Indistinct Union: Christianity, Integral Philosophy, and Politics

Indisinct Union HAS MOVED!!!

2007-09-13T11:08:00.001-07:00

To the land of Wordpress.

I've imported this entire blog over to the following address:

http://indistinctunion.wordpress.com

Same Indistinct Union, new site/look and publishing tool.

I will be updating from that site alone from now on.

Please update bookmarks, rss feeds, etc. accordingly. Peace.

New feed: http://indistinctunion.wordpress.com/feed

bin Laden a neo-Marxist?

2007-09-13T08:54:00.001-07:00

Fawaz Gerges, one of the best commentators, on radicalized Islamism, on the new bin Laden tape.

clipped from www.csmonitor.com

Intentionally or unintentionally, bin Laden is venturing into a new ideological terrain. He is blurring the lines between
jihadist messianism and Marxist utopia, which might, in turn, throw his die-hard Salafi supporters off balance.

Militant Salafism, a hard-line sect within Sunni Islam, follows a literalist interpretation of the Koran and is suspicious
of philosophical innovation. Marx's conception of material history, rendered exclusively in terms of economic impulses, is
thus incompatible with Al Qaeda's brand of Islamicism.

Bin Laden's address is a new twist in the ideological struggle for hearts and minds, mostly because it targets Westerners
and Americans. Obviously, bin Laden and his senior associates feel confident to expand their propaganda campaign in the other
war – the war of ideas.

politics of iraq

2007-09-13T08:37:00.001-07:00

I think Juan Cole has some very honest and sharp points on the subject, here.

The Democrats even with trying to legislate Baker-Hamilton, will not be able to overturn a veto in the House of Representatives. What will happen I bet is what Petraeus said will happen. One brigade or so down a month until by mid-08, and then more or less 100-130,000 troops will still be in Iraq as Bush leaves office.

By that reckoning, the best the Democrats in a sense can hope for is that Petraeus does some good in the meantime. Because Republicans are going to likely lose the White House and the next Democratic president will have to make the hard decisions Bush was never willing to (admit loss of peace not war). I think that President, likely Clinton, will only last one term, and the Democrats are dumbly taking the fall guy pill yet again, like in Vietnam. In that war, it was less clear cut, given that Johnson (a Dem) escalated the war and Nixon (a Rep.) was the one that started the pullback. In this war it was a war of choice, sold by a Republican administration, that many a Democrat stupidly caved in on.

Obama has a new, fairly detailed plan for getting out of Iraq. Has some good things on political pressure, UN mediation, Iraq in the context of the Middle East, and the one that will get most play domestically, his call for basically all combat troops (minus protection forces and residual al-Qaeda force, plus troops in Kurdistan and Kuwait) out by 08. It's not going to happen. It might help him politically, might not. But again I think it's largely irrelevant.

As Thomas Ricks says, if you liked the first phases of this war, you'll love the next one.

anbar salv. council

2007-09-13T08:18:00.001-07:00

clipped from www.washingtonpost.com

Iraqi tribal leader Abdul Sattar Abu Risha, a key figure in U.S. efforts to turn local residents against al-Qaeda in the restive Anbar province, was killed today by a roadside bomb, U.S. military and Iraqi sources confirmed.

Abu Risha was a leading member of the Anbar Salvation Council and worked closely with U.S. officials -- a fact that made him a target of insurgents angry about his cooperation with the United States and his ability to convince other tribal sheiks to follow him.

Gem of a Book Review

2007-09-13T07:40:00.000-07:00

Wherein Peter Beinart, rips Michael Ledeen and Norman Podhoretz new a-holes. Read the whole thing, it's brutal (and sad that this kind of garbage actually gets serious play).

Each of the two neocons has new books: NP: World War IV--The Long Struggle Against Islamofascism and ML: The Iranian Time Bomb.

On Podhoretz:

The most astonishing part of “World War IV” is Podhoretz’s incessant use of violent imagery to describe American politics. Critics of the Iraq war represent a “domestic insurgency” with a “life-and-death stake” in America’s defeat. And their dispute with the president’s supporters represents “a war of ideas on the home front.” “In its own way,” Podhoretz declares, “this war of ideas is no less bloody than the one being fought by our troops in the Middle East.” No less bloody? That’s good to know. Next time I talk to my sister-in-law, an emergency medicine doctor serving at Camp Taji, north of Baghdad, I’ll tell her we have it just as rough here at home. Norman Podhoretz is practically dodging I.E.D.’s on his way to Zabar’s.

Not to mention that Pod. never really defines Islamofascism or how the two relate given Islam is a religion of myth/revelation, while Fascism is a worship of the state. And that Fascist parties in the Arab world, like the Baath (Hussein's party) was founded by a Christian.

Podhoretz turned against the left (as a former member thereof) as part of the original generation of neocons. (Paleo-neocons, if that makes sense). He has never forgiven the betrayal he senses from the left and is only out for revenge, seems to me. Podhoretz would only be some laughable crank--his son John still believes Saddam's weapons of mass destruction were sent off to Syria before the war--except for the fact that he is a, if not the, principal foreign policy adviser to Rudy Giuliani.

All of Giuliani's talk about the Democrats being for retreat and his policy being to stay on the offense (the great insight of Bush so he tells us) is straight Norman Podhoretz. Don't let facts get in the way of truth as they say.

On Micheal Ledeen, possibly in the short run an even more dangerous figure. His book, in essence, argues that everything terrorist wise stems from Iran. Heard this argument before? In the 1980s, the neocons said that all terrorism stemmed from the Soviet Union (fortunately Reagan was smart enough not to invade Russia). Then Wolfowitz promoted the views of a wack job conspiracy theorist named Laurie Mylroie who argued Saddam was behind all terrorism in the world, including al-Qaeda.

Here's Beinart:

“The Iranian Time Bomb” has its strengths. On the topic of Iran’s repression of women and ethnic minorities, for instance, it is genuinely moving. But Ledeen’s effort to lay virtually every attack by Muslims against Americans at Tehran’s feet takes him into rather bizarre territory. He says the 1998 bombings of the United States Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania “were in large part Iranian operations,” which would come as news to the 9/11 Commission, which attributed them solely to Al Qaeda. He says Shiite Iran was largely behind Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a man famous for his genocidal hatred of Shiites. He claims that “most” Iraqi insurgents are “under Iranian guidance and/or control,” not just Shiite warlords like Moktada al-Sadr, but Sunni militants as well — the very people who say they are fighting to prevent Iranian domination. In Ledeen’s view, in fact, Sunni-Shiite conflict — the very thing that most observers think is tearing Iraq apart — is largely a mirage, because Iran controls both sides. And Al Qaeda is a mirage too, a mere front for the regime in Tehran. “When you hear ‘Al Qaeda,’ ” Ledeen writes, “it’s probably wise to think ‘Iran.’ ” Not surprisingly, he thinks the mullahs were probably behind 9/11.

This book I worry is part of a campaign that has been decided on in the halls of American Enterprise Institute among others, to sell a war with Iran. Just as was done with Iraq. [For the backstory on this read Hubris by David Corn and Michael Isikoff]. Within the White House we know that Cheney favors a bombing campaign against Iran and his minions do as well (e.g. David Addington).

Although to be fair, Ledeen himself does not favor (as Beinart notes) bombings of Tehran, but rather an aggressive attempt at regime change from within. Podhoretz does favor bombing Iran. Guess which Giuliani would likely follow.

And on the two strongest arguments against America pushing for regime change within Iran: 1)pro-reform elements will labeled American 5th column and discredited, jailed, and/or killed 2)democratic Iran will seek a nuclear weapon because what they are after is Persian nationalism and regional hegemony and protection of their regime against American overthrown/invasion/bombing----Ledeen has basically no response.

Beinart's conclusion:

One day, prominent conservatives will offer not merely new foreign policies for the post-Bush era, but a new style of foreign policy argument: lighter on character attacks and unsubstantiated generalizations, heavier on careful reasoning and empirical evidence. And when they do, they may find “World War IV” and “The Iranian Time Bomb” instructive, as object lessons in the kinds of books not to write.

Amen.

tags technorati : iran

tags technorati : peter beinart

tags technorati : michael ledeen

tags technorati : norman podhoretz

Lawrence on Wright on al-Qaeda in Iraq

2007-09-12T20:06:00.001-07:00

Rhetorically they win either win. US stays, can swarm and bleed. US leaves, they claim victory. But events on ground, they haven't won, and will never win any real territory, but may (at most) be able to launch attacks. Can we get beyond this nonsense that if we leave they will win?

clipped from www.townhall.com

Al Qaeda is in a great public relations situation, whereas if we withdraw, then they can say that they won, and that they defeated the other superpower. And if we stay, then Iraq is still a beacon for disaffected jihadis who want to go join the war. So they are in an enviable position, but really, they haven’t accomplished what they hope to do in Iraq.

Eva Fairbanks on Ambd. Crocker

2007-09-10T21:19:00.001-07:00

Why his testimony was far more important than Petraeus'.

clipped from www.tnr.com

Crocker is right that Iraqi leaders' intentions and how much actual power they wield is more important than whether they have accomplished a specific set of benchmarks--or whether withdrawal will do more harm than good. But his cautious optimism didn't even seem to convince himself. Even when he was describing areas like provincial reconstruction in which he'd had "pretty good luck," Crocker sounded depressed. I think he's well on his way to becoming another tragic figure of this war: well-intentioned, capable, but brought to his knees by the mistakes of others and the sheer immensity of the task he was given. Success is "achievable"? You wouldn't know it from Crocker's manner at the hearing today--a subdued, this-is-all-hypothetical-anyway spirit, like a doctor whose careful and long-ranging diagnoses are for naught because the patient in front of him is already gone.

move on ad

2007-09-10T20:48:00.000-07:00

The General Petraeus=General "Betray-us" title from MoveOn.org is as bad in my book as the "Stab-in-the-Back" campaign Hugh Hewitt has run. I'm tired of the so-called political football being kicked around by both sides. Each is equally disgusting in my book. Each calls into question the honor of Americans who serve the country (either as politicians and military personnel). Make an argument someone is wrong, why they are wrong, and why your position would be better.

Petraeus didn't betray the country. He has consistently supported a strategy that I think is failed, however many tactical gains have been made. Not exactly betrayal. The ad does make some valid points, which sadly get lost in the controversy over the title. [There's always a grain of truth in the stereotype]. These groups will never learn apparently that they only make those pushing against the escalation in a worse position.

Not that in matters, given that with 5thGeneration Warfare, civilian protests (unlike Vietnam where they were successful, 4th Gen.), war is continual. If such groups want to attack A)they should attack the President's lack of Middle East strategy. He's in charge not Petraeus. B)the one attack they do make is in this realm (rhetorically charged as "cooking the books") but without the "betray-us" which allows the ring-wingosphere to cry foul (deservedly so in a way) without of course ever having to deal with the following facts.

From the ad (my emphasis):

Every independent report on the ground situation in Iraq shows that the surge strategy has failed. Yet the General claims a reduction in violence. That’s because, according to the New York Times, the Pentagon has adopted a bizarre formula for keeping tabs on violence. For example, deaths by car bombs don’t count. The Washington Post reported that assassinations only count if you’re shot in the back of the head — not the front. According to the Associated Press, there have been more civilian deaths and more American soldier deaths in the past three months than in any other summer we’ve been there. We’ll hear of neighborhoods where violence has decreased. But we won’t hear that those neighborhoods have been ethnically cleansed.

Or Kevin Drum:

For myself, I'll just note the same thing I noted over the weekend: all the charts for civilian fatalities show basically the same trend: a big pre-surge drop between December and March, no progress from March through July, and then a modest drop in August. So Petraeus is hanging nearly his entire case on a single month.

Remember all this talk about summer violence being down is mostly a product of the fact that Iraq is 130+ in the summer and jihadis stay in.

Plus the more that Iraq is ethnically cleansed, the less ethnic violence there will be in places. The Shia have won.

The problem is by now the move towards a Baker-Hamilton consulting-training role is questionable because the Iraqi Army 1.is a failure 2.is a Shia militia--except where it is a Kurdish militia or in some small pockets, covers for the insurgency.

The Baker-Hamilton train-advise role assumes a country called Iraq, a central non-sectarian government, and army that controls violence and enforces constitutional rule. None of those exist and will exist in the country (countries) formerly known as Iraq.

Petraeus' tactics have essentially been shown to be useless, as was predicted. Why not attack there instead of the Betray-us model. Why not point out that the only way they get "security" in Fallujah or Ramadi is to return the city to a medieval frame, complete with donkeys instead of cars? Because Petraeus' COIN is based on agrarian society, not urban guerilla warfare.

Not to mention that the "Tribal Awakening" had nothing to do with the surge:

- Petraeus did not try to claim that the tribal revolt in Anbar, now spreading in the country wherever Sunni Arabs live in numbers, was the result of his policy. His COIN adviser David Killcullen recently wrote that the tribal revolt was not anticipated by the US command in Baghdad, was not caused by it and was a "surprise." What Petraeus did claim, fairly I think, is that he and his team have perceived the usefulness of this phenomenon and are helping to spread it wherever they can while at the same time trying to integrate these forces into government structures.

In other words the key piece of evidence that is cited for maintaining the surge has nothing to do with the surge and will continue so long as the US keeps sending these groups money. Just recall though that there are no "good" guys in Iraq. These tribes fighting al-Qaeda are also running kidnapping rackets (with US taxpayer dollars) and oil smuggling rings. And what else could they do? There is no economy except an expropriating, black-market one.

There are so many reasons to criticize this policy. Betray-us was not a good one.

Jon Chait Again

2007-09-08T18:58:00.001-07:00

Here he is on Bloggingheads with Matthew Yglesias, on economic crackpots.

One of the arguments Chait makes is that this "libertarian-tax cut" wing (along with DOC's "economic authoritarians") is the real power base of the Republican party, much more so than the social conservative (so-called "Christianist") element.

I think Chait is basically right. The "Christianists" on a Federal level got the stem cell research ban. And Alito for Sandra Day O'Connor. Some more restriction on abortions but no overturning of Roe V. Wade.

I think the mainline thread since Reagan has been the social right courted by the Republicans, promised, used for votes, and then left to dry after elections.

The social cons (Christianist being an extremist subset thereof) may have more influence at state and local levels, geographically dependent of course. But federally I don't think so.

Take torture, which say Andrew Sullivan has used as proof of his Christianist takeover of the Republican party thesis. That some Christians would approve of torture, shows to me how actually weak the Christianists are. Namely that they must contravene their own religious principles in order to still have a seat at the table with the power brokers.

The neocons would be another branch, for since losing the peace in Iraq have lost some influence. The Cheney-ite Unilateralist American strand though remains very strong and a Giuliani win would re-insert some neocon elements.

As someone raised a George HW Bush Moderate Republican I would like to see the Republicans of a Schwarzenneger/Tim Pawlenty (Gov. of Minn.) bent take the lead and drive policy for the Party. These "economic crackpots" as the party orthodoxy is the number one turn off for me of Republicans. That and movement conservatism (e.g. National Review). [Or movement liberalism for that matter.]

But this election, the party orthodoxy (tax cuts, stay in Iraq/surge is working, Fred Thompson has a little global warming denial to throw in, evolutionary denial from some) it is not pretty from my view.

Review of Soulfully Gay

2007-09-08T13:31:00.001-07:00

Full disclosure: Joe invited me to be a contributor to the now defunct IntegralChristian.com. I consider him a friend.
Fuller disclosure: Joe's publisher sent me a free copy of the book on the condition that I would write a review on my blog.
Fullest disclosure: I was obviously not told what kind of review to write. The opinions below are my own.

--------
I am not going to write a review of Joe's book on literary or artistic grounds. Those have already been written (e.g. Ken Wilber's foreword to the book) and the desirous reader can find those elsewhere. It's also out of my realm of expertise, and would therefore only make me look silly and waste your time.

I also am not touching on Joe's involvement with and political views upon the gay rights movement. Others are more connected to that discourse to make proper judgments on his ideas there. I will only say that his summary of Andrew Sullivan's Virtually Normal, has got me wanting to the read that book and re-consider the strategy of focusing on gay marriage at the judicial level.

What I think I can speak about with some more weight is the theoretical side of the integral community/blogosphere. This review is meant to articulate what I believe are Joe's fundamental (and unique) gifts to integral discourse and thought.

And that contribution can be summarized in one word: Involution.

While Wilber's work gives a place to Involution, I think it is fair to say it is not an aspect of his system that he highlights.

Joe makes Involution real. All of his story (or almost all of it perhaps) is an exploration on involution. Joe's notion of Homophilia---the love of the Self for itself/the same. His embrace of his dark descent into (temporary) madness, sexual excess, drugs, etc. He finds beauty in places that makes others skin crawl. All of these are different expressions of Involution.

He has even written additions to the 20 Tenets of Holons in Wilber's Sex, Ecology, and Spirituality. These additions are the Tenets of Involution, asking whether Involution itself has a telos?

The other theoretical pole of Joe's integral thought comes in the form of Symbology/Astrology. We hear rumors that he is hard at work on Kronos, a symbological equivalent to the philosophical megalith that is the Kosmos Trilogy of Wilber's.

Here the adage applies: Go Big or Go Home.

I have this sneaking suspicion that the Symbolism/Illuminated side is intertwined with the Involutionary Side. I don't know how yet, but I just can let that instinct go.

Post-metaphysical Involution. Post-metaphysical Symbolism. I have no idea exactly where this idea goes or how it changes beings in their actual day to day life practice, but I can say the following: If true (in anyway), it's mind blowing.

By post-metaphysical, I mean the notion that the future stages/concretions of evolution are not pre-set. That human choice--and in the future possibly other than human beings--actually helps create the contours of the Kosmos itself.

Wilber's work has opened up the implications for the future, for Evolution. It calls for deep human participation on the edge. A new form of human intimacy and ecstasy not defined by traditional social-religious-ideological boundaries nor the same as the flat narcissism and shallow nature and unreality of postmodernity.

Joe leaves us questioning whether our actions affect Involution. Whether how we dream about the world (in symbols) actually changes it, changes us, changes us to change it, changes it so it can change us. Whether us and it even are helpful terms in this dance. Where us and it dissolve. In a new stage of human soulfulness. Gay, straight, or otherwise.

--CJ Smith

Barone on 3 Americas

2007-09-07T09:25:00.001-07:00

Great piece by Michael Barone summarizing a new book by Morton Keller (America's Three Regimes).

Barone:

His three regimes are the deferential-republican, from the colonial period to the 1820s; the party-democratic, from the 1830s to the 1930s, punctuated vigorously by the Civil War; and the populist-bureaucratic, from the 1930s to the present.

Barone focuses mostly on the second (party-democratic).

Continue Reading

Key piece:

By today's standards, some of the trends seem progressive, some regressive. Yet all swept the nation, and not by centralized imposition by a well-positioned elite but by the more or less simultaneous decisions of state legislatures and courts of various partisan composition. Today no one thinks that married women shouldn't be able to enter into contracts, and pressing for child support has been a position taken by liberals as well as conservatives. On the other hand, today's liberals certainly don't favor limiting the grounds for divorce, and many believe that confining marriage to the union of a man and a woman is a deprival of basic human rights. Sunday blue laws are regarded as regressive, antismoking restrictions as progressive.

What do these post-Civil War measures have in common? They were the demands of New England Yankees, the fiercest opponents of slavery in the territories and advocates of abolition. The Yankee culture was not shy about using the power of the state to regulate private conduct in the interests of morality, and morality meant the protection of women and children (by restricting divorce, among other things) and the prohibition of sinful or harmful behavior (smoking, gambling, drinking, working on Sundays). However differently today's liberals (or conservatives) may respond to this agenda, they amounted to a coherent agenda for certain Americans at the time. If the Civil War could be regarded as the Yankee Conquest of North America, this agenda could be regarded as the postwar Yankifying of the newly conquered territory. But not exactly a conquest, since it was acquiesced in or joined by legislatures that were never controlled by New England Yankees.

