islam a--well, take it from Rod:

America was founded in part with the intention of seeing this false religion destroyed. And I believe September 11, 2001, was a generational call to arms that we no longer can afford to ignore.

David Corn asks:

imagine if Barack Obama had campaigned with an imam who had called for destroying Christianity. A media and political uproar would ensue—with wide-ranging calls for Obama to condemn the imam.

Yes and imagine if someone spoke about Judaism that way. Ahmadinejad hasn't even done that. He has called for the end of the state of Israel (in something of the way that George Bush called for the end of the secular Arab dictatorship Iraq).

Was 9/11 a Failure of A, Intelligence or B, Policy? (Answer: B)

Tonight I caught C-Span's Book TV, Philip Shenon of the New York Times talking about his 9/11 Commission book to Michael Duffy of Time Mag. Shenon's argument is that there was massive bungling in the intelligence agencies that resulted in 9/11 and has never fully been addressed. His reporting uncovers phone calls between former 9/11 executive director Philip Zelikow, now a prof at the University of Virginia, and Karl Rove, with the suggestion that the Commission tailored its findings to exonerate the Bush administration for doing nothing about the many warnings of a terrorist strike that it got in the months before 9/11.

At the end of the show Duffy brought up all the conspiracy theories that exist around 9/11, that it was an American plot, etc. The men scoffed at these, as they should.

But there was something absurd about the dialogue. The dichotomy between intelligence bungling/a conspiracy as causes of the attack is a false one. The real dichotomy is between intelligence bungling and policy bungling. The people who were truly responsible for 9/11 are Al Qaeda, a potent and vicious force, and who could have stopped them striking?  No one, I think.  Yes we can hamstring them and chase them and throw them all in prison, but if people hate you, they are going to break through. Look at the Israelis. They have the best intelligence in the world, and they don't care about Palestinian civil rights. They build walls on the Arab world. Then an Arab driver shoots up a school. Al Qaeda was going to get thru here at some point. Turned out to be 9/11.

The real business of the 9/11 Commission that Shenon ignores is, Why they hate us? Of course, the 9/11 Commission also gave short shrift to this question, though I seem to remember that it did offer some compromise language about bin Laden's grievances about American policy, from the occupation by the U.S. of the Prophet's birthplace in Saudi Arabia to the Palestinian struggle for freedom from a country that holds 78 percent of historical Palestine and is now colonizing the choice bits in the remaining fifth. As (Ron Paul advisor) Robert Pape has explained, occupations that involve religious differences will result in acts of suicide terrorism that are supported by the terrorists' community.

This is the gaping hole in Shenon's analysis. Bureaucracies will always break down; the notion that they are perfectible is some meritocratic fantasy.  The effort to blame Bush or Clinton for 9/11 is akin to the efforts to blame Rumsfeld or Cheney or Bush for bad execution of the Iraq war. (It was the policy stupid). The true causes of the attack were American policies, some of which we actually should change.

Unreconstructed Neocon Wurmser Decants 'Regime Change,' Holy War, and 'Goodbye to 2-State Solution' to a Thin Crowd

Going into the basement conference room of a law firm on 6th Avenue in New York yesterday to hear former Cheney adviser David Wurmser speak  on "What's at Stake for the West in Lebanon?" I was afraid that the subject, Lebanon, and six years in the White House meant that I would see a domesticated Wurmser, there would be no sign of the firebreather who once pushed for the Iraq war by saying that "craven, fawning" western politicians had "appeased" Arabs who had modeled themselves on Nazis.

Not to worry. Speaking to an audience of about 70 gathered by the Middle East Forum, Wurmser said we are on our way to a catastrophic war with Iran whether we like it or not. He poured the straight old 150 proof moonshine from the old neocon jug. His extremism was untempered by the experience of the last six years.

What are the 3 things he would tell John McCain if he were his adviser?

"Let me just bluntly answer that. One, abandon the two-state solution statement that we have right now vis a vis the Palestinians. Two--Well, let me start with number one. Number one is an open, publicly expressed regime-change strategy in Iran. Two, an open expressed regime-change strategy in Syria. 3, abandoning the two-state solution policy we've had frankly since the 9/11 attacks..."

(Yes, Israel is always first for the neocons, then they hide the salami.)

And barely a word about what has happened in Iraq. I believe Wurmser mentioned Iraq only once substantively (must check the tape)--as a triumph that we had failed to solidify when we had cravenly asked the U.N. for permission to occupy post-invasion, thereby signaling our weakness to the Muslim world. And indeed Wurmer's argument for a military confrontation with Iran, sooner not later, sounded a lot like the argument for a military confrontation with Iraq. The people want democracy. They look to the mighty west to provide it. We can't disappoint them. I suppose they will welcome us with flowers.

The good news about the event is that the room in the basement of Kramer, Levin, Naftalis & Frankel was only half-filled with mostly older people (and mostly Jews, my Jewdar told me, and even Wurmser seemed to acknowledge, when he said that everyone there follows the news from Israel/Palestine closely), and the roundish balding bespectacled true believer at the podium seemed purely historical. He conceded that George W. Bush has no appetite for a military confrontation with Iran (I wonder why!).

But let me report straightforwardly what Wurmser had to say.

All the reports from Europe and the State Department (which he derided as "Foggy Bottom") that Iran is becoming more moderate are false. Yes Iran is changing, but it is actually moving from "a pure theocracy to what is now essentially a theofascist state" that seeks confrontations with the west, and "a stream of victories," from Lebanon to Gaza, culminating in "destruction." "We're headed for a major conflict with Iran, it won't end nicely." The sooner we bring it on, the less horrific it will be.

Wurmser explained Iranian President Ahmadinejad by likening him to the Prophet Muhammed, the Soviets, and Hitler. He quoted a book by Saeed Jalili, "the mind behind Ahmadinejad", saying that when Muhammad arose as a tribal leader he fired all the negotiators and sent letters to Byzantium and Persia, telling them in essence to convert or "you will face the sword...." a bold act by a newcomer facing down "the two superpowers of his day." And look: when Ahmadinejad took power, he fired 100 ambassadors then sent a letter to George Bush! He was consulting Jalili's holy-war Islamic playbook to reenact Muhammed's challenge.

As I remember, Ahmadinejad's letter was actually cordial and conciliatory--no matter. These things are "coded," Wurmser said. Ahmadinejad is all about jihad. He believes that the west has no will and if the west is challenged, it will fall like a "collapsing hollow tree." He has ordered Syria and Hezbollah to take on this holy war, and Hamas to conduct an "active hot war" with Israel, thus producing war after war till the west falls. 

As for the Nazis, Wurmser said the "internal dynamic within the Iranian regime" was a lot like Hitler's triumph of the will over his own hierarchy. "This is a lot like Hitler's generals in the 1930s, who at every successive crises he would then turn to his generals and say you're degenerate, you have no will." Wurmser said that Ahmadinejad thinks, "The west has no will. You have no will.  I know I can get away with this and with each crisis he could increase his power by doing so." And so Iran will continue to amass power till the west faces a "catastrophic" situation. The Iranian people had looked to the west to bring the dictatorship to heel, but the west had failed them on numerous occasions, for instance when Europe began negotiations with Ahmadinejad over nuclear power. 

Where is the evidence for Wurmser's assertions about the Iranian will? As many neocons do, from Paul Berman to Daniel Pipes, he spoke with a scholarly authority, fluently throwing around the names of Muslim intellectuals and books. (Indeed, these neocon intellectuals study the Islamists with the same passion that I study them!) Wurmser's fluency is not surprising; you'd expect it from a guy who spent years coordinating policy in the White House. But his theory struck me as largely that, a theory. His claim that Ahmadinejad is replaying the apocalyptic narrative of Muhammad or Hitler or the Soviet Union is based on his own view that the Muslim world is rife with evil men, and that we are good. You either subscribe to his judgment or not. Wurmser can read the code. We can't.

And this is what I found so mindblowing. That a man who has such feverish and melodramatic ideas of a showdown between the east and the west, and who is so separated from reality that he regards Iraq as a triumph and Israel's policy toward the Palestinians as one of forbearance, had so much power for so long. Scary.

Israeli forbearance? Wurmser is married to an Israeli and was funded at American Enterprise Institute in the good old days by Irving Moskowitz, a man who also funds colonial settlements in occupied territories, and Wurmser's comments about Israel utterly merged the interests of the United States and Israel, as democracies trying to turn back the Islamofascists but lacking the will to do so. The will again. "Israel doesn't seem to have the will to go back in [to Gaza]," he said with disappointment. "I don't see any will." The idea that the Israeli treatment of Palestinians is a "red flag" of injustice across the Arab world (as Muhammed ElBaradei said on Charlie Rose) was pure calculation in Wurmser's view; the Iranians have merely grabbed on to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as "the key emotive issue" to gain power from the Sunnis and the Arab world. Hamas is simply a tool of the Iranians thru Syria. Its electoral victory shows that the Palestinians have chosen "terrorism and a war against the west." There must be "consequences" for such behavior.