Barone then goes through the overturning of some of these Yankee state (not federal) moralist projects: prohibition overturned, divorce allowed, etc.

He then writes:

Can I go from these observations to a more general theory of American history? Let me try. The natural state of America, in my theory, is decentralized toleration: We stand together because we can live apart. We are, most of the time, the nation described by Alexis de Tocqueville, made up of various ethnic, religious, and racial strands who believe fervently that we can live and triumph together if we allow one another to observe our local mores.

His general theory would be more grounded I think if he dealt with the rise of the third tradition (populist-bureaucratic) and whether there may in fact be a fourth tradition rising (free markets, de-regulators.....need better name, can't think of one right now).

Ending very nicely:

The Civil War, the imposition of New England Yankee mores in the way described by Morton Keller, and the creation of national business and professional organizations described by Robert Wiebe in The Search for Order 1877-1910 reversed the extreme decentralization of the 1850s. The cultural rebellions, to the left and the right, described recently in neat form by Brink Lindsey's The Age of Abundance reversed the extreme centralization of the 1950s.

For those of us who grew up in the backwash of the 1950s, this decentralization seemed like an abandonment of American tradition. In the long line of history, I think it is more like a reversion to norm. The seeming inconsistency of currently prevailing attitudes on marriage and divorce, gambling and drinking, cigarette smoking and marijuana smoking, is part of the continuing turmoil of a decentralized society. The results don't cohere, but perhaps that is to be expected in a society like ours.

His point about the 50s being an "other than normal" time of conformity should be kept in mind whenever the "Bowling Alone" meme is brought up (usually though not exclusively by conservatives). It is true that such connections, community clubs have been lost and we should try to fashion new ones, but not ones based on a 1950s era of conformity, which was a historical accident and anomaly. We need those communities in a more pluralistic "de-centralized" frame.

pinkercorn

2007-09-07T09:15:00.001-07:00

If Wright-Kaus is #1 on Bloggingheads, then Pinkerton and Corn are 1A.

These guys are gold.

Question for Best Moment:

1)When Corn "defies" Pinkerton (or any reader) to find any article on Thompson that does not use the "F" word (folksy).

2)When Pinkerton thinks aloud whether Mao may have been right (US=paper tiger), to which Corn responds, "plastic tiger, maybe one made in China, with lead paint, that should be recalled, possibly."

And of course their "And we're Bloggingheads TV" opening line.

Duffy on post-surge

2007-09-07T08:24:00.001-07:00

clipped from www.time.com

Whenever they begin, then, the withdrawals are unlikely to last very long. Many experts believe the threat of a wider civil war — and the regional instability that would follow — means that the U.S. cannot afford to reduce its presence in Iraq much below 130,000 troops for the next year and probably beyond that. And so it could turn out that just six months after the long-awaited drawdowns begin, they stop again.

intersubjective mysticism

2007-09-06T15:25:00.001-07:00

A followup, sidepoint that sprang to mind while writing the last post.

If we take the modernist, materialist view of mysticism (God=Brain Chemistry) and reduce all experience (mundane and/or mystical) to physiology then why does the content of such experience mimic one's own religious, cultural heritage?

In mystical experience, why do certain Christians and Buddhists, whose religious traditions allow for even promote iconography (e.g. Eastern Orthodox, Roman Catholic and Mahayana and Vajrayana), have such iconic subtle mysticism while traditions that do not, e.g. Islam, have subtle mystical experience without iconography? (Or even forms of Christianity and Buddhism that do not accept iconography, i.e. Reformed Calvinist/Baptist Xians).

How does a brain know it should be a Christian brain? Or Buddhist? Or Neo-Pagan? Or fill in the blank.

Mother Theresa Again Again: Promise Last Time

2007-09-06T10:08:00.000-07:00

Just one more thought worth considering that I have not seen anyone in this on-going thread mention.

The New Atheist Crew have jumped on this new piece of phenomenological evidence---i.e. that Mother Theresa felt God absent for something like 4 decades--as proof that God does not exist.

What they do not deal with is that the feelings of her absence followed feelings of presence. Deep presence. I.e. Mother Theresa had a famous mystical experience of Christ hanging on the cross and accepting her to be with him forever in that suffering. Her mystical marriage, as opposed to say Catherine of Sienna or Teresa of Avila, was about being married to Jesus' suffering.

Which is exactly what happened by the way. She saw Jesus everywhere, in everyone in the world but never inside herself. Just as Jesus on the Cross felt God everywhere but in his own suffering (My God, My God why have you abandoned ME....not them).

So the New Atheists are playing both sides (or perhaps neither side well). Here's their conundrum. They immediately seize upon and believe wholeheartedly (for their own purposes) Theresa's description of her inner feeling of emptiness. But if they are going to do they to be in any way consistent, have to by her description of her inner mystical experience of God's presence/vision.

Which obviously they won't do because it undermines their entire project. Instead, if they were being honest (which they won't but for the sake of the argument) they would be in a bind. If they tried saying the vision experience was either a hallucination, lie, or a random by-product of biochemistry, then so is the experience of emptiness & absence of God.

In other words, as always, we return to the central dilemma---interior experience. If someone is a true reductionist, then even the realization of reductionism (say Daniel Dennett) is itself simply a product of the reduction. And therefore is wrong. Or as useless or equal to any other experience.

A reductionist model does not allow for judgment of better or worse. So no one is ever truly a reductionist, as evidenced by Dennett, Harris, Hitchens, and Dawkins among others. They obviously have values they favor over others. They just do not usually have a solid basis for making the judgments that they do, in my estimation. Nor are they particularly insightful and/or honest (since they themselves don't know) why they hold what they hold. They have their own story about why they hold what they hold, but deeper study shows other factors at work I maintain.

They can't have it both ways here. Either we give Theresa the benefit of the doubt on her own experience and therefore she had years of feeling God and years of not feeling God--why is the latter right and the former wrong? Or for "defenders" of God--the opposite? Who makes that decision? What does the "fact" of her feeling God then not feeling God mean? How do we determine the answer to that question? [Much more important than any answer/suggestion itself because the answer to the question of how reveals the person's real existential/intellectual affiliations and hunches].

From a post-metaphysical pov, which I'm arguing helps solve these dilemma (or rather dissolves them), I say that you have to look into Theresa's background to understand what was happening. Namely in a quadratic, intersubjective view, one's background filters helps shape the content of one's own spiritual experience.

No Eastern Orthodox Christian mystic would ever have a vision of becoming wedded to Jesus suffering on the Cross. Theresa's own devotion, which is a product of her training in the Roman Catholic Feminine Spiritual Path, helped shape the experience she had.

God is real. Consciousness Is anyway. But God also forms depending on our mode and vision of who/what God is. God (not Godhead) is "God as God is For Us". Often without us ever being aware of that reality.

I'm not criticizing her per se for her affiliation. But it is worth asking in Christian theology, whether suffering should be glorified in the spiritual path. My personal opinion (and that's all it is) is that Theresa did over-glorify suffering. But I'm from the Masculine Path, so that determines my own opinions on the matter.

Suffering will come. I don't think we need to seek it out or glorify it. I don't think we should fear it and do everything we can simply to avoid it either. Suffering is as inherently (from the Absolute view) liberated as health. And as inherently addicting, from the relative point of view, as well.

What she did to was bring it to light and by not making the poor victims (as too many liberals do), she showed that even in their suffering, they were often happier than rich Westerners. I.e. the Real poverty was spiritual poverty and the West is drenched in that poverty. That to my mind, was her greatest gift, for those who are fortunate materially.

But back to the absence....

So on the relative side, the absence is explained as the truth of the assertion of Jesus: you will be with me in my suffering. Which itself does not exist separate from her own perspective. (Love relationship=Two Partners, though asymmetrical in influence).

On the absolute side, Theresa could have realized that in the presence and the absence, there is AWARENESS. She was locked totally into the content of the experience (the feeling of God being absent). At least that is how she comes across in her own reflection/letters. What she could have done was to realize and identify with the one that was Aware of her feeling God's absent.

That voice, the voice of I AM ("Before Abraham was, I AM"), is the voice of Nonduality, as experienced in the first person mode of awareness. Indistinct Union. Then the question of God's relative absence would have been less important than the non-separate nature of any content that arises. Presence or Absence. Visions or suffering. Consolation or Desolation.

The One that is Aware is Free of both the (relatively) good and bad. Of course that kind of discussion you will not hear from either the defenders or attackers of Theresa, theists, atheists, whoever.

Possibly Best Piece on why Iraq will Continue

2007-09-05T20:46:00.000-07:00

From John Robb:

If you think the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan will end with this US presidency, think again. These wars will likely outlast the next several Presidents. The old Vietnam era formulas don't apply anymore. The reason is that the moral weaknesses that have traditionally limited the state's ability to fight long guerrilla wars have dissipated, and modern states may now have the ability and the desire to wage this type of war indefinitely.

For three reasons says Robb:

1. Better media relations by the military (Petraeus strolling with Katie Couric through Fallujah calling).
2.On-going and indefinite threat of terrorism
3.The privatization of conflict (Blackwater-ization of conflict). For Robb this is most important.

This is why with the majority of US populace wanting out of Iraq, it will not matter.

Because this is not 4th Generational Warfare like Vietnam.

Peace, Propaganda, and the Promised Land

2007-09-05T20:05:00.001-07:00

This is a tough film to watch. Warning: Graphic imagery.

Covers the unequal and unjust depiction of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in the US media. In short, how the coverage is so lopsidedly pro-Israeli occupation. (without ever really calling it occupation or describing what occupation is).

It articulates well a coherent, though-out, public relations campaign on the part of the Israeli government and its arms (Israeli lobbies) since the 1982 disastrous "PR" campaign of the massacres of the Sabra and Shatila Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon. The Lebanese Christian Felange, allies of the Israelis, slaughtered thousands of civilians while the Israeli army surrounded the camps and let them in and sat by and watched the horror. The Israeli Gen. behind that operation was none other than (later PM) Ariel Sharon.

My only qualms with the film are that it perpetuates the myth that terrorism (specifically in this case Palestinian) is the product of poverty, hopelessness, etc.

The actual ringleaders in most cases of terrorism are well educated and often religiously motivated. What the poverty and hopelessness does cause is the population to support this patina of radicals and give them foot soldiers/cannon fodder.

Also the film gives the impression that the settlements (illegal, unjust, immoral) settlements in the West Bank are a political agenda of the Israeli government. What would be more accurate is following Gershom Gorenberg, to say that the settlements were originally accidental. Only later, especially under the Likud Party (Menachem Begin and now Netanyahu) were the settlers embraced as a strategic defensive/offensive bulwark against Palestinian resistance and terrorism.

And as a leftist, populist-leaning piece, it tends to lay the blame on corporations, media-political elites, and pro-Israeli lobbies. Not that these groups do not have negative influences (by my lights), but they are human beings. I don't like analysis that reduce everything to these factors because it gives no chance for a both/and position. One must simply convert to its point of view.

The occupation is unjust. It is brutal and existentially erodes the deep truth of the founding of the state of Israel. Long term, in a globalized world, I'm not sure a Cold War/post-Holocaust Zionist experiment in a Jewish only state can last. Long long term I think there has to be one state. But right now that would be the end of Israel. Short to medium term, I think the dismantling of the settlements and any opening of the West Bank economically, educationally, and governmentally is the key. Meanwhile the violence that will flare with that draw back has to be managed.

It is particularly painful as an American Christian to see American Christian Zionists support Israel 100%, blank check and that those actions end up hurting in many cases Christians (Palestinian Christians).

But the movie's central assertion of the uneven depiction of the conflict and the negative effects (in terms of US public policy) is indisputable in my estimation. The context of why Israeli troops have stones thrown at them is never covered. You never get the names, interviews with, or feelings of the Palestinians--grieving widows, parents, friends, family. How many innocent civilian Palestinians are killed in real concrete human depiction.

Reality Check Fallujah

2007-09-05T08:11:00.001-07:00

Fallujah which is being cited as the prime example of the new surge tactic in Iraq.

John Robb on Petraeus taking Katie Couric through Fallujah as a modern day Potemkin village:

Indications of calm and tranquility in the "pacified cities" of Iraq is at the expense of viability. Essentially, to pacify urban areas we have destroyed the basic levels of connectivity that make them work. For example, Fallujah residents are disconnected...
from the country. A wall around the city with biometric entry points.
from each other. The city is divided into 10 walled districts with few entry/exit points. Each is guarded by a combination of neighborhood militias, police and US soldiers.
from basic mobility. The city has been under a vehicle ban since May 2007.
The natural result is zero economic activity. Its industrial area is closed since it is a security risk. The city suffers from 80 percent unemployment with the bulk of the remainder of those employed are either working in militias or with the police. There are chronic shortages of basic necessities like food and fuel. Reconstruction is nearly at a stand-still (in part due to a complete lack of support from the central government).
What's cool is that this "pacification" has had as good an effect on the modern day Queen Katherine (Katy) as it did on on the earlier Queen Catherine.
NOTE: This post doesn't make the claim that things are worse in Fallujah today than it was under jihadi committee. Rather, it does make the case that locking down a city until it stops doesn't prove that we have a solution for urban insurgency.

And as Juan Cole points out, there are huge numbers of arrested and jailed young men in the area.

In other words, exactly as Robb predicted months ago, the surge follows the ink-blot strategy of the British in Malaysia. It is based on an agrarian insurgency not an urban one. You have to cut off all connection and either arrest or publicly execute (as the British did) masses of young men.

Again Robb's last sentence is the clincher: it is not to say it is worse than under jihadis, just that it does not represent a viable success/model.

Why Democrats fold over and not attack the strategy as Wesley Clark has said repeatedly I'll never understand.

Not that this is ever covered in the "liberal" mainstream media, but Fallujah is to the Arab and Muslim world what the Alamo is to American history. A story of the injustice of a foreign invader, corrupt and of ill-will, slaughtering heroic resistance fighters. That Petraeus is taking Katie Couric around there, that he chose that city as his Potemkin village suggests he doesn't understand what kind of image that sets off for the Muslim world. [Or more darkly, he does, in which case, expect long term Hugh Hewitt-style occupation and destruction of the Middle East. That would be the message of such ads.]

tags technorati : Fallujah

tags technorati : Iraq

tags technorati : Surge

Lie the Media will Tell You

2007-09-04T21:43:00.001-07:00

Why are we even still having this argument? How does one fundamentally criticize ir-rationality?

--Both "liberal" and "conservative" media fall for this one.

clipped from news.yahoo.com

WASHINGTON — The surge of additional U.S. troops in Iraq has failed to curtail violence against Iraqi civilians, an independent government agency reported Tuesday.

Citing data from the Pentagon and other U.S. agencies, the Government Accountability Office found that daily attacks against civilians in Iraq have remained "about the same" since February, when the United States began sending nearly 30,000 additional troops to improve security in Iraq .

The GAO also found that the number of Iraqis fleeing violence in their neighborhoods is increasing, with as many as 100,000 Iraqis a month leaving their homes in search of safety

The GAO's conclusions contradict repeated assertions by the White House and the Pentagon in advance of the coming congressional debate on whether to stay the course in Iraq or to begin some withdrawal of U.S. troops.

How to Keep an Autocratic Government You Hate in Power

2007-09-04T21:24:00.001-07:00

this should be surprising why? (Cuba calling....)

clipped from www.nytimes.com

average Iranians have endured economic hardships, political repression and international isolation as the nation’s top officials remained defiant over Iran’s nuclear program. But in a country whose leaders see national security, government stability and Islamic values as inextricably entwined, problems that usually would constitute threats to the leadership are instead viewed as an opportunity to secure its rule.

Paradoxically, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s economic missteps and the animosity generated in the West by his aggressive posture on the nuclear issue have helped Iran’s leaders hold back what they see as corrupting foreign influences, by increasing the country’s economic and political isolation, said economists, diplomats, political analysts, businessmen and clerics interviewed over the past two weeks.

Pressure from the West, including biting economic sanctions, over Iran’s nuclear program and its role in Iraq have also empowered those pushing the harder line.

Jon Chait on Supply Side Economics

2007-09-03T21:05:00.000-07:00

These are fighting words--many of them accurate. Cult, wingnuts, and crackpots: the founders of supple side economics and the Laffer Curve?

But this is not a DailyKos like screed (although it is punchy), this is a well researched, well argued position that admits that supple side is by itself not a problem (true). The problem is that it has become a mono-explanatory creed (partial/totalizing). He writes:

Like most crank doctrines, supply- side economics has at its core a central insight that does have a ring of plausibility. The government can't simply raise tax rates as high as it wants without some adverse consequences. And there have been periods in American history when, nearly any contemporary economist would agree, top tax rates were too high, such as the several decades after World War II. And there are justifiable conservative arguments to be made on behalf of reducing tax rates and government spending. But what sets the supply-siders apart from sensible economists is their sheer monomania. You could plausibly argue that, say, Reagan's tax cuts contributed around the margins to the economic growth of the 1980s. But the supply-siders believe that, if it were not for Reagan's tax cuts, the economic malaise of the late '70s would have continued indefinitely. They believe that economic history is a function of tax rates--they insisted that Bill Clinton's upper-bracket tax hike must cause a recession (whoops), and they believe that the present economy is a boom not merely enhanced but brought about by the Bush tax cuts...All this is to say that the supply-siders have taken the germ of a decent point--that marginal tax rates matter--and stretched it, beyond all plausibility, into a monocausal explanation of the world.

The major downside of supple side-at the margins economics is deficits. (Given that government continues to grow).

Chait:

But what, you may ask, about deficits, the old Republican bugaboo? Supply- siders argue either that tax cuts will produce enough growth to wipe out deficits or that deficits simply don't matter. When Reagan first adopted supply-side economics, even many Republicans considered it lunacy. ("Voodoo economics," George H. W. Bush famously called it.) Today, though, the core beliefs of the supply-siders are not even subject to question among Republicans. Every major conservative opinion outlet promotes supply-side economics. Since Bush's heresy of acceding to a small tax hike in 1990, deviation from the supply-side creed has become unthinkable for any Republican with national aspirations.

What Chait also points out is that the Laffer Curve-Supple Side Magic Formula is so irresistible to operatives, politicians, conservative media outlets because of its simplicity. Monocausality is easy. Cut taxes for the rich and everyone wins. Tough to resist for a politician--doesn't have to deal with complexity, explain complexity of economics to voters, nor call for sacrifice.

Chait then does some biographic background of the main theorists behind Supple Side--not exactly sound thinkers in other arenas let us say.

I love articles like this because I am perpetually amazed (though I know its coming just not the degree to which it will happen...) at how dogmas take over. How clear-thinking withers on the vine. How constant repetition of an illusion (technically true but partial, but perhaps a minor truth in this case) simply makes it to be.

The major points of the article are on target. The Laffer Curve is inherently problematic. Cutting taxes rates at the top does do things for the rich, but the trickle down is just that (or worse), a trickle. But it does not cover all economic reality positive or negative.

I imagine one point that will be criticized--perhaps with some validity--is Chait's underestimating of supple side/tax cuts at the margins. Exactly how large are those margins. Others will likely retort that the characters (like Waninski and Gilder) were not as influential as Chait maintains. That may be or not, but it still reflects badly that such thinkers' ideas still exist as orthodoxy today when they themselves are forgotten/ostracized. Important to remember the source of such ideas. Good intellectual archeology on Chait's part.