It should be pointed out that Wurmser's evil empire has morphed. In his book Tyranny's Ally, in 1999, our enemy was the Nazilike evil of pan-Arab nationalism. That was Israel's opponent then. Well now the Persians don't like Israel, so it's Nazilike "theofascism" that we have to go to war with. 

I wonder who is going to be fighting all Wurmser's wars. I wanted to ask him why we should believe his statements about the Iranian people after his predictions about the Iraqi people turned out so badly...

But I thought I'd ask a non-adversarial question during the Q-and-A. "What is your vision for Israel if there's no Palestinian state? What will you do with the millions of Palestinians?" I wasn't called on (and maybe the doctrinal answer is contained in another stale neocon screed, the "Clean Break" paper he and the Perle-Feith braintrust created for Netanyahu 12 years ago). Yet I can imagine Wurmser's answer; it would involve the word "will"--whether we and the Israelis have it or not. What a tragedy for the U.S. that this man had so much power. And for my people that prominent Jewish intellectuals are taking their lessons from Nazis.

Is Bhutto Assassination a Wake-Up Call for Left?

Jimmy Carter lost his presidency in 1979 (I think that was the year), when he was shocked that the Soviets had invaded Afghanistan. He had trusted them. Shocked. Americans didn't want a naive president. They turned to Ronald Reagan.

I was shocked by Benazir Bhutto's assassination. Any fool knew it was coming, that is the not the point. It was the pure evil infamy of it. They hate democracy. Who hates democracy? Well, some elements of radical Islam. When David Axelrod of Obama's campaign yesterday hinted that Hillary Clinton was somehow responsible because she voted for the Iraq War, I thought, Don't be an idiot. (Though yes, Hillary Clinton should be rejected because she supported that hateful war and has never said she was wrong...)

I feel a need for revision. I am not saying there is a clash of civilizations, I don't believe that. I don't believe it is world war iv. But for a universalist like myself, there has been no greater nobility in the last few weeks than watching the Pakistani journalists going to jail for their freedom. They are more inspiring to me than our corporate media, most of whom wouldn't sacrifice any portion of their salaries to tell an important truth. These guys were willing to go to jail! Love them.

I am not saying that the U.S. is a righteous force. Axelrod is right, we are hated in the region for good reason. We are occupying an Arab/Muslim country, and have caused incredible suffering. One thing I take away from this is that Robert Pape's realist analysis of suicide bombing must be revised. Pape's argument in Dying to Win (as I recall; my books are packed, sorry) is that suicide bombers are responding to two conditions: occupation with religious difference. The religious difference allows them to demonize the occupier. Critically, in Pape, the suicide bomber is honored by his own culture. Streets are named after him. They are licensed freedomfighters against an occupier. Not religious fiends from a debased culture who hate modern freedom, as Paul Berman and Norman Podhoretz would have it (those advocates for the great democracy in Israel).

Pape's sample was mostly suicide bombers on Sri Lanka and in Israel/Palestine, as I recall. There is now a much larger database. Yes, it includes suicide bombers who have attacked the U.S. forces in Iraq--an occupier with a religious difference--but suicide bombers have also attacked Shi'ites, Sunnis, etc. And now they are attacking democratic forces in Pakistan. Where is the suicide bomber who has attacked the Taliban? Or attacked Al-Qaeda?

After the Cold War, Susan Sontag famously said that the National Review was more reliable than the Nation on the Soviet Union. This time around the left must show that it is more reliable than the Weekly Standard and the New Republic about "the war on terror". We are winning this ideological battle because we have not overstated the threat, and they have, and we do not ignore the fact that the Palestinian situation is a red flag across the Muslim world. Yet we can't forget: there are forces of darkness out there.

My Wife Invokes Sharia re Our Investments

My wife and I made some money off the sale of our house (I'm almost ashamed to admit, what with the sales crisis) and I was about to give a bunch to our investment guy when my wife invoked Sharia, or Islamic law. She knows a little about it from working at Newsweek International some years back. And she said that Sharia's ban on interest, or usury, springs from the idea that money shouldn't make money, your money should be active in the world. "I come from a world of coupon-clippers," she said, referring to her WASP roots, and that is offensive to her understanding of Sharia. You should be building the community with your money, not resting on your gilded laurels.

The personal finance issue aside, I found it amazing that my wife was invoking Sharia. She's a highly evolved type, and in New Age circles people describe religions as "wisdom traditions." It's just unusual to hear of Islam in that connection. Because Islam has been so slimed in the west, partly legitimately, because of the 72 virgins and the stoning of adulterers. Bad stuff (caricatured by Sam Harris in his anti-Islam books). But of course there's bad stuff in Jewish law too, like capital punishment for adulterers and covering a woman's hair. Also a lot of great stuff in Jewish law, like paying someone who works for you before a day passes, or feeding your animals before you feed yourself, or not eating an animal that was killed in fright.

I'm a Chinese-menu Jew, as they used to try and guilt us: one-from-column-a, one from column-b. Henceforth I know my wife and I are going to be thinking about Sharia when it comes to our money...

Leon Hadar on Israel's Shifting Strategic Role (and the Neocons' Assimilationism)

A sharp reader has pointed out that another scholar holds the patent on an idea I found so exciting in Walt and Mearsheimer's book. This is the idea that after the cold war--a period in which Israel was our invaluable asset against the Soviet Union--neocon supporters of Israel needed to reposition the state as an invaluable asset in the ensuing global order.  It turns out that Leon Hadar of the Cato was saying this way back in 1991. And again in '93, in Foreign Affairs:

From home and abroad voices have begun to counsel the Clinton administration that with communism's death, America must prepare for a new global threat--radical Islam. .. intent on launching a jihad against Western civilization.

And in a '92 paper for Cato, Hadar pointed out the upside for Israel:

Israel could become the contemporary crusader nation, a bastion of the West in the struggle against the new transnational enemy, Islamic fundamentalism. According to Daniel Doron, "With the momentous upheavals rocking the Muslim World, the Arab-Israeli conflict is a sideshow with little geopolitical significance."

Which is exactly what Ken Pollack did in his book, The Threatening Storm.  Or that Paul Berman did in Terror and Liberalism. Boy, those neocons have been influential! In his '91 paper, Hadar goes into something I missed in W&M's book, the social history of the neocons and the issue of Jewish identity:

ADL Says Protecting Israel Justifies Not Memorializing Armenian Genocide

In an ad in the Boston Globe, the Anti-Defamation League says the controversy over its nonrecognition of the Armenian genocide in Turkey in '15-'18 has "nothing to do" with its program of fighting hatred and bigotry. Huh. It goes on to justify its refusal to support official recognition of the Armenian Genocide (in which, the Armenian community says, 1.5 million Armenians were killed) by stating that Turkey is a "staunch friend of Israel" and "the most critical country     in the world" in the battle against radical Islam.

What a pity. It's central to the business of any human-rights organization to memorialize genocides. So that civilization can move forward, so that the victims will have honor, so that the killers will suffer disgrace. It's called historical justice. The ADL's very-political position on the Armenians tends to undermine its own ceaseless efforts to memorialize the Jewish holocaust in Europe. How much of that campaign is also political: to maintain moral support for Israel? 

Alan Johnston: Hamas Is Not Jihadist

Alan Johnston's homecoming is as exciting as Jill Carroll's a year ago.  BBC, CSM--they're enlightened outlets, and both reporters have had interesting things to say about their captors.

Johnston made an effort just now to distinguish between his jihadist captors and Hamas. The jihadist Muslims believe that all westerners are bad.  "They have a black and white view" of the west. Their battle is not about Israel and Palestine, it is about a war of civilizations. And these extremists have "their mirror," he said, in the westerners who believe that no Arabs can be trusted. When in truth the world is filled with shades of gray. When Hamas took power in Gaza, the jihadists realized that their three-month exploitation of Johnston's kidnaping was near an end; and so that came to pass.

Johnston reminds us that Hamas's issue is a local one: Israel/Palestine. It requires a local solution. Overheated minds, from Paul Berman to Norman Podhoretz, elide the difference between Hamas and the jihadists. They say that because Hamas has used terrorism in Israel, it is the same as Al Qaeda attacking the World Trade Center.  Podhoretz calls it World War IV because he wants World War IV, he wants the U.S. and western powers completely engaged on the side of the militants in Israel. It is this kind of bad thinking that got us into the Iraq debacle.

Johnston's celebration reminds us that cooler heads should prevail.

 

Paul Berman Is Against Head Scarves (I'm Not)

Paul Berman's piece in TNR on Tariq Ramadan is important, and deserves attention for a few reasons. One is Berman's point that western liberals have rationalized the stoning of adulterers and other primitive practices in the Muslim world. I'm not sure how widespread that practice is, but I'm in complete agreement. As I've said many times, I think the Muslim world is behind the west on freedom of speech and women's rights. Berman is right to talk proudly about the 150-year struggle to establish women's rights in the west, including modern landmarks like Madame Bovary, speaking of adultery.