The final point Chait sets out to make is that inequality (the result of supple-side economics) hurts democratic culture. This is a common meme of the left. While true I would say, I'm not as troubled by the idea of income inequality as I am by opportunity inequality and social inequality (like Mickey Kaus). I don't know Chait's position on this per se (this article is a tease to his upcoming book), but I imagine he is more traditional left/center-left on the issue. I would certainly agree that it is overall bad for political discourse that inequality has become so heretical a term to discuss in movement conservatism (New Right). I think that cedes the ground of inequality too much to the left which is out to fix the market in some fashion as a redress.

Chait again:

Indeed, this theory offers an uncannily precise description of what has happened in American politics over the last 30 years. The business lobbyists have turned the Republican Party into a kind of machine dedicated unwaveringly to protecting and expanding the wealth of the very rich. As it has pursued this goal ever more single-mindedly, the right has by necessity grown ever more hostile to majoritarian decision-making for the obvious reason that it's hard to enlist the public behind an agenda designed to benefit a tiny minority. The old ways of conducting politics have broken down in the face of this onslaught. The mores of the old Washington establishment--the assumption of some basic intellectual goodwill on both sides, the focus on character over substance, the belief in compromise--all developed during an era when there were few ideological differences between the parties. The old ways may have done a decent job of safeguarding the national interest when the great moderate consensus prevailed, but they have proven unequal to the challenge of a more ideological time.

Chait's words I think here are given more weight by the fact that he has taken on the Netroots within his own party, comparing them to movement conservatives (Kristols, National Review, Hoover Institution, etc.). In other words, this breakdown has occurred in both parties. And while this isn't raised in the issue, the same pattern Chait correctly shreds on the right could easily gain traction among movement leftists (say a neo-protectionist meme).

tags technorati : supple side economics

tags technorati : Reaganomics

tags technorati : Jonathan Chait

Walter Russell Read: Faith and Progress

2007-09-03T17:21:00.000-07:00

A very sharp and interesting thinker (see his book: Special Providence where he coins the notion of the 4 schools of American foreign policy--Wilsonians, Hamiltonians, Jacksonians, and Jeffersonians), writing in The American Interest on the positive dependency of capitalism (of the Anglo-American variety) on religious faith.

Read is writing to counteract the famous thesis of "secularization"--that is the more modern a country/society becomes the more secular it will inevitably transform into. The New Atheist Anti-vangelicals are a version of this old trend (from Comte on).

Read writes:

This aptitude for capitalism has at least some of its roots in the way the British Reformation created a pluralistic society that was at once unusually tolerant, unusually open to new ideas, and unusually pious. In most of the world, the traditional values of religion are seen as deeply opposed to the utilitarian goals of capitalism. The English-speaking world, contrary to the intentions of almost all the leading actors of the period, reached a new kind of religious equilibrium in which capitalism and social change came to be accepted as good things. Indeed, since the 17th century, the English-speaking world for the most part has believed that embracing and even accelerating economic, social, cultural and political change fulfills their religious destiny.

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I've written before in this blog about the great work of Nathan Hatch The Democratization of American Christianity which shows how the American form of Christianity aligned with the Revolution and thrived off the dis-establishment of any one denomination in America. Just as Madison predicted: the point of dis-establishment and non-confessional governance would make the government more efficient and the churches so. That is in integral-speak, American Christianities joined up with the rising orange-meritocratic-industrial wave instead of like in the Catholic Church in Europe completely wedding themselves to the blue-aristocratic- agrarian wave. When Western Europe overthrow the blue order (French Revolution), the Catholic Church went with it (ancien regime).

Read adds the element of the Anglican and English (later British) parliamentary system. The Anglican religious tradition developed a system of pluraity and reformed national Catholicism, allowing evangelical, catholic, and liberal/latitudinal wings.

[This history of convention and balance is currently in jeopardy in the Anglican tradition due to the dis-proportionate rise of the evangelical wing and groups in sub-Saharan Africa who did not come through the English Reformation, English Civil War, and the Glorious Revolution. Nor American or Scottish Revolutions.]

Read:

The key to the ability of the Anglophone world to advance so far “West”, culturally speaking, and maintain its lead position in the global caravan is therefore not that it has been more secular than other societies. On the contrary, dynamic religion—religion that is open to change and that accords change a positive role in its sacred narrative—explains Anglophone ascendancy. Dynamic religion infiltrated and supplemented static religion in the religious life of the Anglophones. It showed that the great visions that light up the Western sky and drive us to pull up our stakes and move on stir human souls to the depths, just as do those mystic chords of memory that bind us to the past. Religion and myth are not always conservative. The mystic of progress is as god-seized as the mystic of tradition. Socrates was as pious as his executioners, if not more so.

And later on:

It was thanks to this tension that, as its social evolution speeded up, the English-speaking world managed to move from an essentially static religious condition, in which a stable equilibrium was periodically shaken by episodes of religious dynamism, to a dynamic religious system anchored by persistent elements of stasis.

My own theological thinking is moving more and more to an application of adaptive systems science to ecclesiology (the study of the church). i.e. The question becomes how to live with the creative destruction of a sped-up world rather than try to re-create a by-gone nostalgic (never existed?) era.

How to live with chaos not prevent the chaos as almost all churches are built upon? Though structural-stage wise evangelical traditions tend to slant differently than the views I hold, I think in general those churches are much better suited to this reality than so-called liberal ones (sideline not mainline anymore). Although that creative destruction management is faced to instantiate a different value-social-moral system.

The last of Mead's points I want to deal with is his expansion of the thesis of Max Weber (made in his landmark The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism). Weber argued that Protestantism, particularly of the Reformed Calvinist variety, accelerated the rise of capitalism. Calvinism stressed double predestination: one predestined either to heaven or hell. But for some Calvinists, the proof of one's election came through "blessing" (i.e. health, wealth, & prosperity) in this life. So this drove Calvinists to pursue wealth to assuage their consciences proving to them their own election to everlasting bliss.

Weber still basically held to the secularization thesis---for Weber modernity is an iron cage that de-sacralizes the world, everything becoming far more grey, vague, and depressing.

For Mead this analysis, while partially correct does not go far enough. Weber is too negative--the force driving his proto-capitalists is largely fear/intimidation.

Mead sees in the Anglo tradition, a positive contribution: a desire to fulfill, even bring about, change in this newly adapative religious mindset:

But Protestants also came to believe that living in communion with God and experiencing the hope of salvation meant cooperating with, and even furthering, the waves of social change unleashed by capitalism on the English-speaking world. Increasingly, dynamic religion would become the only true religion for English speakers. Religion not only had to tolerate change; it had to advance it.

Weber was right in this sense I would argue. For Calvinists who are driven by the Calvinist ethos (the negative drive), they do continue to practice often enough the Protestant Ethic (little sleep, sobriety, hard work, thrift, etc.) but do become mostly secular-agnostic.

Mead is right for those who are going to continue to have religious faith--there must be a positive drive. A note for all theologians out there.

This positive need is the sense of the individualistic relationship to God in the Anglo tradition (for Read):

Where Weber, like European Enlightenment thinkers, saw progress in terms of rationalization and the disappearance of the numinous from ordinary existence, for the individualistic Anglo-American Christian, the “personal relationship with God” is a powerful and effective link with the realm of the transcendent that does not wither or fade in the face of the modernizing and rationalizing processes of capitalist society. On the contrary, the experience of transcendence may become increasingly important to a population facing growing uncertainty in a world of accelerating change.

This is where I find his analysis flat. Is the outer world simply to be given over to the market, with the possible exception (as he points out) of churches acting as safety nets, safeway houses for people lost in the machine of capitalism? Does religion then simply become a purely private affair? How do we determine which are better or worse forms then of faith? Are we supposed to? Whatever makes someone feel fulfilled/accepted, good?

First off, that can't work, because as we know, the social-collective aspects of the Mandala of Reality, are inherent in arising (lower quadrants).

Also is this vision for Mead to be exported--i.e. to China, Brazil, India, and the like? There some arguments that such is in fact the case, say with Brazil which is undergoing a massive push towards a modern economic system at the same time that Pentecostal Christianity (American Individualist variety) is booming. China as well with Xty exploding there.

Does that mean whoever takes over the mantle of individualist Christianity will be the leader of the economic world for the century to come (China? South Korea?).

integral communication

2007-09-03T11:32:00.000-07:00

A really important (I think) clip from Ken Wilber on IntegralNaked (subscription required--first month is free).

Wilber's main point is how hard it is to both talk about and actually inhabit the integral world. As a real wave in existence (assuming this whole idea of altitude is in someway right). Words like 2nd-tier, turquoise, etc. are the barest of signifiers. We need words for the actual lived reality of integral.

It reminded me of something a woman I knew once (a spiritual seeker) used to say all the time: we never really understand the depth of a teacher. We hear them repeat words like "2nd-tier" or truth or whatever and assume we know what they mean but they are always deeper than we at first expect.

He's talking about something very subtle profound and I get the sense the crowd doesn't quite get the intensity of his words (some no doubt do but probably not too too many). On the surface Wilber's words seem easily understandable.

If post-metaphysics is right (if integral is at least in part about a rising wave of consciousness and that the future is not pre-set), then language has to be enacted/created at the edge. It is not simply a matter of description but enactment. And wanting to actually communicate that wave and realize together we are describing this space without actually having to talk about the fact that there is such realization--that's hard.

[Again at least in part--if this version of integral has merits, which I believe it does. I point this out because if integral is better defined as the Canon/Great Conversation/Humanities as MD has argued or some version of Neo-Perennialist Philosophy then this problem of language does not really arise].

It also brings me back to one of the hardest points I've had in my own articulation of what I think integral is. In my gut and heart and even my head I know from personal experience (and interactions with others who "light" up and start to sense the change), what is the reason why it is necessary to wake up to this idea of altitude. But I find it hard to articulate to others.

For those who are already sensing something is amiss, something is missing, I can begin to describe this and immediately they re-cognize the truth. And maybe these are the only people to talk to? But I have the sense I'm missing something in the description. Something that answers the question of why? What's the payoff?

Iraq in a Nutshell

2007-09-03T11:30:00.001-07:00

Recall that Talabani is a Kurd--a separate ethnicity from majority Arabs. He aligns with Shia (though Kurds are mainly Sunni).

--So does Bush not actually realize this and is really that clueless?
--Or does he know better and he is trying to goad Talabani in that direction (national unity reconciliation)

And better question: which is worse?

clipped from www.washingtonpost.com

Talabani had been delayed getting to the meeting. When he arrived, Bush greeted him warmly, according to Defense Department spokesman Geoff Morrell.

"Mr. President. Mr. President. The president of the whole country," Bush said to Talabani, before shaking his hand and sharing a traditional Middle Eastern greeting.

On Mother Theresa again: "Unfaith"

2007-08-31T08:34:00.001-07:00

(Hat tip to C4 for the coverage He's got all the links you'd ever need or want...and more possibly).

I'm loathe in a sense to bring this up again because it doesn't matter a whit obviously for Theresa. She is wherever she is. It matters (I guess) only for us, which ought to be remembered in all this commentary (mine included)--how self-centered this whole thing can easily become.

None of it in a sense matters, so therefore I'll just dive in knowing that Theresa, God, whatever is going to be whatever it/they/we are.

That said, it does matter relatively. At least when moronic de-humanizing screeds abound--they have to be combatted.

C4 has the links for the usual cast of characters--Hitchens, Dawkins, etc. But Sam Harris has weighed in too, which is a shame. He's better than those guys. He knows more, has had more intimate experience of meditation and should not so easily dismiss inner turmoil to score a cheap, short-term victory against religion. He doesn't realize his own criticisms undermine his own project for a science of contemplation.

A little known Christian (non)mystic by the name of Hadewijch comes to mind (nondual realizers in my books actually transcend the divide between mystics and "regular" people). H was a 12/13th c. Dutch woman. Not a nun important to note, but a member of the Beguines.

In my previous ramblings on this issue, I discussed more the Christian phenomenological map and noted that Theresa may have suffered unnecessarily because of certain subtle attachments to high mystical realms.

Hadewijch adds a key element in this regard---the notion of "unfaith" (her term in translation). Unfaith was not atheism. This is the first and most important point. When you understand experientially what Hadewijch meant by "unfaith", you will see how flat, pathetic Hitchens and New Atheist Crew are. Atheism is just the flip side of weakly developed theism.

In other words, atheism/theism are both of the relative world. Where all questions eventually get reduced to something like: Is the universe for or against us (or neutral?)?

For Hadewijch that question was inquiry, was to be faced through not every solved (dis-solved). Unfaith was the point at which one faced finally into the awful reality of all relativity but has not yet awakened to the Absolute.

A person has gone through all the previous stages: subtle union with God, the Witness, Causal Darkness. Visions perhaps. Lack of visions. Dark nights. Ecstasy, suffering. Whatever.

At some point the individual realizes that all of this have still left him/her ultimately at the core un-happy, confused, and searching. One must realize that all of these are changes of condition/state. And that (from the Ultimate pov) all such changes/conditions are ultimately unfulfilling. For they come, arise, decay and pass. Including union with God. Which Theresa of Calcultta seemed never to understand/accept. She was going through the natural cycle of decay/death of her soul and its union with God.

Unfaith Hadewijch boldly proclaimed comes next. One simply sits and lets all thoughts/feeling arise and faces the great existential questions and all of one's assumptions/positions through this burning fire. (Usually located in the right-causal heart).

You have to face the bigiges: God and the Devil (let them pass/choose no side). Heaven and hell. Good or evil. Theism and atheism.

Choose no side. See that all are relative.

Unfaith is not the opposite of faith but rather the suspension of the faculty that determines faith or lack of faith.

Alternatively, it could be the realization that all such positions (atheism and theism, life is meaningful vs. life is meaningless) are faith. Unfaith is the natural relative counterbalance to faith.

After awakening, there is neither faith nor unfaith.

Theresa, I would guess, never went into this realm of unfaith. And as one smart commenter noted, this could be attributed in part to the fact of her being in charge of the Missionaries of Charity.

Hadewijch was not a nun. She had no superior. She was not in the public eye. She was able to isolate herself for awhile to experience her "unfaith" time. And also to readjust after her awakening to the Nondual. [What Bernadette Roberts called the God Awful moment, a 2nd Incarnation----entering the marketplace with open hands in the Zen Oxherding Pictures].

Theresa was sadly not afforded those life conditions. Whether God wanted it so or not, is not for me to decide. It is a difficult choice to make, when all the information is not out there. Talking about God's will without any mention of the institutional and theological obstructions/obstacles and ignorance/repression of the truth seems fairly sterile and empty to me.

If Theresa had gone to unfaith she would have had to face the possibility that the entire order was just relative. Was locked into the wheel. This is a tough place to go because it is a knife's edge. Thinner than the razor you are preached upon. I know from experience.

It is hard, for someone raised to love and sacrifice, to face the possibility that I/you/we have never really loved (from the Absolute pov), have never really sacrificed.

In Unfaith there is the deep anxiety that on the far side of Awakening, you will no longer care. I'm sure that partly explains Theresa's existential dilemma. God had fled from her inner life but was seen everywhere in her outer life. But outer/inner are themselves just another version of the same basic duality.

shadow 101

2007-08-31T08:03:00.000-07:00

Been thinking of late about the unconscious. About psychology in general I suppose.

Archetypally you have the Freudians and the Reichians. Freud--especially through Neo-Freudianism championed by his daughter Anna--thought the unconscious should be made conscious and then controlled. "Integration" often was a mask for Freud's (admitted) bourgeoise conservative European values. [Btw, Anna Freud was a lesbian who because of such values hated her own sexuality and was essentially frigid her whole life]. Cognitive therapies, script therapies, voice dialogue(?) are in this general vein.

Reich, originally a disciple of Freud, then later a breakaway heretic, argued that the unconscious should be expressed, its native wildness not tamed by Freudianism. Much of the Human Potential Movement stems from Reich.

[The terms of the debate I think are a little wonky given that both Freud and Reich shared the same over-emphasis on the uber-nature of libido/sexuality. Both save civilization (either for good or bad) too much as simply a store of repressed/sublimated sexuality.]

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A third axis, I suppose, is the Jungian one: that the unconscious is symbolic images/stories of the collective unconscious. The mytho-poetic, the hero journey, all these flow from the Jungian premise.

And perhaps a fourth--body, bioenergy, therapies. The concept of the bodyego is one I've been playing with. That the body (bioenergy/prana/lifeforce) has its own as it were center of gravity (body consciousness, not literal physical center, although they may be related). If so, then the bodyego would have a body-unconscious. And this to me seems to be (correctly) the working assumption of body therapies. Somewhat similar to Reichians, but still I think different enough to merit a separate category.

Which just then puts the Freud-Reich question back another layer: is the body-unconscious to be more "integrated"/controlled or expressed? Clear both have a role. Too much Freudianism becomes Anna Freud. Becomes mental control and therapies built around patching people up so they can be sent back to the workforce and be good worker bees. Too much Reichianism--the danger is regression not repression. Many of the expressed elements of the unconscious are immature, self-centered, destructive forces that should be (a la Freud) held in check. Others aren't. And even some of the immature, self-centered stuff should be expressed but in safer environments (my Freudian streaks now showing, so say the Reichians).

Of these (admittedly too general) four major camps, I'm more drawn to the body realm at this point of my life. I still read Jung and find him fascinating, but I'm not in any way looking to heal my archetypes. I bring this up in my continued thread around self-esteem, becoming more process-attentive and creative. I've worked hard in my life on the mental and the spiritual aspects, but not as much in the emotional. I feel like the Freudian/Reichian split is still too cognitive---again express or not express the unconscious but the unconscious depicted in a more cognitive-ish light. Even when describing say libido, still very cognitive. Not wrong, but not really seeming to get at what I'm after at this point (meaning perhaps what those schools do point to in some fashion or another I've touched).

The difficulty, for one, is language/mapping. The body/bioprana stuff recalls a Great Chain (matter, body, mind, soul, spirit). Whereas, in post-metaphysical writings, body/matter is not the lower two rungs (as such) but the exterior correlates (the "without") of all interiors (the "within").

So there is a matter-matter and a body-matter and a mental-matter, soul-matter, and spirit-matter, as it were.

So there would be a hierarchy of body therapies depending on the differing levels of the body/matter. And how all of that relates to the emotional line, which seems to be really somehow intimately linked. Huge room for growth in this area.

Meet the Iraq War

2007-08-28T22:09:00.000-07:00

On Meet the Press this past Sunday, Russert led a roundtable with Thomas Ricks, Richard Engel (one of the few Western reporters to speak Arabic and live in the Middle East), and Michael Gordon.

Ricks says that, like all Shakespeare's tragedies, there are 5 Acts. And Iraq has not yet reached Act IV.

Act I: Invasion
Act II: Post Saddam (Purple Fingers, CPA, Bremer, Insurgency, Casey-forward base mode)
Act III: Petraeus and Surge
Act IV: Post-surge (Baker-hamilton?)
Act V: Post US effect on the Middle East/region.

Ricks believes that Bush will draw one brigade (5,000 troops) per month from March through October of next year. That will then leave the US force back to its pre-surge levels (circa 130,000). Bush will then keep the troops I believe in surge-lite mode. Will continue the Petraeus strategy of embedding, counter-insurgency, and so-called national reconciliation.

I think only the next US president will start Act IV. Unless the Senate Republicans and the Senate Democrats agree to legislate Baker-Hamilton as the Law and force a constitutional crisis. But Reid will want timetables and the Republicans I think would ultimately punt on such a situation.

I think therefore we are looking at another 5-10 years in Iraq. This is why commentators were pointing out that the surge was not so much a surge as an escalation and further entrenching of the military in Iraq.

But as Ricks points out, all discussion should start from realization that there are no good options and every option has major dark sides that could be exploited.

Whether Bush, legislated, or the next (Dem?) Prez, if a Baker-Hamilton like position is adopted, Act IV will basically be (in Ricks' words) about 3 NOs: No Genocide; No Regional Conflict; No Safe haven for Al-Qaeda in Iraq.