That said, Berman is essentially a neoconservative as I would define that term now--wanting to impose democracy on the Arab world by force, dismissing the Israeli occupation as meaningless--so I want to critique him. Let's look at one point. Berman's rationalization of the French law barring Muslim women from wearing headscarves in schools.

As I understand Berman, he says the reason that was a good law is that the Muslim girls wanted to participate in the freedoms accorded women in a democracy, and their families were keeping them from so participating by making them wear headscarves. The girls were "under pressure."

The pressure sometimes came from their families at home, and other times from the larger Muslim community, in opposition to their families. The pressure demanded conformity with Islamic precepts.. The purpose [of the law] was to transform the schools into a zone beyond Islamist control, not out of some ideological whim but in order to preserve and to enforce one of the major achievements of modern sociey still not entirely realized, which is full rights and benefits for women.

I find this nutty. Berman's chief problem as a thinker is black-and-white-ism, and this is a good example of his failure to make subtle distinctions. If a family wants to stone a girl for adultery, or cut her genitals, I am all for the state interfering on behalf of the girl. Berman has no evidence that these women are being compelled to wear the headscarf, and even if they were, it's a very difficult area. The realm of the family as a cultural entity is somewhat sacrosanct in the west, and while we may object to strong familial cultures--I am upset when I see evangelical kids proselytizing on street corners with their parents; they have no ability to resist--society must tolerate those cultures. According to Berman's principle of interference, we could be going into Orthodox Jewish families too, because they deny their girls certain rights. How could the state ever sort out these psychological/familial questions. It can't. And so I say, Back off.

No, I wish they wouldn't wear a headscarf. But I'm not going to get them to stop wearing them by interfering in these personal decisions. I'll get much further by demonstrating pluralist principles of respect. Besides, anyone who has hung out at an American campus understands that it is not such a big deal that some girls are wearing a headscarf.  (A burqa is a different matter; that crosses the line).

It is precisely these failures to understand, What is our business and what isn't, what we are capable of achieving and what we aren't, what we can tolerate and what we must smash, what threatens our freedom and what doesn't--these intellectual failures that mark the Iraq War that Berman pushed for. Nowhere in this very long article does he come to terms with his massive and horrifying failure of judgment...

Bernard Lewis Overlooks Muslim Intellectuals

Speaking to VP Cheney and others at American Enterprise Institute the other night, Bernard Lewis did what he does best: warns that we are involved in the Crusades with jihadists whether we like it or not. Masking hysteria in (impressive) erudition, he ignores all signs of modernity in the Islamic world, and treats Osama bin Laden as representative of Muslim attitudes toward the west. They want to destroy our societies and we must give them no quarter. 

And then there are the appeasers:

In Europe, as in the United States, a frequent response is what is variously known as multiculturalism and political correctness. In the Muslim world there are no such inhibitions. They are very conscious of their identity. They know who they are and what they are and what they want, a quality which we seem to have lost to a very large extent. This is a source of strength in the one, of weakness in the other...
The Islamic radicals have even been able to find some allies in Europe... They have a left-wing appeal to the anti-U.S. elements in Europe, for whom they have so-to-speak replaced the Soviets. They have a right-wing appeal to the anti-Jewish elements in Europe, replacing the Axis. They have been able to win considerable support under both headings.  

I defy Lewis to show me "considerable support" for Islamic radicals among leftwing multiculturalists.  I doubt he's spoken to Muslims either. He seems not to know anyone outside a book, and yet he claims to understand Muslim psychology: their identities, and who they know themselves to be.

These ideas are dangerous. Lewis was a White House guest, adored by Cheney;  his idealization of the use of force in responding to radical Islam helped move Bush into the Iraq debacle.  He sold us "the clash of civilizations," in Cold War terms. But in the Cold War, the west was at odds with a totalitarian ideology that had successfully captured European states. This time around we are at odds with traditional societies that are struggling with modernity and radical movements. Their people don't wish to be freed by the west, nor do they want to be led by Osama bin Laden. Lewis overlooks our many allies in that world, the educated Muslims, many of whom have come to the west not to burn it down but because they like what we want, personal freedom, intellectual freedom. We have to find common ground with them if we want to hasten reform of Islam; and denounce extremist, discredited answers.