And as Ricks contends that strategy will be as equally unwinnable (another Fiasco) as the current one was. For Ricks, the two most likely outcomes are the breaking up of Iraq and/or control by Sadr. But neither of those will end the violence only opening up a new phase (possibly more violent).

Moving back to bases and training/advising, fighting al-Qaeda will give space for an explosion of the civil wars. More Shia death squads, bodies on the street in the morning. So that policy doesn't work. Even a soft-partition only reduces some kinds of violence. Moving back to bases will lead to massacres/genocides.

Engel points out that Iraq will probably not just break up into three but probably something more like 5 fiefdoms. A major Shia civil war will take place between Sadr and SIIC/Hakim. Engel is also right that Maliki's gov't will fall. Not a question of if but when. And Engel predics (correctly I bet) that a series of gov'ts will rise and fall.

Engel basically calls for a dictator/strongman. He thinks new elections should be called (don't know if that is a good idea). Provincial elections which the Sunnis didn't participate in, giving the Shia disproportionate power at the provincial levels. And the US soldiers will not be happy with the return to the base model.

[Gordon adds nothing really other than the administration/military line. How local reconciliation is happeing, how the Sunni tribesman model could be a model for other groups across the country. How that would work is never explained.]

The hardline right (Hewitts of the world) are already lining up their narrative that if and when the Dems begin Act IV and the violence rises (as it will and must), that this is Vietnam all over again. The "stab in the back" from the Democratic Congress that lost the war which we were just on the verge of winning.

To combat that will require more than saying Bush got us in, Bush screwed up the post-invasion, etc. They will have to attack not the surge but the strategy of a central government. And not just criticizing al-Maliki. Levin and Clinton are too stupid to realize this won't matter and stop the Hewitt line.

Change the rules of the game. Admit that no matter what violence will occur. Admit that there are no good options left, instead of scoring cheap political points on Maliki or Bush.

Comment on Radical Middle

2007-08-28T22:06:00.000-07:00

How's this one for postmodern self-referentialism? Mark Satin has excerpted a piece from this blog regarding his article on immigration. So I'm linking (here) something that I've already written on this blog. Scroll down a bit and you'll see it. I'm linking to him linking back to me. Weird world.

Blohio

2007-08-28T22:03:00.000-07:00

In Ohio, visiting my family (and going to the Bengals-Colts preseason game Friday!!!) for the week. Expect blogging to be a little lighter. It's 1 am right now for example.

9 to 10 years

2007-08-25T18:54:00.001-07:00

As John Robb says, kudos to the genius of the PR campaign by Petraeus and crew.

clipped from www.washingtonpost.com

But the military presentations left her stunned. Schakowsky said she jotted down Petraeus's words in a small white notebook she had brought along to record her impressions. Her neat, looping handwriting filled page after page, and she flipped through to find the Petraeus section. " 'We will be in Iraq in some way for nine to 10 years,' " Schakowsky read carefully. She had added her own translation: "Keep the train running for a few months, and then stretch it out. Just enough progress to justify more time."

"I felt that was a stretch and really part of a PR strategy -- just like the PR strategy that initially led up to the war in the first place," Schakowsky said. Petraeus, she said, "acknowledged that if the policymakers decide that we need to withdraw, that, you know, that's what he would have to do. But he felt that in order to win, we'd have to be there nine or 10 years."

"Sanctuary Cities"

2007-08-25T18:46:00.001-07:00

Good piece by Ron Brownstein.

Looks like Romney is pushing for this issue to be the Gay Marriage Equivalent of 2004 in 2008.

clipped from www.latimes.com

His criticism draws on a legitimate concern: After 9/11, the nation has a greater incentive to identify everyone inside its borders, either legally or illegally. But turning city workers into immigration snoops won't advance that goal.

If a mayor announces that he will check people's papers at police stations, school admission offices and emergency rooms, illegal immigrants are unlikely to line up in those places to be discovered and deported. They are more likely to abandon those services -- with dangerous consequences for all city residents.

Some cities, by condemning federal immigration raids, have carried the "don't ask, don't tell" impulse to excess. But Romney has overreached too with his threats against "sanctuary cities" like New York (and presumably Los Angeles). Romney's aides won't say what New York should have done differently in its policy toward illegal immigrants. Maybe that's because the city, like many others, chose the most practical response available.

Breakdown Iraq

2007-08-25T18:31:00.001-07:00

National-->Tribal (LL)
Industrial-->Pre-industrial (LR)

clipped from www.msnbc.msn.com

While security is returning to some areas of Baghdad, modern conveniences aren't necessarily following. The Iraqi capital is no longer the place described in the old guidebooks, a metropolis of casinos, culture and Western-run hotel chains, although vestiges of that city can still be found. Instead, unceasing violence has thrust Baghdad back to a more primitive era, forcing its people to take up pre-industrial occupations and rediscover almost forgotten technologies. The collapse of municipal water services has revived the profession of well-digging, especially in the Green Zone, where foreign diplomats are reluctant to give up their flush toilets and showers. Donkey and horse carts are increasingly common on the capital's streets; the animals are cheaper than trucks and less likely to be held up in searches for hidden explosives.

1967

2007-08-25T17:38:00.000-07:00

Tom Segev on ForeignExchange. Segev is one of the better "New" historians of Israel. He gives the shadow side to the Six Day War in 1967. The foil to Segev (the "bright" side) is Michael Oren. Other "New" Israeli historians are too mean green meme and only blame Israel for everything (e.g. Norman Finkelstein).

Segev is not in this camp. He is right that Palestinian suicide bombing never has helped the Palestinians. I like his formulation: Pal. suicide attacks can not threaten the state of Israel but what they do threaten is the ability of Israel to respond rationally.

What really centers on the 67 War, 40 yrs later, is whether Israel should have taken over the West Bank, East Jerusalem. It's hard to decide because each has a point. Oren is right that it did create some better security positions. For Segev, the occupation undercuts the rationale for a Jewish state (by colonizing 3 million non-Jews who are not given rights, voice, opportunity, etc.). I think that is right as well.

Same with security fence. In the short term it does reduce violence (point Oren). In the medium-long term it leaves Israel further and further weakened, isolated, and the Occupation (and it is an Occupation) it is a cancer on the moral soul of Israel.

Segev interestingly though is moving to a third position. He used to a liberal. That is he fit into the basic scheme of "Land for Peace" (Rabin, Barak). I think Land for Peace could still work in certain ways with Syria.

The conservative-Likud position (Netanyahu) is Security Fences, further settlements (illegal) in the occupation, constant warfare, and blame Palestinians for everything.

Segev points out that neither has worked. Sharon's unilateral disengagement failed which was an attempt at any other position. He says the conflict at this point can only be managed. And he is right that it could be managed more rationally than it is right now.

With Segev all have failed and there is no real chance for now. [One positive that is currently somewhat possible: Saudi Arabia recognizing Israel and the West Bank economic development.] But long term that can not work either. Hamas has to be part of the deal at some point.

tags technorati : Israel

tags technorati : 1967 Six Day War

tags technorati : Palestine

One Che cont'd.

2007-08-25T17:17:00.000-07:00

I've discussed before (via William Easterly) there are "planners" and "searchers".

Planners usually fall into the liberal tradition. Liberal in the more modern sense. From Keynes, FDR, social welfare states, Jeffrey Sachs "End of Poverty", to the communism/socialist state owned system. Top-down.

Searchers typically fall within the conservative tradition (modern Anglo-American conservative tradition). Bottom-up.

The Anglo-American common law tradition is more a searcher tradition. Localized scale, trial and error, organic.

The Latin American world comes from the Roman (Catholic and Spanish/Portuguese colonial) tradition which is top-down planner model.

There is very little budge in that system. Which when there is challenge, tends to push the momentum in the other direction (communism). But the same mindset in reverse: top-down, planner model.

Latifunida-right wing aristocratic agrarian empire versus left-wing communist/state socialist model.

Bacevich on Vietnam-Iraq Analogy

2007-08-25T17:16:00.001-07:00

clipped from www.latimes.com

Radical Islamists like Osama bin Laden do subscribe to a hateful ideology. But to imagine that Bin Laden and others of his ilk have the capability to control the Middle East, restoring the so-called Caliphate, is absurd, as silly as the vaunted domino theory of the 1950s and 1960s.

Politics, not ideology, will determine the future of the Middle East. That's good news and bad news. Good news because the interests and aspirations of Arabs and non-Arabs, Shiites and Sunnis, modernizers and traditionalists will combine to prevent any one faction from gaining the upper hand. Bad news because those same factors guarantee that the Middle East will remain an unstable mess for the foreseeable future.

The Real Real Search for Truths on 9/11

2007-08-25T16:39:00.000-07:00

The best piece I've read yet on 9/11 by Robert Fisk in the Independent.

I was thinking just along these lines after watching another 9/11 conspiracy vid (Zeitgeist, suggested by Gary) and then the requisite look back at the debunking the conspiracy points of view (this piece from Skeptic a good one). Then "de-bunking" the de-bunking. (Re-bunking?). Then my head is nearly ready to explode.

Fisk gives voice to something I've been feeling, but couldn't articulate. I'm not really happy with either of the 9/11 Commission Version nor the Conspiracy Model. I don't want conspiracy theories because they are too neatly packaged. Everything makes too much sense. And the official 9/11 Commission Position is unsatisfying in many key ways (as are pieces like the Skeptic one, criticisms of the Consp. Theorists).

Key quote Fisk:

But – here we go. I am increasingly troubled at the inconsistencies in the official narrative of 9/11...Let me repeat. I am not a conspiracy theorist. Spare me the ravers. Spare me the plots. But like everyone else, I would like to know the full story of 9/11, not least because it was the trigger for the whole lunatic, meretricious "war on terror" which has led us to disaster in Iraq and Afghanistan and in much of the Middle East. Bush's happily departed adviser Karl Rove once said that "we're an empire now – we create our own reality". True? At least tell us. It would stop people kicking over chairs.

It takes some serious courage to admit that one has questions about the official storyline because one will immediately be lumped in with conspiracy theorists. I commend him for willing to give voice to those questions of his.

Fisk goes through a number of question marks he still has---the problematic Mohammad Atta letter. Read his article for all of them.

Continue Reading

It's hard as say a non-specialist in demolitions (but generally educated person) when you see experts, seemingly sincere people (who may be wrong and not paid off by the string-pullers) give conflicting reports. What I am to make of all that?

The South Tower didn't fall straight down as is often shown in the conspiracy models. But as in the Skeptic piece, no rebuttal to the testimony of multiple people to feeling, experiencing, hearing blasts from the basement is given? I've never heard an official counter-response to that for example. Again doesn't mean I assume invidiousness--I think we give government's way too much credit in the way of intelligence (certainly conspiracy theorists do imo). But I would like to hear an explanation for something like that. [If someone knows of a decent one, please provide links].

For myself, I think the 9/11 Commission was a political hackjob that served basically to cover people like Condi Rice's arse. As Bob Baer points out if the various agencies had worked together, the plot should have been uncovered and stopped. Rice goes before the 9/11 Comm. and says there were no reports of impending attacks from bin Laden. We later learned that was false. So either A)she really didn't know about them (in which case she should have been fired for failure to do her job) or B)she did know and lied to cover herself. [Richard Clarke's testimony also lends credence to the view that enough information was out not just 20/20 hindsight monday morning quarter-backing].

It's not a conspiracy theory to say that some things may have been covered up after the attack--without having been part of some uber-false flag operation.

Things that bother me still:

Philip Zelikow, an otherwise good State department official, was head of the Commission. But we know he is/was very close with Rice. I'm not implying anything insidious about him personally, but it was an obvious case of conflict of interests.

Mohammad Atta's passport. How does this survive the crash and fireball and then the collapse of the towers intact on the ground in

--On the larger scale I think the conspiracy theorists remind us phenomenologically that the nation never properly mourned 9/11. It was thrown away and turned into memorials and parades and Republican National Conventions as quickly as Giuliani starting shipping otherwise important physical evidence of the rubble. [That also bothers me. Not just for truth reasons but because dead police, firefighters, and civilians were not given their proper resting place and funerals].

The other point, which Fisk raises, is that the attack was politicized. Plots aside, the shadow (conspiracy theory groups) have an element of this truth: that it should not have been so politicized. That in the rush to war (particularly Iraq) and the Patriot Act and Gitmo and eavesdropping, etc., something of our national identity/innocence was lost.

So while I don't buy into all the detailed plot lines (official or conspiratorial), the conspiracy folks at least, if nothing else, keep the issue alive in American consciousness. I think as a country, 9/11 was never properly absorbed. The neat-package, case-closed, official line of the 9/11 Commission, because it wasn't I think willing to wade into some difficult places, creates the space for its antithesis the conspiracy theorists (like matter and anti-matter).

The truths of such an event I believe are always more disturbing, hopeful, enlightening, confusing that those packaged versions. Some of those truths lie buried. Unfortunately I don't see that kind of discussion taking place anytime soon. The mainline narratives are all black/white (either official or conspiratorial).

tags technorati : 9/11

tags technorati : Conspiracy Theories

Das Boot is Bad

2007-08-24T14:11:00.001-07:00

Max Boot that is writing in the Wall Street Journal, saying Bush's Iraq: Vietnam analogy is not wrong but does not go far enough. Interesting case of being right in one way and completely screwball wrong in the other.

Boot's point is that there were more bad lessons to be learned from having "abandoned" Vietnam than the President cited. Bush cited the Vietnamese who were killed after having supported the US. The Cambodian Killing Fields.

As historical background, remember the US troops were out of Vietnam. The Democrats cut off funding and air support to the South Vietnamese gov't, the Vietcong reneged on the prior Peace Treaty and invaded.

I don't think it was good for the US Congress to cut off funds for the support to the regime. I also think the US should never have backed up the French in the first place and gotten into the mess, but that's a different story.

The argument that is being made now therefore is not a particularly helpful one. The troops in Vietnam were already withdrawn. The Americans troops aren't. The Democrats (and now Senate Republicans) calling for withdrawal of troops are not in the same position as the 72 Democratic Congress.

Anyway, to Bush's list, Boot adds: Winning the War, Losing the Peace (Bingo: already happened, sorry Max).
--More enemy regimes/rebels than just Vietnam were "emboldened" by the US "defeat". (Mozambique, e.g.)
--Danger of Prematurely Dumping Allied Leaders (True, except Maliki and/or anyone else is useless because the central gov't has no power and Iraq doesn't exist anymore).
--Danger of not Making Plans for Refugees (agree completely. 2 million already left Iraq and the US should be right now processing people who have worked with the regime. Because we are leaving, Boot's uber hawk vision aside.

What Boot leaves out of his "complete" model is of course the following: Vietnam today after the US withdrawal, after the cutting off the funds, after the death and despair (not minimized) is a capitalist country that is helping push the rest of SouthEast Capitalist (those dominoes are now falling).

And the US won against the Soviets. No doubt there were difficulties and tragedies from the US cutting off the funds to South Vietnamese. The US shouldn't have been executing its own puppets in S. Vietnam either, just like we keep engineering the "democratic" process in Iraq.

But the Soviet curtain did fall all that considered.

The analogy might suggest that Iraq (or the countries that will emerge from the former country of Iraq) will one day be another Vietnam. Pain and change included.

That would be a more complete outlook.

There's no doubt that this withdraw from Iraq will be used as propaganda and there will be extra violence. No amount of "surging" will stop that. The US has already lost the politics or knocked down the house of cards that was the hollowed out Saddam police state. Now there are gangs, militias, and local fiefdoms.

These emboldened groups will often experience fights with each other. Or until some sort of figure/group wins out and/or a dictatorship is re-established.

This is what happens when you invade a place without an exit strategy. That's the lesson of Vietnam and Iraq.

Nerves, Neural Fiber, and Synaptic Connections

2007-08-23T22:59:00.001-07:00

An anatomical analogy.

I think of Wilber-5, AQAL post-metaphysics as skeletal in nature.

The blogosphere, foreign policy writers, the Great Conversation, academia, are for me the muscle, viscera, and bulk.

All muscle/fat and no bones=no solidity.
All bones and no muscle=a skeleton.

What I try to do in this blog is add the nerves and tendons--connecting the two for a full, electrified body.

Che Documentary

2007-08-23T18:57:00.000-07:00

Very good documentary about Che Guevara. Based on the recent (and best English) bio of the man--Che: A Revolutionary Biography by John Lee Anderson.

Che is a fascinating (and disturbing) study. On the one hand, Che's heart was moved by the poverty of his native South America. He was a doctor and some part of him sought to heal.

On the other, his rigid ideology and worse his psychotic pathology were evil. The video shows (more than I knew) of how he was essentially Castro's executioner. His ability to murder (see his non-emotional non-reflection on his first murder/execution) is chilling. Part of the doctor, surgical mindset I suppose.

Marx's philosophy and sociology is all built around the premise that consciousness is a social by-product. That social, economic, and technological force is the really real. Therefore, the socialist state, to make the "socialist being" (one of Che's passions) must control all property and economics. Thereby all consciousness will be molded to the socialist dream. Like clockwork. 100% guaranteed.

Marxism failed because there was no proof that the social-economic was the really real. Marx did however add to Western thought that social-economic-class elements are intertwined in every movement of consciousness, philosophy, and religion.

Che, more than Castro and certainly more than Marx himself, stands in the line of Trotsky, of perpetual socialist revolution. What I found most interesting about the film was how the communist guerillas hid out in Cuba during their insurgency against the dictatorship of Batista. There they gained the connection of the people.

His heart towards the poor and constant revolution gives him the "Christic" element (in the face of the Che shirts). A secular Christ-figure. Or rather atheistic communist religious Christ figure. The psychotic killer is forgotten in that image however.

Everywhere else Che went (Bolivia, Congo) he never gained the love/hearts of the populace (as we know from Iraq, an important step in any insurgency/counterinsurgency movement). Without that base, Che went from revolutionary "of the people" (as it were) to revolutionary against the people. Like communists like Mao, Stalin, and others before him.

tags technorati : che guevara

tags technorati : marx

tags technorati : communism

Wilber on Post-Structuralism

2007-08-23T18:50:00.000-07:00

From Excerpt A to Volume 2 Kosmos Trilogy:

Probability Space in the AQAL Matrix

Because "postmodernism" has often meant "post-structuralism," laypeople often misunderstand just what a "structure" is (and is not). Among experts, there is actually a broad and strong agreement as to the meaning of a "structure," which is generally defined--by Sheldrake, Piaget, Habermas, Francisco Varela, Carol Gilligan, Jane Loevinger, etc.--as a "dynamic system of self-organizing processes that maintain themselves as patterns through their dynamic reproduction."⁸ As dynamic self-maintaining patterns, structures are not fixed and unchanging, but rather are "unstably stable" (or a mixture of "circularity and openness"--i.e., oldness and newness--i.e., karma and creatively--i.e., include and transcend), and thus are capable of flexible adaptation to fluctuations: they evolve through "structural coupling" with enacted environments (we say, "tetra-evolve"). A structure is materially different moment to moment; its pattern or form, however, is unstably stable and endures as a Kosmic habit for as long as that class of holons exists in spacetime (i.e., for as long as it negotiates the selection pressures in the AQAL matrix).

It is common in postmodern forms of "new paradigms" to say that "structure" has been replaced by "process." Actually, of course, structure was always defined as dynamic processes that reproduce themselves. But there are indeed two aspects of structures that researchers keep emphasizing: their capacity for fluid change (e.g., accommodation and adaptation--or adjusting to their communions); and their capacity, if conditions are right, for remaining incredibly stable over long periods of time (e.g., autopoiesis and assimilation--or stable agency).

Deep structures are simply probability waves. Does not cover the great diversity of surface features, expression:

What is required, then, is a way to account for "structure" without falling, shall we say, into structuralism, or a reification of structures as some sort of ontologically existing molds (which is what both the perennial philosophers and the structuralists did, in their own ways, both of which need to be jettisoned in that regard).
We saw that deep features are inherited, not surface features. That is, even though the general patterns (or morphogenetic grooves) of these holons are handed to us by Kosmic karma, all of the actual contents, surface features, and expressions of these habitual patterns are determined by relative, culturally, and personally contingent factors in all four quadrants.

But this is where we start to move beyond any of the typical definitions of "deep structures," "deep features," or "deep patterns": for Integral Post-Metaphysics, a "deep pattern" is not an actually existing form or structure but simply a term that represents the probability of finding a particular type of holon in a particular mode of spacetime.

tags technorati : Ken Wilber

tags technorati : post-metaphysics

States and Stages on American Civil Religion

2007-08-23T17:05:00.000-07:00

Robert Bellah, the great American sociologist, postulated the notion of an American civil religion which combined the Enlightenment notions of optimism, progress, and rationality along with the Biblical notion a chosen group of people who are the bearers of salvation in the world. (Those people in this case being the Americans).

With all religions they begin with a state/revelation. One could point for this religion to George Washington's famous mystical vision. Washington interpreted that vision through his Masonic-Deist leaning frame. Both more so through the civil religion frame. Both elements (Western Enlightenment and Chosen People Motif).

Religions then are meant to translate and help repeat that experience (or similar ones) and cement its theology in a larger scale.

Religions then as the vehicles for the great meaning-events of transcendence have an ambiguous nature. To the degree they help create the conditions for the revelation (assuming it is a good one), they are beneficial. To the degree they don't, they tend towards the metaphysical.

That is they speak about the experience, or more typically, the interpretation of the experience/revelation (the latter slipping away), not towards it or from it.

The American Civil Religion, which is Religion, holds a similar ambiguity. Like all mystical traditions, this one, has yet to take clearly into perspective, the notion of the intersubjective, Heideggerian, post-metaphysical turn.

In the case of Washington's mystical vision, for example, the difference has serious implications. If you take his vision at pure face value, as "the truth", then the descendants of the Europeans are destined and chosen by God, to overrun the indigenous populations.

If we take Washington's vision as a genuine one (which I do) and add the intersubjective, then I need not hold that the interpretation/background factors that influenced the content of the vision, are automatically forever and ever the truth.

Just as I have a pro/con relationship with Christianity (esp. its amber traditional form), so I do with the American civil religion. It is a better religion--particularly after the Civil War and the Civil Rights Movement--than amber-aristocratic mythic theocracies the world over. (Present and past).

For those who practice the "orange" civil American religion, then they should seek out the more esoteric roots of that tradition, so they can experience its heights for themselves, as true Enlightenment inner scientists.

It also makes clear for those who critique the religion, they receive (very often) ir-rational response mechanisms. As a religion, myth is strong and exerts a powerful hold on its believers. Criticism=heresy.

Better is to understand the symbols/myth (from the state and stage pov) and learn how to tweak the symbols to criticize from within. To subvert the typical pattern/establishment that they are used to often cement.

Both the Enlightenment and Biblical tenets of the American Civil Religion are a two-edged sword.

For the Enlightenment belief: Americans can always be called back to a pragmatism, to the so-called can do spirit, to audacious plans and goals.

On the downside--failure is one's own fault. There is nothing in the world that is not rational by this view (hence problems with religious states and mysticism in general in this religion though sourced in it). Nothing that can not be systematized. No fallow ground. No place for mourning. No great understanding of cultural-historical diversity.

On the Biblical belief. Plus Side. Always call Americans, e.g. Lincoln, to their better angelic side. On the torture question, calling to the American soul and saying this is not us. Volunteerism.

On the negative side--enforcing Americanization. Mythic American faith ("My country right or wrong, but my country") nationalism.

If the religion takes the place of it being the vehicle for the revelation, then idolatry is afoot. If the US is the only nation founded on the belief in God, then the US of all suffers from the danger of idolatry. [I'm not sure that's the right formulation, but it doesn't really matter for the point I'm making].

Reihan on Manzi on Climate Change

2007-08-23T17:02:00.001-07:00

Maybe Arnie is finally going to push some Republicans and conservatives to get their heads out of their backsides, so the electorate has a choice between massive economic cuts climate model (Gore) and something other than Tom Coburn and Fred Thompson saying it's all a fabrication.

clipped from www.theamericanscene.com

Essentially, Manzi was articulating a strategy for a Republican candidate: rather than continue to deny that anthropogenic climate change is real, an increasingly untenable position, conservatives ought to (a) accept that it is real, (b) advocate increased funding for research, and (c) advocate low-cost strategies for adaptation and mitigation.
Substantively speaking, I am drawn to large-scale efforts to sharply reduce carbon emissions, like Al Gore and many other left-of-center environmentalists. But this is simply not a very smart political strategy. Why? The costs of climate change are uncertain, unpredictable, very diffuse, and (mostly) in the future. Someone like me, obsessed with the future and not averse to intervention, is strongly inclined to take action, indeed to take sweeping action. Someone who works in the automobile industry, or someone who is very tax-sensitive, will likely feel otherwise.

Mother Theresa's Inner Darkness

2007-08-23T16:34:00.000-07:00

A new work is out, from Mother Theresa's proculator (petitioner for her sainthood), that reveals Theresa lived in a state of spiritual dryness, aridity, and separation (of feeling) from God for the last 40 plus years of her life.

Article from Time. The book (Come Be My Light) is a series of letters and personal meditations from Theresa.

From the article:

That absence seems to have started at almost precisely the time she began tending the poor and dying in Calcutta, and — except for a five-week break in 1959 — never abated. Although perpetually cheery in public, the Teresa of the letters lived in a state of deep and abiding spiritual pain. In more than 40 communications, many of which have never before been published, she bemoans the "dryness," "darkness," "loneliness" and "torture" she is undergoing. She compares the experience to hell and at one point says it has driven her to doubt the existence of heaven and even of God. She is acutely aware of the discrepancy between her inner state and her public demeanor. "The smile," she writes, is "a mask" or "a cloak that covers everything." Similarly, she wonders whether she is engaged in verbal deception. "I spoke as if my very heart was in love with God — tender, personal love," she remarks to an adviser. "If you were [there], you would have said, 'What hypocrisy.'"

Her words are powerful and her suffering immense.

So what is going here? Christopher Hitchens of course (so pathetically ignorant) chimes in that Theresa knew, like the rest of us, religion is a fraud.

There is a more subtle answer, to say the least.

Theresa realized spiritual union in a famous vision of total rapture and conversation with Christ on the Cross prior to her leaving to work with the poor. When she did, Christ vanished from her interior world. He entered into the face of the poor.

She had reached the climax of interior connection to the Divine on the relative plane.

Her dryness was due in part, I would argue, to the fact that she was never taught there was another plane of (non)spiritual realization: The Nondual.

The article mentions St. Paul of the Cross, famous early modern saint, who for 40 years himself was in aridity, only towards the end of his life to have been raised from the Causal (John of the Cross and Teresa of Avila's Mystical Marriage) to the Nondual Indistinct Union (Meister Eckhart's Gottheit).

If Teresa had known this path, the path of inquiry, the aridity might have been less. She was searching in the realm of the soul-God when she had already exhausted everything capable in that realm.

The Soul in Mystical Marriage is fired so that it might burn through life (in love)--as she did so wonderfully. Eventually (a la Bernadette Roberts) meant to burn out completely. On the far side of the annihilation of the Soul, lies the realization of the Witness/Godhead and from there to the dropping of the Witness, to Isness Alone.

On the far side of Isness (Sahaj Samahdi) lies a new Burning, without selfhood--Bhava Samadhi. An evolutionary-Pentecostal burning. God and creation burn together in that place.
Melt, like liquid fire.

Theresa, could have asked, "Who is it that is Aware of this Dryness/Absence of God?" That one is free of the pain/torment of the Absence.

To ask that question is to take the red pill and go down the rabbit hole.

This is why the work of Indistinct Union, bringing back the awareness and the practice--without the fear of heresy labels--is so important for Christianity.

Siddhis who are free to participate (or not participate) in whatever states and reality emerge. From the perception of Isness, Absence and Presence (of God, of anyone, of anything) is equally the manifestation of the Ultimate.

God's Presence and God's Absence are only two sides of the same Godhead-minted coin.

Update I: Vince has a good post on the subject referencing Bernadette Roberts as well. I have a comment in the comment section.

tags technorati : Mother Theresa

Iraq in Fragments

2007-08-23T16:20:00.000-07:00

Just finished watching the film. Artistically it is a revelation. It redefines the genre of documentary. The "non-fiction" world of "reality" is more fiction, in a way, than consciously scripted fiction.

"All of Iraq is divided into three parts". So should say Gen. Julius Petraeus.

Politically, we know Iraq does not exist anymore.

This film is the requiem for the country that was Iraq. From the Iraqi point of view.

There is no narrator. More like the Witness. Voices arise, have their time, and then recede. The Earth, the soil, the elements are given a voice. Silence. A world of oral literacy and culture.

Individuals broach the issue of politics. The viewer sees violence, frivolity, confusion, pain, and suffering. There is no narrator with his top-down central message. No interviewer, no scripts.
The viewer is left having to decide his/her own opinion, if one is even to be held. It is a work of mourning. What is the point of mourning? We mourn to acknowledge death. To put the pieces back together in whatever way we can.

No US point of view--but always hovering (literally in some occasions). When the Iraqis watch TV the screen is always blurred. Bush talks in one scene through a blurred screen. A fitting image. Not everyone in the film is anti-US. [The Kurds in Pt.III are not].

If there is a "message" politically, it is the perception of being a liberator (Pt III Kurds) versus being an occupier (Pts I and II, Sunni and Sadr Shia).

tags technorati : iraq in fragments

tags technorati : iraq

9 90s in 9

2007-08-23T13:59:00.000-07:00

Nine debates, ninety minutes each, in the 9 weeks leading up to the election. Newt Gingrich and journalist Marvin Kalb make their pitch here. (in LaTimes).

It's not just the more extensive element I like, but more the cutting out the stifling "rules" that have glommed on recently.

Ignatius on "Pragmatic" Obama Foreign Policy

2007-08-23T11:08:00.001-07:00

Add to the list his sharp statements on Cuba (as against Clinton who he can continue to call now Bush-Cheney Lite).

clipped from www.washingtonpost.com

Indeed, you can argue that over the past month, Obama has been shaping the foreign policy debate for the Democrats -- and getting the best of the arguments. By last Sunday's televised debate in Iowa, nobody else seemed eager to challenge Obama's postulate that "strong countries and strong presidents meet and talk with our adversaries." And there was little repetition, either, of the tut-tutting that greeted his statement that he would be prepared to go after al-Qaeda terrorists in Pakistan, with or without President Pervez Musharraf's blessing.

Obama is deftly managing to outflank his Democratic rivals on both the left and right on key foreign policy issues. That may be a piece of political opportunism on his part, but a top Obama adviser gives it a different spin, which may reveal the essence of the man: "He is totally pragmatic. He asks what would work and what wouldn't."

Eine Klein

2007-08-23T10:51:00.001-07:00

clipped from www.time.com

To be sure, the success in the Sunni areas is real, but it may have greater long-term significance in the region than it does in Iraq. We've learned an important lesson in Anbar province: the Islamic-extremist message is a loser. Most Muslims do not want to live without music, television and, especially, tobacco. They don't want their daughters forcibly married to jihadis or their sons shrouded in explosive vests. That is certainly good news, but it's not enough. Indeed, the campaign against AQI may be among the last useful missions for the U.S. military in Iraq. We could drive out every last Islamic extremist, and the country would still be in the midst of a civil war that is trending toward chaos. And make no mistake: the U.S. colonialist insistence on dictating the shape of Iraq's future—framing a constitution, training an Iraqi army and the threat of a permanent U.S. military presence—has exacerbated the chaos.

Iraq Does Not Exist Anymore

2007-08-23T10:28:00.000-07:00

Claims the well-traveled, well-sourced, and best Western journalist on the civilian issues in Iraq and the Middle East---Nir Rosen. On Democracy Now. Listen to the whole thing or read the entire transcript, but the piece is clear: Iraq exists on paper only. It is, as he says, more now like Somalia: a series of fiefdoms run by warlords and militias.

The central government has no power. Criticizing Maliki does nothing because the guy is a useless figurehead. To the degree he has power it is only through militias and Shia-identity (he fled during the Saddam years). His only cred on the street is not to play the Iraqi Nationalist Card, but the Shia group card.

On criticisms of Maliki (Levin, Clinton, Bush):

Well, it’s stupid for several reasons. First of all, the Iraqi government doesn’t matter. It has no power. And it doesn’t matter who you put in there. He’s not going to have any power. Baghdad doesn’t really matter, except for Baghdad. Baghdad used to be the most important city in Iraq, and whoever controlled Baghdad controlled Iraq. These days, you have a collection of city states: Mosul, Basra, Baghdad, Kirkuk, Irbil, Sulaymaniyah. Each one is virtually independent, and they have their own warlords and their own militias. And what happens in Baghdad makes no difference. So that’s the first point.
Second of all, who can he put in instead? What does he think he’s going to put in? Allawi or some secular candidate? There was a democratic election, and the majority of Iraqis selected the sectarian Shiite group Dawa, Supreme Council of Islamic Revolution, the Sadr Movement. These are movements that are popular among the majority of Shias, who are the majority of Iraq. So it doesn’t matter who you put in there. And people in the Green Zone have never had any power. Americans, whether in the government or journalists, have been focused on the Green Zone from the beginning of the war, and it’s never really mattered. It’s been who has power on the street, the various different militias, depending on where you are -- Sunni, Shia, tribal, religious, criminal. So it just reflects the same misunderstanding of Iraqi politics. The government doesn’t do anything, doesn’t provide any services, whether security, electricity, health or otherwise. Various militias control various ministries, and they use it as their fiefdoms. Ministries attack other ministries.

Here's the main issue politically and for the future of US policy (what really has to change after Bush departs):

Well, there is a general aversion on the part of the US administration towards any Islamist movement or government. This is why they brought down the Islamic Courts in Somalia, this is why they overthrew the Hamas democratically elected government in Palestine, this is why they refuse to deal with Hezbollah, an overwhelmingly popular movement in Lebanon: I think a fear of any successful Islamist model.

His conclusion, grim:

In Iraq? It’s too late for anything good to happen in Iraq, unfortunately. If the Americans stay, we’ll see a continuation of this civil war, of ethnic cleansing, until all of Iraq is sort of ethnically -- or sectarian, homogenous zones, which is basically what’s already happened. If the Americans leave, then you’ll see greater intervention of Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Syria, supporting their own militias in Iraq and being drawn into battle.
But no matter what, Iraq doesn’t exist anymore. Baghdad will never be in the hands of Sunnis again. Baghdad will be controlled by Shia militias. They’ve been cleansing all the Sunnis from Baghdad. So Sunnis are basically being pushed out of Iraq, period. They can go to the Anbar Province, which isn’t a very friendly place. I think you’ll see that there won’t be any more elections in Iraq. Maliki is the last prime minister Iraq will have for a long time. There is neither the infrastructure for elections anymore, nor the desire to have them, nor the ability of Iraqi groups to cooperate anymore. So what you’ll see is basically Mogadishu in Iraq: various warlords controlling small neighborhoods. And those who are by major resources, such as oil installations, obviously will be foreign-sponsored warlords who will be able to cut deals with us, the Chinese. But Iraq is destroyed, and I think we’ll see that this will spread throughout the region, and this will destabilize Syria, Lebanon and Jordan, as well.

Why US Criticisms of al-Maliki are pretty well useless

2007-08-23T10:16:00.000-07:00

From Sic Semper Tyrannis:

What the clever people in this administration seem to "miss" is that there is no one in Iraq who will do any better at stabilizing the country than Maliki.

We re-made the government on the basis of individual rights and interests but the Iraqis don't function that way. They think of themselves as members of groups, just like the bonzes who burned themselves on the streets of Saigon so long ago.

Maliki knows that his real job is to ensure that the Shia Arabs will be the "overdogs." In his mind he is the defender of Shia rights in Iraq. Someone else would merely be the defender of some other group. There are a few, like Allawi, who think of themselves PRIMARILY as Iraqi, but we saw how well he did at election time. What a disappointment that must have been.

We keep "screwing up" in places like Vietnam and Iraq because we (as a people) do not accept the relevance of history and cultural difference. We insists on believing people are all pretty much the same and that they will behave as we think we would behave. Nonsense. We and another set of peoples have paid the price for that cultural blindness once again.

"Swapping" Maliki for someone else would be pointless. The groups will not share power and wealth amicably. In their minds that is simply arming and equipping one's enemies.

Not to mention that Carl Levin (D-MI) made his comments about the people throwing out Maliki while in Tel Aviv as Juan Cole pointed out. i.e. In the Arab world (American politicians are so f--in dumb) it will be read as the Israeli ("The Jews") are pushing the US to overthrow Maliki.

RIP Micronesians

2007-08-21T09:57:00.002-07:00

Sad story here on the funeral for the three people killed in a Missouri Church recently.

The individuals killed were Micronesians. I spent a year working for the Jesuit Volunteers in Guam (in Micronesia). The victims were Pingelapese (Pingelap Atoll--far right of map). I never made it to that particular island (nor really worked with that sub-Micronesian group, the Ponepeians) but did spend time on other nearby atoll islands with related groups of people.

Sleep with the angels and the ancestors.

Packer on Rove

2007-08-20T16:23:00.001-07:00

Again not clear how much in terms of tone, particularly on foreign policy (not Rove's bag), belongs to Rove. Tough to separate him from Bush. Or Bush from him some would say.

But Rove or not Rove, the point about politicization of the GWOT is the central flaw of this administration. An unforgivable political sin if there every was one. Sure there is always some politics (there are still elections during wartime, ask Lincoln), but the degree with this administration is unprecedented I believe. Different in kind I would go so far as to say.

clipped from www.newyorker.com

Karl Rove’s resignation brought to mind a conversation I had a few weeks ago with an Administration official who genuinely wanted to hear my account of why the Iraq war has gone so badly. In a word, I said, “politics.” At every turn, the White House has tried to use the war, and the larger war on terror, to consolidate power, to reward ideological and political loyalists, to win electoral advantage, to push the Democrats into a corner, to divide the country into patriots and defeatists. President Bush insisted on pursuing a highly partisan domestic agenda rather than unite the country around the war in the spirit of F.D.R. (who said that “Doctor New Deal” had been replaced by “Doctor Win the War”). So many disastrous wartime decisions can be traced back to the original sin: policy mattered less than politics. The message in Washington was more real than anything happening in Iraq.

Juan Cole on "Iran" in Iraq

2007-08-20T10:19:00.001-07:00

Ockham's Razor anyone?

--Like the label "plot device."

The only counter-argument (I guess?) is that the Revolutionary Guards are training Sadr now because Sadr wants the US out and SIIC wants us to stay. Meaning Iran would be switching allies. They are probably playing all sides though. No way though that the Iranians are simply cutting ties with a group they basically built over 2 decades who is now in power.

clipped from www.juancole.com

The US military hasn't found any Iranian trainers in Iraq or any training camps, but like Saddam's weapons of mass destruction, that you can't find them doesn't mean they are not there. What I cannot understand is why the Pentagon needs Iranians in Iraq as a plot device. The Iraqi Badr Corps, tens of thousands strong, was trained by the Iranian Revolutionary Guards, and it has been alleged that some Badr corpsmen are still on the Iranian payroll. It is the paramilitary of the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council, America's chief ally in Iraq. What would the IRGC know that Badr does not? Why bother to send revolutionary guardsmen when the country is thick with Badr fighters anyway (who have all the same training)? I think the US is just embarrassed because Badr is its major ally in Iraq, and Pentagon spokesmen are over-compensating by imagining Iranian training camps inside Iraq.

Truth Telling on Iraq--from Soldiers

2007-08-20T09:09:00.001-07:00

This is one of the best op-eds/pieces on Iraq I've read yet. Written by American soldiers. Maybe the best. Certainly coming from soldiers, it carries a greater weight of legitimacy.

They begin (all emphasis mine):

VIEWED from Iraq at the tail end of a 15-month deployment, the political debate in Washington is indeed surreal. Counterinsurgency is, by definition, a competition between insurgents and counterinsurgents for the control and support of a population. To believe that Americans, with an occupying force that long ago outlived its reluctant welcome, can win over a recalcitrant local population and win this counterinsurgency is far-fetched. As responsible infantrymen and noncommissioned officers with the 82nd Airborne Division soon heading back home, we are skeptical of recent press coverage portraying the conflict as increasingly manageable and feel it has neglected the mounting civil, political and social unrest we see every day.

The authors then detail a recent attack on US forces that clearly had some involvement with the Iraqi Army and/or Police. The Army/Police gave their position to the attackers it would appear.

Their conclusion on the matter:

As many grunts will tell you, this is a near-routine event. Reports that a majority of Iraqi Army commanders are now reliable partners can be considered only misleading rhetoric. The truth is that battalion commanders, even if well meaning, have little to no influence over the thousands of obstinate men under them, in an incoherent chain of command, who are really loyal only to their militias.

Followed by the point echoed by others than while arming the so-called Sunni tribesman works against al-Qaeda in Iraq, it is entirely unclear whether they are in any fashion loyal to the central government (seen as an Iranian proxy).

The counterinsurgency model Petraeus employs is based largely on the British in Malaysia and Kenya (Mau Mau Revolt). In both those instances, the British were brutal beyond the current allowed climate---given YouTube and the climate of the American not to mention Western world attitude.

In other words:

While we have the will and the resources to fight in this context, we are effectively hamstrung because realities on the ground require measures we will always refuse —namely, the widespread use of lethal and brutal force.

Never heard described in pro-surge contexts. Speaking of criticizing propaganda, this nice jab at certain Senators who will remain nameless:

Given the situation, it is important not to assess security from an American-centered perspective. The ability of, say, American observers to safely walk down the streets of formerly violent towns is not a resounding indicator of security. What matters is the experience of the local citizenry and the future of our counterinsurgency. When we take this view, we see that a vast majority of Iraqis feel increasingly insecure and view us as an occupation force that has failed to produce normalcy after four years and is increasingly unlikely to do so as we continue to arm each warring side.

And an equally nice jab at Democrats (and some Senate Republicans):

Coupling our military strategy to an insistence that the Iraqis meet political benchmarks for reconciliation is also unhelpful. The morass in the government has fueled impatience and confusion while providing no semblance of security to average Iraqis. Leaders are far from arriving at a lasting political settlement. This should not be surprising, since a lasting political solution will not be possible while the military situation remains in constant flux.

On the Shia and the political situation:

The qualified and reluctant welcome we received from the Shiites since the invasion has to be seen in that historical context. They saw in us something useful for the moment. Now that moment is passing, as the Shiites have achieved what they believe is rightfully theirs. Their next task is to figure out how best to consolidate the gains, because reconciliation without consolidation risks losing it all. Washington’s insistence that the Iraqis correct the three gravest mistakes we made — de-Baathification, the dismantling of the Iraqi Army and the creation of a loose federalist system of government — places us at cross purposes with the government we have committed to support. Political reconciliation in Iraq will occur, but not at our insistence or in ways that meet our benchmarks. It will happen on Iraqi terms when the reality on the battlefield is congruent with that in the political sphere. There will be no magnanimous solutions that please every party the way we expect, and there will be winners and losers. The choice we have left is to decide which side we will take. Trying to please every party in the conflict — as we do now — will only ensure we are hated by all in the long run.

Their conclusion:

In a lawless environment where men with guns rule the streets, engaging in the banalities of life has become a death-defying act. Four years into our occupation, we have failed on every promise, while we have substituted Baath Party tyranny with a tyranny of Islamist, militia and criminal violence....In the end, we need to recognize that our presence may have released Iraqis from the grip of a tyrant, but that it has also robbed them of their self-respect. They will soon realize that the best way to regain dignity is to call us what we are — an army of occupation — and force our withdrawal. Until that happens, it would be prudent for us to increasingly let Iraqis take center stage in all matters, to come up with a nuanced policy in which we assist them from the margins but let them resolve their differences as they see fit. This suggestion is not meant to be defeatist, but rather to highlight our pursuit of incompatible policies to absurd ends without recognizing the incongruities.

Wow. See if this gets the play it deserves in the press and blogosphere.

Update I: Joe Klein seconds. And says its puts to shame "all the Kristol, McCain, Lieberman, Pollack and O'Hanlon etc etc cheerleading of the past two months."

Update II: While it will certainly get play on the left for its corrective to the pro-surgers, the article is very clear that the Democratic line of timetables/benchmarks for withdrawal is also failed. The article if anything points to Baker-Hamilton, pull back to Kurdistan, and prevent the civil war and bloodshed from within crossing the borders. Or being stoked by others crossing in.

As Barnett says, we have to get out of the mindset of winning the war (or being a defeatist) that is perpetuated from the right and the how fast can we get out attitude from the left. The peace was lost not the war. That is what these soldiers tell. No surge will restore the peace. That opportunity was a one shot deal--we missed it. It's gone, it's never coming back. Time to move on. This is different than defeat. This is simply accepting reality as opposed to assuming one can simply by military might & rhetoric make reality (that Bush is such a conservative postmodernist---very Foucaultian).

fantastic

2007-08-18T22:11:00.001-07:00

The middle paragraph is the key one--you have to actually think about the consequences of laws and their meaning before legislating them based on the executive branch playing politics with the terrorism trump card.

clipped from www.nytimes.com

Broad new surveillance powers approved by Congress this month could allow the Bush administration to conduct spy operations that go well beyond wiretapping to include — without court approval — certain types of physical searches on American soil and the collection of Americans’ business records, Democratic Congressional officials and other experts said.

The dispute illustrates how lawmakers, in a frenetic, end-of-session scramble, passed legislation they may not have fully understood and may have given the administration more surveillance powers than it sought.

It also offers a case study in how changing a few words in a complex piece of legislation has the potential to fundamentally alter the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, a landmark national security law. The new legislation is set to expire in less than six months; two weeks after it was signed into law, there is still heated debate over how much power Congress gave to the president.

Good Move by Obama

2007-08-18T21:33:00.000-07:00

From Marc Ambinder (the under-rated):

Frustrated with the volume of interest group forums and non-party sponsored debates, Sen. Barack Obama's campaign manager has put his foot down: Obama won't attend any more debates that aren't sanctioned by the Democratic National Committee, and he won't accept any more invitations to speak at candidate forums.

In a memo the campaign will post on its website shortly, campaign manager David Plouffe writes that Obama has already spoken at 19 different candidate forums and has participated in seven full debates and is committed to attending a total of fifteen debates.

"Unfortunately, we simply cannot run the kind of campaign we want and need to, engaging with voters in the early states and February 5, if our schedule is dictated by dozens of forums and debates," Plouffe writes. "Ultimately, the one group left out of the current schedule is the voters and they are the ones who ask the toughest questions and most deserve to have those questions answered face to face."

Screw these things. I'm so sick and tired of Democratic one-issue interest groups and their disproportionate influence in primaries.

Which leaves Obama to do the one truly radical thing to do--accept Newt's invitation to a renewed Lincoln-Douglas Debates. For the man who announced his candidacy at Lincoln's old stomping grounds, he is the perfect one to do it.

He does poorly in quick 30 second-1 minute debates. He needs to time to get through his thoughts, lay out his vision, and it would help bring back his charm factor.

Mahdi/Mafia Army

2007-08-18T16:37:00.000-07:00

This article gives a penetrating glimpse into the reality of Baghdad and the rise (and future) of the Mahdi Army.

From the article:

The Hurriyah neighborhood of northwest Baghdad, gripped by a spasm of deadly
ethnic violence a year ago, has grown markedly calmer over the past eight months. It is now the kind of area that both U.S. and Iraqi officials point to when they cite progress at stabilizing Baghdad. But only Shiites are welcome — or safe — in Hurriyah these days. And neither Iraq's government nor U.S. or Iraqi security forces are truly in control. Instead, the Mahdi Army militia runs this area as it does others across Baghdad — manning checkpoints, collecting rental fees for apartments, licensing bus drivers, mediating family fights and even handing out gas for cooking.
The U.S. Army still runs regular patrols, sometimes on foot, sometimes by Humvee. And Iraqi police, on the streets, are nominally in charge. But underneath the calm, an armed group hostile to the United States holds a firm grip on power. Some fear the Mahdi Army is simply biding its time — eager to grab outward control and run things its way whenever U.S. forces pull back.

And how to it get this way--two words: ethnic cleansing...

Until late 2005, Hurriyah was a relatively safe, working-class community of Sunnis and Shiites. The first signs of trouble began that year, when gunmen from a Sunni extremist group began abducting and killing Shiites. In early 2006, Mahdi Army militiamen from their base in nearby Sadr City — about seven miles to the east — set up an office in Hurriyah's main outdoor market, promising Shiites protection. Last fall, fliers went up, warning that 10 Sunnis would die for every Shiite killed. As a wave of Sunni car bomb attacks on Shiites killed hundreds across Baghdad, reprisal attacks on Sunnis steadily escalated. Throughout the fall, dozens of bodies turned up each day in Hurriyah and other neighborhoods. By late November, Sunni mosques in Hurriyah were being attacked, never yet to reopen. U.S. troops came under frequent sniper fire. Schools closed. By early December, almost all Sunnis had fled Hurriyah, except for a handful of elderly Sunnis, and the Mahdi Army was running several checkpoints. By March, Shiites who had been displaced elsewhere were moving into Hurriyah, taking the shops and apartments of Sunnis who had fled.

The Iraqi Army is not going to control the streets in these neighborhoods. The Mahdi Army is running things mafia style and when police/army is weaker than Mafia, then Mafia buys Army and Police. Because otherwise the Army and Police know they will be targets.

Gang on gang warfare. The cleansing is already over---the Sunnis have basically lost. Train the tribesman to fight AQ, prevent the Turks and Saudis from joining in, let the Shia gangs fight each other and get outta the way. People are going to die. The new order is going to be ruthless. Not that the old one wasn't. But the streets are where the power is--not the Green Zone of dithering politicos.

Nominee: Best Opening Line to Pop Song

2007-08-18T11:43:00.000-07:00

On those Shia militias

2007-08-18T10:45:00.000-07:00

And Iran again.

Good piece from Mark Kukis in Time asking how accurate are US military claims of Iran being behind all the Shia death squads and the recent claims (totally unsubstantiated so far as I've seen) that Shia militias now kill more than Sunnis in Baghdad. If that were true, and I'm not highly skeptical that it is, it would only prove that Baghdad has been ethnically cleansed and the war is already over. The Baghdad phase of the war that is. The Arab-Turkomen vs. Kurd showdown looms. The Mahdi Army vs. SIIC in Basra, Southern Iran, intra-Shia death match looms. The intra-Sunni fight continues (tribes vs. AQI).

But this claim of 75% of casualties from Shia seems on face dubious.

Kukis:

Iran, while denying the charge, makes no secret of its interest in shaping events in neighboring Iraq. And few doubt that Tehran offers some support to the country's leading Shi'ite militias, the Mahdi Army of cleric Moqtada al-Sadr and the Badr Brigade. But how deeply is Iran really involved in Iraq's violence? The answer remains elusive, even to U.S. officials who firmly believe the worst.

Kukis then quotes Kevin Bergner, a Dick Cheneyite, who discusses the US accusation of Shia leaders being trained by the Quds Force in Iran (with help from Hezbollah).

Then this line:

The veracity of these claims is unknowable, however, since the Americans have offered no solid proof to support their allegations.

That's no as zero, zilch, nada.

All that has seemingly been proved is that elements that have broken off from Sadr's control (rogue Mahdi Army) have been trained in Iran. Meaning they are probably more criminal, gang lord type guys.

Nor has it been proved that the EFP (Explosively Formed Projectiles) could not be manufactured in Iraq. i.e. Sunnis could be using them too. Or Shia without Iranian help. Once they enter the market, let's say they did first come from Iran, then why couldn't they be replicated locally? Anybody could be doing this inside Iran on the black market, doesn't have to be the gov't or their army/revolutionary guards but even they might be rogue elements to the gov't.

For all this talk aside, it would seem, the US' main enemy in Iraq are Baath, Sunni jihadists, etc. The Sunni insurgency in other words.

Bourne Ultimatum

2007-08-18T10:30:00.001-07:00

Saw the film last night. Highly recommend it. A little distorting with the hand-held cameras, but I liked that. (Chloe did not).

Spoiler Alert--not much detail, but some. So be warned.

The movie is the first in the series to really tackle the post 9/11 security world. Bourne is tracing his life back to the beginning and finds out he is part of an "experimental training" program.

We see him waterboarded and fitted with the famous black hoods of Abu Ghraib.

Pamela Landey (Joan Allen) from the Bourne Supremacy returns. She ends up in an intra-CIA tussle with Noah Vosen (David Straitharn). Vosen represents the "new" breed of CIA: with him comes black sites, Rendition, secret executions. Landey is the rep. for the old style, play by the rules espionage crowd.

Landey asks Vosen after he (Vosen) has ordered a hit on CIA Nikki Parsons (Julia Styles): "when does it end?" Vosen answers---"when we are victorious."

And that to me was the real question, the real point the movie was poking and proding? What is victory in all this? Is there a time whenever "we" are "victorious". Bourne himself has to come to grips with his own participation (guilt?) in this new reality.

It is not as dark or dystopic as say Children of Men. We see a glimpse of a transparent government cracking down on its own rogue elements and embracing its side of higher angels.

There is this strange mixture, that the movie captures well, of both the brutal and clinical efficiency of say the water-boarding and the ghost sites and black ops, but how inefficient, how ham-handed and ignorant the people behind these orders are (Vosen). All he keeps doing is wanting to destroy, kill, and end opposition. No thought of who gets hurt in the process, and whether such individuals would later themselves become a liability. The press is targeted in this movie--literally.

It's an interesting glimpse at (one construction of) the man behind the curtain. And like Oz, he is not so great and all powerful for all his technological mastery/wizardry. He remains a fallible human nonetheless.

"New New" Strategy

2007-08-18T10:28:00.001-07:00

Anyone surprised by this? Ask yourself--is this actually a new strategy? Or if you prefer, is it actually a different goal? Is the goal achievable, new strategy (er tactic) or not?

--If Congressional Republicans go lock-step for this (if Bush calls their bluff iow), then expect them to suffer historic defeats in Congressional '08 elections.

clipped from www.nytimes.com

WASHINGTON, Aug. 17 — The White House plans to use a report next month assessing progress in Iraq to outline a plan for gradual troop reductions beginning next year that would fall far short of the drawdown demanded by Congressional opponents of the war, according to administration and military officials.

One administration official made it clear that the goal of the planned announcement was to counter public pressure for a more rapid reduction and to try to win support for a plan that could keep American involvement in Iraq on “a sustainable footing” at least through the end of the Bush presidency.

The officials said the White House would portray its approach as a new strategy for Iraq, a message aimed primarily at the growing numbers of Congressional Republicans who have criticized President Bush’s handling of the war.

China brings sub-Sahar Africa to Modernity

2007-08-18T10:21:00.000-07:00

Further proof, via NyTimes on Chinese entrepreneurs in Africa. (Hint: Won't be another Concert for Africa that will).

These numbers should make your eyes bug out of your head (my emphasis):

Stories like this have become legion across Africa in the past five years or so, as hundreds of thousands of Chinese have discovered the continent, setting off to do business in a part of the world that had been terra incognita. The Xinhua News Agency recently estimated that at least 750,000 Chinese were working or living for extended periods on the continent, a reflection of deepening economic ties between China and Africa that reached $55 billion in trade in 2006, compared with less than $10 million a generation earlier.

Who do you think al-Qaeda in Africa is going to start targeting? Who is going to feel the inevitable anti-modern, anti-globalization backlash---answer the Chinese. Who is the natural ally?

Iraq as Neo-Spanish Civil War

2007-08-18T10:15:00.001-07:00

clipped from www.msnbc.msn.com

The insurgents in Iraq have perfected a new way of war. America is still the world's greatest superpower, and the U.S. military's capacity to take out a moving vehicle using a drone piloted from half the world away should still provoke a little shock and awe. But the IED—cheap, easy to make and adapt, and deadly—has in its own way proved equally powerful. The bombs have bled the U.S. military in Iraq. And thanks to the ubiquitous videos of IED attacks shot by insurgents and put up on YouTube, they will be credited with driving us out of the country whenever we do leave. Guerrillas, even armies, elsewhere are watching: most of the world's conventional militaries would be vulnerable to similar tactics. Already, locally made devices have begun appearing on battlefields from Somalia to Thailand to Pakistan.

Where in the World is Rick Santorum?

2007-08-17T13:52:00.001-07:00

For all those of you out there who are secretly hankering for a Rick Santorum update (and you know who you are), here it is via American Conservative.

--When invading Iran doesn't work, then the next next great enemy after Hussein and now the Ayatollahs will be Venezuela and Russia (check the article for details).

clipped from www.amconmag.com

After taking the worst thumping in the contested Senate races, he seemed destined to disappear. But instead of cashing in at a lobbying firm or cruising on his reputation through the conservative dinner circuit, the senator embraced the war issue. Now he is building support for regime change in Iran among social conservatives and reframing the war on terror into a much larger conflict that stretches back over a millennium. In his right hand, he holds a growing list of America’s enemies, and he’s reading off their names to everyone who will listen—at think tanks, on Christian radio, and perhaps soon at a theater near you.

I Heart Huckabee

2007-08-17T11:35:00.001-07:00

On my theme of a dual track presidency--one foreign policy, one domestic--Mike Huckabee would be a good candidate for domestic president. I like his style and his demeanor/personality, even if I don't agree with all his policies.

But he doesn't demonize. He could work across party lines. A Sam's Club Republican would make a very good domestic president in my opinion. I like his linking (from the rising evangelical world) of poverty and environment with traditional life and moral conservative issues. Far as I know though, Huckabee has no foreign policy cred.

My foreign policy pres would I guess be Biden. Biden-Huckabee in '08?

Nobody quite has the all the pieces.

--Biden seems to me to have the sanest (least worst) option in Iraq
--Obama has correctly put Pakistan and Afghanistan back into view. Particularly not wedding our Pakistani policy to Musharraf himself.
--Giuliani sees Long War and need for SysAdmin.
--Dodd has been clearest on harm done to Justice Dept. and Rule of Law by Bush.
--Clinton has made clear she won't have US policy hijacked by Taiwan (acting as if they can declare independence and no matter we'll have their back against China).

Update: Forgot about Huck's "I don't believe in evolution" answer. On the Colbert show he said he believed in "devolution"---that is looking at Congress he has seen humans become like monkeys. Funny (accurate possibly) but doesn't answer the question. If it's his own personal thing and he wouldn't use the platform to push for intelligent design curriculum that's not the best but allright I guess.

tags technorati : Mike Huckabee

Yazidis and the Original Religion of the Near East

2007-08-17T11:17:00.001-07:00

The horrific bombing in the Kurdish regions around Kirkuk (death toll estimates currently at 400) targeted the Yazidis, a smallish Kurdish (but non-Muslim) sect. The Ys tended to separate themselves from the Peshmerge (the Kurdish military), which likely resulted in their being left vulnerable to this brutal attack. (For interviews with some Yazidis, here via BBC).

Who are theologically the Yazidis?

For repeat readers, they will know I support the (somewhat) controversial thesis of Christian scholar Margaret Barker (known as Royal Temple Theology).

Barker's first work is titled The Older Testament. A brilliant way to describe her point of view--namely that the Judaism that comes across in the Hebrew Bible we currently have has been massively (re)edited, more than most scholars will admit, by the Deuteronomic/Rabbinic schools of Judaism.

The Older Testament (as opposed to the "Old Testament" of the Deutro. school) included the belief in two g/Gods. The first was the High God (El, Elyon) who had "sons" (angelic beings). Each angel, known as an angel of the nation, was chosen for a specific people. As above so below. i.e. When their was war on earth between two peoples, their angels were fighting in heaven. Hence all the Psalms rousing YHWH (Israel's Angel/god) to fight.

The second G/god then is YHWH for Israel. The second God can manifest/appear either in angelic form (i.e. pillar of cloud leading the Israelites through the Desert) or in human-form, a la the three visitors to Abraham, who he recognized as angels and worshiped.

The Yazidis are called "Satanists" by certain Muslims and Christians in Iraq because they are said to worship an "angel." In other words, the Yazidis are the modern day practicioners of this essentially ancient (Older) Near Eastern religion. The "original" Judaism. Or the original religion from which likely most, if not all, Eastern religions descend. Including Islam by the way, given that Islam considers itself to be returning to the original religion of Abraham.

The charge of Satanism then sadly way off. Because Yazidis are actually following the basic

Christianity replicates this "second God" structure by having the Father be El/Elyon the unnameable high God and Christ (incarnate in Jesus) being the second God, the God of the "Christians".

The dangerous trend of this system, no doubt, (Jesus=High Priest) is that Jesus is an Angel and not really human....called Docetism or Gnosticism when it becomes a heresy.

It's a kind of pluralistic monotheism. There is only one High God for everyone. And only one mediator, second God for each group. One angel/god per nation. But multiple one way mediations. This model splits the difference between syncretism (bad merging of too many paths/angels) and fundamentalist exclusivism (our mediation path as only path).

tags technorati : yazidis

Cole on "New" Iraqi Gov't Coalition

2007-08-17T11:15:00.001-07:00

clipped from www.juancole.com

I think one hope of the American authorities that encouraged this coalition was that if they could dissociated al-Maliki from Muqtada al-Sadr and his Mahdi Army, that would make him more palatable to the Sunni Arabs. This calculation may have been incorrect.

If al-Maliki moves away from Muqtada, he is more dependent on the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council (SIIC), which the Sunni Arabs code as an Iranian organization, and on its Badr Corps paramilitary, which the Sunni Arabs accuse of engaging in death squad activity and ethnic cleansing of Sunnis.

Moreover, SIIC is dedicated to two political principles that are anathema to the Sunni Arabs. One is that US troops should remain in Iraq for as long as they are needed and the second is that a Shiite super-province should be formed in the south, on analogy to the Kurdistan Regional Government.

tags technorati : al maliki

tags technorati : iraq

tags technorati : supreme islamic iraqi council

Biden-Gelb Gets a Supporter

2007-08-17T11:11:00.000-07:00

In the Fund for Peace, non-partisan Washington Think Tank. Wants devolution to three state-lets in Iraq, monitored by UN. Story here from WAPO.

Michael Isikoff on Jose Padilla

2007-08-17T10:36:00.001-07:00

Most balanced piece I've seen yet on the subject.

I'm open to the argument that the question of trans-national combatants (non-identified with any nation-state) does not work within the framework of nation-state law. I think we should make sure that is the case before immediately jumping to the conclusion, a la this administration, that it is not.

Someone like Padilla, who was clearly, whatever else he may or may not have been, not a leading light of the al-Qaeda movement (if he was at all connected with them).

If it is true, that nation-state systems are not currently built to handle, let's say the higher "ups", the most dangerous terrorists, than I think the obvious solution is the ICC. That will immediately get some people's nerves up (on both left and right)--fearing loss of sovereignty and/or questions of transparency and democratic checks. The parallel for me is Nuremburg.

I'd rather than "rendition" to governments we know will torture and/or use of our own black sites (e.g. Eastern Europe) to do the torturing ourselves. For low-level recruits, I think the US justice system could work. I don't see any proof from the Padilla case that terrorists gained massive insight into our surveillance, police, or military defense systems.

What the Padilla case point is how corrosive the enemy combatant Bush/John Woo model has been (extended quotes--my emphasis):

Defense lawyers for Padilla are almost certain to appeal, including challenging the core question of whether their client was competent to stand trial in the first place. For three and half years after being declared an “enemy combatant” by President Bush, Padilla was held incommunicado in a barren nine-by-seven-foot cell in a military brig in Charleston, S.C. He was cut off from all contact with the outside world (including his own defense lawyers) and subjected to unusually harsh treatment that would never have been permitted if he had been a normal defendant—including allegedly bombarding him with loud noises, keeping his cell at extreme temperatures and other techniques designed to break down his defenses and force him to talk.

The techniques apparently worked. Padilla eventually confessed to joining Al Qaeda even as he denied some of the more sensational claims—about planning to set off a dirty bomb—that U.S. government officials once made against him. (The government was never able to use his statements in court because they were obtained through extraconstitutional means.) But the impact of the U.S. military’s interrogation techniques left him, according to the testimony of two mental-health professionals hired by his lawyers, so psychologically traumatized that he feared talking to anyone, including his own lawyers (who he apparently suspected might be government agents trying to spy on him).

Throughout his trial, the high-profile defendant sat impassively, barely speaking a word and showing not the slightest reaction (or even comprehension) of any of the evidence being presented by the government against him. “It was almost like he was a piece of the furniture,” said one courtroom participant, who asked not to be publicly identified talking about the defendant. When the jury verdict was read today, Padilla—dressed in a dark suit—watched the proceedings intently, but once again said nothing and showed no emotion.

The verdict leaves open the wisdom—and constitutionality—of the decision by the White House to first declare Padilla an enemy combatant, a move that arguably stands as the single most audacious act of the Bush presidency in the war on terror...

As an enemy combatant, who Bush said posed a “continuing, present and grave danger” to the country, Padilla was to be held indefinitely without being charged with a crime or given any right to defend himself while the U.S military interrogated him. It was only three years later, fearing that the Supreme Court would declare the president’s move unconstitional, that the President Bush signed an order transferring Padilla back to the custody of the Justice Department and paving the way for him to be indicted and finally tried in a court of law.
In one sense, the jury’s verdict is a welcome shot in the arm for a Justice Department that has been demoralized of late both by legal setbacks in other terrorism cases and the continued tribulations of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales. But while seeming to vindicate the administration’s initial claims that Josè Padilla was indeed a dangerous man, the jury verdict could also bolster arguments that the same result could have been achieved from the start by simply keeping him within the criminal-justice system and treating him like a normal terrorism defendant—without making the extraordinary claims of executive power that the White House did in declaring a U.S. citizen an enemy combatant.

And what by the way is "extra-constitutional?" Is that different from illegal?

tags technorati : jose padilla

Rudy's Foreign Policy

2007-08-17T10:22:00.001-07:00

Good summary of Rudy Giuliani's recent Foreign Affairs article outlining the basics of his foreign policy. Summary by Philip Klein in the American Spectator here. The text of Rudy's article here. (For a dissenting, dismissive view of Rudy's piece, Fred Kaplan in Slate).

On the plus side (by my lights) for Giuliani:
--Wants to add a tone of realism while not abandoning a more idealistic goal
--Realizes the threat is to the international system (not just the US)
--Calls it a Long War.
--Has pointed to the need for better diplomacy and public relations/media interface (Bush gets an F- in this field)
--And is the candidate who most clearly understands Barnett's point about needing a SysAdministration Force (a blended military/security/humanitarian aid/engineering force)
--Possible Nixon (in terms of foreign policy): could head the cred to deal with the Palestinians (given his long standing Israeli support) and/or Iran.

Major negative with Giuliani for me:
--His emphasis on not showing weakness. He cites Lebanon in 1982 (rise of Hezbollah). In other words, he is for long term occupation of Iraq. Which to me misses one of the key points of Iraq....creating petri dishes for more and more complex jihad. [True that it is also a petri dish for American military learning of counterinsurgency to some degree, not sure they are equal in scope though].
--Tendency towards the equation of all groups as Islamo-fascist (like al-Qaeda and Baath in Iraq)...Kaplan's point.
--Possible Nixon (in terms of rule-bending).

tags technorati : rudy giuliani

tags technorati : terrorism

tags technorati : Long War

Mr. Feiler Goes to Washington

2007-08-16T14:17:00.001-07:00

Interesting post from Bruce on his meeting with the President in the White House.

Like All Good Dictators

2007-08-16T13:19:00.001-07:00

clipped from www.nytimes.com

CARACAS, Venezuela, Aug. 15 — President Hugo Chávez outlined a proposed overhaul to the Constitution on Wednesday night that would allow him to remain in power indefinitely through perpetual re-elections, an intensification of his efforts to assert greater state control over political and economic institutions.

Warning: Photo of Dead Child

2007-08-16T12:02:00.000-07:00

Photo by AFP/Getty Images

An Iraqi man mourns over the dead body of his son who was killed in a roadside bomb explosion in the restive city of Baquba, 30 miles northeast of Baghdad, today.

--As a reminder, whatever side a person is on, this is tragic and, like the the Rosary meditation, a sorrowful mystery.

Photo of the 80% Solution

2007-08-16T11:54:00.000-07:00

Mohammed Sawaf/AFP/Getty

BAGHDAD, IRAQ - AUGUST 16: Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, second from left, and President Jalal Talabani, second from right, are flanked by the leader of the northern autonomous Kurdish region, Massoud Barzani, left, shaking hands with Shiite Vice President Adel Abdel Mehdi (SIIC).

--Kurds and Shia. No Sunnis. (Article here IraqSlogger)

Actually much less than 80%---no Sadr.

Why Daily Kos is the Left Wing Version of National Review

2007-08-15T21:39:00.001-07:00

Harold Ford and Markos Moulitsas debated on Meet the Press last week. Can't find the link to the episode now--snippets on the Meet the Press site.

Ford represented the DLC (Democratic Leadership Council), the "moderate"/"centrist" wing of the Democratic Party. Moulitsas, of DailyKos, representing the left wing of the party.

Ford was hamstrung I think by having to speak always on behalf of the DLC. It would have been better if were just him. Readers now that I think he is one of the really clearer-thinking and future thinking politicians out there. My views are actually much closer to Ford's than say Obama's.

The thing with Kos is that it is a movement group. Which is why I often find them so vomit-inducing.

As Jonathan Chait points out in this (overall right imo) article for TNR, the Netroots' closest parallel and their most obvious mentors are not 1960s New Left nor 1980s Mario Cuomo and Walter Mondale Liberals, but the National Review, Grover Norquist----movement conservatives.

Here's Chait:

The most significant fact of American political life over the last three decades is that there is a conservative movement and there has not been a liberal movement. Liberalism, to be sure, has all the component parts that conservatism has: think tanks, lobbying groups, grassroots activists, and public intellectuals. But those individual components, unlike their counterparts on the conservative side, do not see one another as formal allies and don't consciously act in concert. If you asked a Heritage Foundation fellow or an editorial writer for The Wall Street Journal how his work fits into the movement, he would immediately understand that you meant the conservative movement. If you asked the same question of a Brookings Institute fellow or a New York Times editorial writer, he would have no idea what you were talking about.
The netroots have begun to change all that. Its members are intensely aware of their connection to each other and their place in relation to the Democratic Party. The word "movement" itself--once rare among mainstream liberals--is a regular feature of their discourse. They call themselves "the people-powered movement," or "the progressive movement," or, often, simply "the movement."

More Chait:

The netroots look upon this great right-wing apparatus with unconcealed envy. Traditionally, to the extent that movements exist on the left, they have been dispersed among single-issue organizations--environmentalists, labor unions, pro-choice activists--that mobilize only when their own pet issues are on the agenda. This piecemeal structure leaves each component group fighting solo battles against a large and cohesive coalition. Also, since there are political issues that do not directly affect the single-issue groups, it leaves swaths of liberal territory unguarded.

The netroots are scornful of single-issue liberal groups--or, really, any liberals at all who are not wholly dedicated to the cause of Democratic victory. As Stoller has written on MyDD, "To the extent that I have a political hero, it's probably Grover Norquist, not Ralph Nader." The netroots' dream is of a liberal army of grassroots activists, pundits, policy wonks, and politicians all marching more or less in lockstep.

Actually while I don't share the same reasons as the Kossacks, for the attack on single-issue Democratic voter-blocks, I hope they are at least partially successful. I'm not a fan of single-issue blocks (e.g. teacher's unions) and their excessive (and in my view usually negative) influence on Democratic primaries. Particularly Presidential ones. As a registered independent, in a state where you can't vote in the primaries unless you are registered in the party, then I'm not happy that those bozos end up choosing the candidates (from both parties) I have to decide between.

The key point Chait makes as far as I'm concerned is the following. Movement conservatism allowed criticism from further right but never to the left. You could criticize say Bush on immigration from the right but not say Bush on torture from the left/middle. Not that it's wrong, but you're outta the club (e.g. Sullivan, Bruce Bartlett, John Dean).

Same with the Kossacks. You can criticize any of the Democrats for not being liberal enough, but criticize from their right (center, center-left) and expect their fury, derision, and ostracization (Ford).

Because for movement conservatives and liberals, those kinds of criticisms will be used by the other side. Liberals quote Andrew Sullivan on torture against other conservatives to say "not all conservatives follow this policy, so I'm not anti-conservative just rational" for example. Just as every right wing voice (from Bill Kristol on the Daily Show to the Pres) quotes O'Hanlon and Pollack's op-ed on the surge because they are Democrats.

In the sense that Kos is basically a liberal mirror-image of say Grover Norquist conservatives, then it was a necessary happening. (The Green value system had no political vehicle prior to Kos). It was bound to create its own "bizzaro" Superman, as it were. Like matter and anti-matter. As a pattern and structure in terms of strategies, (ab)use of information, and the rest. Not necessarily political or philosophical complexity/depth.

The think-tanks, boat cruises, media outlets, dinner parties and all the rest of the movement conservatives was (in part) to wall conservatives off. Cradle to grave almost Catholic ghetto like. The key was never to be ostracized. The netroots are busy creating a parallel insular ghetto on the left.

The strongest piece of evidence to support Chait's claims is the "Bible" of the Kos Universe (to the degree they have any philosophical reflection....not much in my estimation): George Lakoff's Don't Think of An Elephant.

A bruising and brilliant critique of the work by RadicalMiddle author Mark Satin here.

Lakoff's book reduces all American to either of two "frames" (based on childhood experience): strict parent or nurturing parent. Conservatives obviously are from the first, progressives the second. (As if strict parents might not also be loving? Or nurturing parents not too loose with the rules?).

For Lakoff any move to the middle is inherently creating conceptual confusion. The point is to cement one's base (stick to the left wing of the Demo. Party) and then battle down everything conservative and force the "middle" to the progressive cause. Because just like movement conservatives, Lakoff (with no support) believes America is inherently progressive. The only thing that stops a progressive win is the vast right-wing conspiracy--(just as movement conservatives have their "political activist judges" and "liberal biased MSM" and their repeated claims that the US is inherently conservative).

Lakoff's simplistic reductionist analysis is the Kos philosophy writ large. And its sad but I guess necessary for it must come forward in a way and then gain some measure of power (hopefully not too much, their Green Inquisition is painful to behold, let alone feel the wrath of) so that they fail (as they inevitably will because their policies and thinking are based on a first-tier system). Once they fail as the movement conservatives have failed, then hopefully the country will be ready to move to a third position. Taking the good points from across the spectrum, jettisoning this all/nothing party mentality.

Scruton (with help from Girard) on New Atheism

2007-08-15T11:09:00.000-07:00

Saw and read this article by Roger Scruton (hat tip: DailyGoose) on Rene Girard. (Actually the article ranges over a number of topics, many well argued, and then focuses towards the tail end on Girard. I'm only going to focus on Girard for this post...I think Scruton's depiction of Girard is in essentials correct.)

Girard (his wiki is good) was famous (infamous?) for his theory of scapegoating and its role in diminishing violence rather than in increasing it. Scruton uses this to point out that the brand of New Atheists has missed this point completely, saying in effect religion is the cause of all evil.

Here is how Scruton summarizes Girard (good summary):

And like Nietzsche, Girard sees the primeval condition of society as one of conflict. It is in the effort to resolve this conflict that the experience of the sacred is born. This experience comes to us in many forms—religious ritual, prayer, tragedy—but its true origin is in acts of communal violence. Primitive societies are invaded by "mimetic desire," as rivals struggle to match each other's social and material acquisitions, so heightening antagonism and precipitating the cycle of revenge. The solution is to identify a victim, one marked by fate as outside the community and therefore not entitled to vengeance against it, who can be the target of the accumulated bloodlust, and who can bring the chain of retribution to an end. Scapegoating is society's way of recreating "difference" and so restoring itself. By uniting against the scapegoat, people are released from their rivalries and reconciled. Through his death, the scapegoat purges society of its accumulated violence. The scapegoat's resulting sanctity is the long-term echo of the awe, relief and visceral re-attachment to the community that was experienced at his death.

Now regarding Girard's theories (memetic desire, scapegoating), I do not think he is wrong just not the final truth on the matter.

Continue Reading

Because, among other things, Girard veers towards a kind of anthropological reductionism towards religion. He does not go as far in that direction as say Emile Durkheim, but he is heading that way I think. Girard sees himself more as theologian, but his writings leave open a reductionistic trend I think. He is not, but it's to see how one could easily take his writings in that light (Scruton as example?).

But by using Girard to counter New Atheism, Scruton only gets it half-right (and half-wrong) imo.

There's no doubt, a la Girard and Scruton, that violence is inherent in ancient societies, in life itself frankly. But brutally so in the ancient world. Bob Godwin has chartered child abuse across the centuries (and in currently premodern societies) and it is tragically high.

Girard is also right that the scapegoat did in fact release some of this violence/tension within the group, thereby creating/re-creating the sense of "self" by the creation of an Other. Self and Other, like left and right hands, are mutually interdependent. The key is to grow both in self and realization of expanding others. Until the final realization which transcends and includes all selfhood and otherhood notions, because the Ultimate/Godhead is neither self nor other nor both nor neither (to quote Nagarjuna).

The source of the conflict however is deeper than Girard ever realized--hence his slide towards reductionism. (Emphasis on slide). The deeper source, so says the mystical tradition (which I am going to call in at this point to counter Girard) is that the communal violence, the memetic desire, etc. are themselves only symptoms of the deeper dis-ease. Namely the inherent contraction that is the self-sense and the un-reality of the Relative truth (alone).

The Atman Project. The inability to face the final annihilation (per identity not literal body) of the self-sense. In that sense, Girard is very close to the Nondual with his writings on the Crucifixion as a Icon, as a Gaze, Christ as one who gets the "game" and makes himself the scapegoat, healing everybody else. But it goes a layer deeper (from the Nondual state): we are to become Christ on the cross. We have to willingly accept the crucifixion of our own selfhood and rise into Absolute Awakened state. Where the Redemption has always already occurred. We must become, like Christ, a sacrifice.

[And in that sense I'm more with oddly Georges Bataille than Girard. Bataille said that the only really real religious impulse is sacrifice. Bataille didn't quite understand from whence that is true, which drove him insane, but he got the right idea.]

Now back to Scruton and the New Atheism. Scruton (via Girard) is right that the scapegoating mechanism did release tension/diminish violence in the ancient context. And created a larger communal self sense.

However if you read which groups this scapegoating applies to it is clans and tribes. Purple and (more significantly) red in Spiral terms. Or hunter-gatherer and early horticulturalists.

The scapegoating then reduced purple and red violence but helped create the blue structure, which then brought about a new wave of violence on the earth. The blue wave creates a meta-identity of trans-tribalism, a People. But that group now becomes locked into civilizational conflict (Huntington) which is the history of the classical periods. It creates Empires that must convert the world to its form of Rule in order to bring peace. A la Caesar: military victory/conquest then Peace.

Only orange-modernity with its multiplistic capacity allowed multiple civilizations to exist without inherent conflict between them. Multiplistic because it recognizes multiples (multiple civilizations) but leans towards one: modernity. Which historically was more equated with Western Europe but is more and more an embrace of the trans-national economic and political infrastructure of WTO, etc.

The New Atheists when they criticize religion generally (esp. Harris, Hitchens) point to mythic-blue violence. Crusades, Jihads, Inquisitions, ultra-Zionism (religious or secular),
Hinduization/Sanskritization in India, etc.

So Scruton is right that the New Atheists don't take into account the other half of the story which is traditional religion diminished violence (by using violence let us remember in many cases of actual human sacrifice, better when performed and not actually enacted). But Scruton has missed that the New Atheists (as orange) still have a point: religion is still the cause of violence (blue).

The (seeming) paradox is: scapegoating religion both diminished one kind of violence (tribal red) but increased another (mythic blue). Girard only points to the former; New Atheists to the latter.

The New Atheists are right that entry into the modern world overall reduces violence---it reduces mythic blue violence. It then creates another set of violence (orange violence): ecological destruction, devastation of traditional cultures, spread of criminality, black markets, etc. What New Atheists won't recognize is there is a way into modernity (on equal footing in terms of depth) that is religious and need not be Atheist. [But with Steven Pinker, overall violence goes down in the modern world---not to mention most of the violence is pre-modern values using modern weaponry and technology. Habermas' dialectic of progress].

By not realizing Scruton's (and Girard) point though that religion diminishes tribal violence (Roman Catholic Church converted the Germanic "barbarians" and Vikings btw), New Atheists by their total one-sided attack on (traditional) religion, end up helping to foster a re-animated tribalism. A revived red across the planet. Or worse purple. Although I hear that Dawkins is after New Agers now, meaning he's crushing purple too, leaving beige I suppose.

The key as always is to create a way in which blue can do what blue is meant to do--keep a lip on red violence, build identity beyond tribes--and yet not become fixated or attack higher moral/value structures.

Russian Nazi Jihadis?

2007-08-15T09:59:00.000-07:00

This is very scary (from NyTimes):

MOSCOW, Aug. 14 — The Russian authorities said Tuesday that they were investigating a video recording of what appeared to be the grisly execution of two bound and gagged young men, filmed in a forest beneath a large Nazi flag. At least one of the men was beheaded on camera as he lay in a shallow grave.
The video, which appeared Sunday on several Russian ultranationalist Web sites, circulated on the Internet with a note from a previously unknown organization calling itself the National-Socialist Party of Russia. The note announced that a “military vanguard” had begun an armed struggle against “black colonists and those who support them from the Russian government.”
It demanded the expulsion from Russia of all Asians and people from the Caucasus and the granting of independence to all of Russia’s internal republics in the Caucasus.
The note also called for the resignation of President Vladimir V. Putin and the establishment of a government formed by Dmitri G. Rumyantsev, the leader of the National-Socialist Society, a neo-Nazi group.

The jihadi reference is due to the "invention" (as horrible as it is to use that word) of the Youtube execution genre by (I believe) Zarqawi and his crew. That meme tragically appears to have spread. [Unless we give the credit to the Mafia with snuff films]. Gruesome.

We've certainly seen Russian ultra-nationalism growing in strength, but more of that is pro-Putin (and anti-Nazi...giving the history of how many Russians died from the Nazis and how the victory over the Nazis is a crowning glory of Russian and formerly Soviet military and national history).

fighting guards

2007-08-15T09:54:00.001-07:00

Cheney wants a strike on Tehran. But what for now Bush seems to have done is split the Condi/Cheney difference. He is going to fight "Iranian" elements ("interdict") in Iraq and Afghanistan (if indeed they are there). Now this spreads the Revolutionary Guard to an almost trans-national group (trying to tie them into AQ). And black ops within Iran. Support of our own terrorist groups like the MEK.

What is unclear is whether this policy is enacted looking for a spark to ignite more?

clipped from www.washingtonpost.com

The United States has decided to designate Iran's Revolutionary Guard Corps, the country's 125,000-strong elite military branch, as a "specially designated global terrorist," according to U.S. officials, a move that allows Washington to target the group's business operations and finances.

A Glimpse of What is Wrong with US Pol. Discourse

2007-08-14T13:46:00.000-07:00

Courtesy of Ed Morrisey of Captain's Quarters. (Just one of possible many....)

It involves a recent statement made in New Hampshire by Barack Obama concerning Afghanistan.

Here's what Obama said:

“Now you have narco drug lords who are helping to finance the Taliban, so we’ve got to get the job done there, and that requires us to have enough troops that we are not just air raiding villages and killing civilians, which is causing enormous problems there,’’ Obama said.

The "not just there air raiding villages and killing civilians" has gotten the press of course.

Morrisey writes:

The NATO troops in Afghanistan would beg to differ. They don't have a policy of bombing civilians, and the ground troops play a very important role in defending Afghanistan's villages from the depravities of Taliban control. Perhaps Obama can explain his analysis of military strategy and tactics to the ground troops that get wounded in these battles -- or to the families of the dead soldiers who died holding ground against the radical Islamists.

In fact, as posited by the Obama campaign, such a strategy would amount to war crimes. This sounds perilously close to the same kind of accusations that Vietnam War veterans faced when they came back from their service -- that they indiscriminately wiped out villages, killing women, children, and babies. And Obama offers this as a defense of his previous pronouncement that he would invade Pakistan as a positive step, presumably as an improvement on indiscriminate attacks on villages in Afghanistan.

Now does Obama mean literally there is nothing going on but air raiding and civilian death in Afghanistan? After he said in his previous foreign policy speech that he would "add brigades" to Afghanistan--adding implies some already there does it not?

So this literal-mindedness is not helpful. Of course Obama is aware of other operations than simply bombings.

What Obama does have his finger on is the view of the US from elsewhere. It seems as if that is the case elsewhere. That is how the US/NATO is seen by too many. Arguments about whether he is just another military-hating liberal (from the right-wing) aside. The US/NATO have because of reduced numbers of ground troops, had to rely on air assaults more in Afghanistan, and it has especially in the past year or two, caused a great number of civilian deaths, which make the air/internet waves and are used as propaganda by the enemy. On that point Obama is factually correct and can not be refuted. One might disagree about the extent and how negatively they hurt the image, but that it occurs (and is occurring still) is beyond doubt.

[And God forbid we actually ask---because I don't know the answer--is killing of innocent civilians a war crime? If its accidental? Or worse negligent? What constitutes negligence? When war is hell.]

Morissey never touches that point at all. He just muddies the waters through his overly literal reading of the statement. The proof is in the pudding of the President of Afghanistan, Hamid Karzai, publicly excoriating NATO and the US on a few occasions---allies not enemies. You call out allies in the midst of a war, you are not happy with them.

Now Morrisey makes another point that Obama is tone deaf to the American audience. This may be true. The question of whether he is right or not (in terms of the negative image done by civilian deaths from American/NATO air raids) is completely ignored.

Might be good to recall it was a stump speech not say a policy report.

Another question worth asking is given the abysmal American media outlets and the pathetic nature of American discourse (a la Newt), is being tone deaf a bad thing? Maybe this is just part of Obama's approach which is not "business as usual" as he likes to say. He's given tough talk to black audiences, unions, teachers (all Democratic base elements). He doesn't like to go as much for the gotcha line, although he has used a few on occasion.

Is being a tone deaf (by American standards) a necessary but not sufficient condition for actual getting a real message across? Is it a Catch 22, where to be truly on target one must be tone deaf by American standards? (One must be insane to prove sanity? Only truly insane would respond sanely in such a crazytown environment?).

Or may EM is right---he's just tone deaf. But tone deaf is still not the question of whether he's right or not. Otherwise it's just more style/form over substance.

Semantics aside, Obama is right that the deaths of civilians in air raids is hurting the mission in Afghanistan. There's no doubt about that. EM could make an argument that he is (even within that truth claim) over-reaching with Obama's primacy on Afghanistan al-Qaeda & Pakistan over Iraq. That would be at least an actual logical argument. Obama is also right, for all the verbage of "smart bombs" than long term air raid campaigns inevitably kill civilians. Keeps the occupying/bombing country's casualty rates down, no doubt. But you lose the COIN.

If Obama were really sharp, when he gets push back on this point, he should say that he is just following the wisdom of Gen. Petraeus about COIN, about not pissing off the locals. Not killing their family members.

I'll grant this kind of talk might not win him an election. No doubt about that. But there is a question of whether if you have to become a machine establishment candidate to win, is there a separation from the real "you" and the machine (the question for Hillary).

Morissey's last paragraphs deal with a criticism of something (he paraphrases) of Obama's from the same speech about Iraq.

EM:

Another part of his speech provides an example. He claims that he will settle the Iraq War by having Saudi Arabia and China occupy Iraq. How exactly will the US convince China to send troops to Iraq -- and why would the Iraqis want the Chinese there at all? Why would we want to put Chinese troops in the center of the Middle East, with all of the critical energy interests we have there? And while some Sunni Iraqis might consider Saudi troops as allies, the majority Shi'ites will see it as another Sunni attempt to dominate them. They would almost certainly appeal to Teheran for troops, and the regional war would flash into existence.

I can't at the moment find Obama's exact words, so I have no idea whether this is an accurate assessment or not. First off, that he wants China in on security across the globe is smart. Shows he actually is thinking for the 21st century. Iraq, I don't know. Also, given a lack of a buy-in for the Chinese from the US, why would they?

Not to mention the biggest criticism (of mine) for Obama is not having a real plan for what happens after the withdrawal from Iraq. This one included (if this is what he said. I imagine he said something like a UN Presence, which btw the current UN Ambd. is pushing for).

But this does not make him an "empty suit." Nobody else (minus Biden) of either party has a good plan for Iraq. Hell even an actual alternative plan--whether or not its good being a different question. Unless Morissey is willing to say they are all empty suits. That would strike me at least as more consistent.

RIP Phil

2007-08-14T09:31:00.000-07:00

NEW YORK - Phil Rizzuto, the Hall of Fame shortstop during the Yankees' dynasty years and beloved by a generation of fans who delighted in hearing him exclaim "Holy cow!" as a broadcaster, died Tuesday. He was 89.

Rove

2007-08-14T08:44:00.000-07:00

News cycle today dominated by coverage of Karl Rove (check out RealClearPolitics for numerous links).

Analysis tends to fall as one would expect depending on party lines.

One I liked best from the right (Rich Lowry) here. From the left, Josh Green here.

The Democrats gave him gifts by having Bob Shrum, one of the biggest morons in the political consultancy class (itself a breeding ground of fools), run Al Gore's 2000 and Kerry's 2004 campaigns. That being said, Rove will be correctly remembered for having pulled some impressive electoral wins.

My main criticism of the so-called Rove strategy was in the wake of 9/11, the administration chose to play 50+ .01 politics (Democrats might have done the same thing had they been in power incidentally but that's a hypothetical). We do know the Republicans did. Actually truth be told for the election it was 50+.01, after the election it was 30%-35%.

I don't know how much that was Rove and how much was Bush (or both of them). But Bush calling on no national sense of sacrifice, cutting taxes during a war, and misleading the public into the idea of a short quick victory, thereby leaving them simply to "trust" the government--and thereby the massive overreach and destruction of rule of law/unitary executive. My guess is Rove was partly behind some of those policies--if he so though he was certainly not alone. Or at least he wasn't opposed to them. But who knows. Maybe he was just following Bush's orders. The buck stops at Bush any way you slice it.

In leadership circles they talk about content, context, and process. Rove knew what content he wanted (immigration reform to bring Hispanics into the GOP, faith-based initiatives, partial privatization of Social Security). All of those (plus education reform) were busts. Either in terms of the ideas (No Child) or the execution (Immigration).

He had his context, ambitious in scope (a permanent Republican majority at local, state, and Congressional/Judicial Levels.

What he lacked was process. He knew electoral process like nobody else. With his application of niche marketing to politics as a permanent feature from now on of elections and campaigns, in both parties. He was an amazing merger of policy wonk and election guru.

But the process of government he knew not. Bush seemingly doesn't care about the governing process (whether he knows it or not being a separate question). [He's a decider not a communicator]. That plus the Tom DeLay House Republicans running less on original ideals than simply on graft and power, created the perfect storm of Republican incompetence. Republicans had some negative images prior to Bush II (white male club, e.g.) but incompetence was not one of them. Nor an inability for people to take responsibility for mistakes. Incompetence is bad enough; excused incompetence is very very bad---how many times with Gonzales or Rumsfeld (or pick one) did you hear, "I don't know...." "I wasn't aware of such X (meetings, notes, pieces of evidence).

Again Rove was an adviser. He was not in the man in charge. The question of accountability always falls back to Bush.

I'm not a fan of reductionist psychologizing answers, but I would note that the scion of a bluebloods, who himself was never really held accountable (he was not the favored, serious, groomed son that was Jeb), showed a similar inability to hold anyone else accountable. And when he (sorta) did, say with Rumsfeld, it was so patently botched, that it was pretty clear he knew not of what he was doing. Perhaps because he was not himself held (in his youth particularly) to such standards, Bush never knew how to apply them to others? Possibly.

If Rove was "Bush's Brain", he was not Bush's "guts" (or whatever the "decider function" is). The only question worth asking on that front is perhaps what did Rove see in Bush that he choose him as his political vehicle? Was that a sound a judgment or not?

Sunni EFPs

2007-08-13T20:08:00.001-07:00

--Where is the proof (as has recently been asserted and is now quoted by the talkingheads community) that 3/4 of the attacks in Baghdad are from Shia?

clipped from www.juancole.com

Note too that the Sunni Arab neighborhoods have the explosively formed projectiles, just as do the Shiite neighborhoods. Iran is not giving them to Sunnis, and certainly not to 'al-Qaeda-allied' Sunnis. Ipso facto, Iran cannot be the only source of EFPs, and it is not established except by allegation and innuendo that they are a source at all. (If the Sunni Arab guerrillas can make EFPs, so could Iraqi Shiites).

It is always surprising what you can conclusively deduce just from reading the newspapers without the spin that the administration and the Pentagon manages to implant in the stories.

Commons

2007-08-13T19:55:00.001-07:00

Adam Smith's Wealth of Nation was part and parcel of his work in moral philosophy. (Economics, was if you can believe it, a branch of moral thought). He assumed choice about a cultural commons--areas taken (consciously) out of the market. With the rise of the Chicago School (on the right--privatization) and socialism/state ownership on the left (state run industries), this middle ground of the commons--"propertizing"--has been lost. Free market vs. state planned is less important than both as economically dominated.

Another in the on-going series on smarts, resiliency, and de-centralized networks. Also connects with Habermas' work on the reconstruction of human civilization based on rational communication.

clipped from radicalmiddle.com

Barnes’s big breakthrough is this: To improve
capitalism, you don’t need to constrain corporations’ profit-making
abilities (as many hard-core socialists would) or change people’s values (as
many radical decentralists would).

“All” you really need to do is add a new
sector (or “set of institutions”) to the corporate and governmental sectors.

He calls it the “commons sector.”

The commons, he explains, is ostensibly an
“unorganized melange of nature, community, and culture.” Much of it isn’t
traded, or marketable, or quantifiable.

But if you look closely, it is as real as
refrigerators. It includes “air and water, habitats and ecosystems, languages
and cultures, science and technologies, social and political systems,” and
even the “social trust that underlies financial markets.”

It is our “joint inheritance,” and it
arguably belongs to each of us equally.

We need to “propertize” (not
“privatize”) parts of the commons and, where necessary, attach “valves”
to it

John Robb Summary

2007-08-13T16:54:00.001-07:00

Great Article by John Robb on The Coming Urban Terror.

He discusses how in the early/mid 20th century, cities worked as defensive positions against tanks (think Stalingrad).

But cities now, given infrastructure, are prone to what he calls systemspunkt. Attacks of critical nodes, infrastructure, transit, and local police.

Robb:

But in the current evolution of warfare, cities are no longer defensive anchors against armored thrusts ranging through the countryside. They have become the main targets of offensive action themselves. Just as the huge militaries of the early twentieth century were vulnerable to supply and communications disruption, cities are now so heavily dependent on a constant flow of services from various centralized systems that even the simplest attacks on those systems can cause massive disruption.

Proof in Baghdad's decreasing energy output and lack of clean water. Iraq he says is the new Spanish Civil War, the preview (as was the Civil War for WWII) of coming deadly attractions.

Militias and gangs self-finance through the black market and internet communication.

The real worry is the following (not "suitcase nukes"):

No, the real long-term danger from small groups is the use of biotechnology to build weapons of mass destruction. In contrast with nuclear technology, biotech’s knowledge and tools are already widely dispersed—and their power is increasing exponentially.

Imagine this scenario:

It is almost certain that we will see repeated, perhaps incessant, attempts to deploy bioweapons with new strains of viruses or bacteria. Picture a Russian biohacker who, a decade from now, designs a new, deadly form of the common flu virus and sells it on the Internet, just as computer viruses and worms get sold today. The terrorist group that buys the design sends it to a recently hired lab tech in Pakistan, who performs the required modifications with widely available tools. The product then ships by mail to London, to the awaiting “suicide vectors”—men who infect themselves and then board airplanes headed to world destinations, infecting passengers on the planes and in crowded terminals. The infection spreads quickly, going global in days—long before anyone detects it.

Suicide vectors not bombers.

His solution set:

In almost all cases, cities can defend themselves from their new enemies through effective decentralization. To counter systems disruption, decentralized services—the capability of smaller areas within cities to provide backup services, at least on a temporary basis—could radically diminish the harmful consequences of disconnection from the larger global grid. In New York, this would mean storage or limited production capability of backup electricity, water, and fuel, with easy connections to the delivery grid—at the borough level or even smaller. These backups would then provide a means of restoring central services rapidly after a failure.

Similarly, cities may combat networked gangs by decentralizing their own security. Cities have long maintained centralized police forces, but gangs can often overwhelm them. Many governments are responding with militarized police: China is building a million-man paramilitary force, for example; and even in the United States, the use of SWAT teams has increased from 3,000 deployments a year in the 1980s to 50,000 a year in 2006. But militarized police may too easily become an army of occupation, and, if corrupt, as they are in Brazil, they may become enemies of the state along with the gangs.

I think his views are much more likely in global south mega-cities than first world. But they are as dangerous and frightening nonetheless.

Craziest Paragraph of the Week Award Winner

2007-08-13T11:41:00.001-07:00

Fearless whole grain recipes---two words: hard core. .

clipped from www.washingtonpost.com

The rivalry between Mosque No. 26 and the start-up 26B grew increasingly bitter after that. The brothers were fearless businessmen from the start. They opened a bakery featuring natural, whole-grain recipes for bread, rolls, cakes and bean pies. The bakery eventually grew into a successful for-profit chain.

Godcasting

2007-08-12T20:21:00.001-07:00

For a breath of holiness and sanity in this world of sin.....check out the homiletical skilz of my podcasting theological classmates---with the PT Barnum of the Godcasting World (irenik). Link here.

Escaping Islamism

2007-08-12T18:31:00.000-07:00

A very good piece by Shiraz Maher in the Times (London). Maher is a former member of Hizb ur-Tahrir, an Islamist (hardline) group in Britain.

First what the attraction to HT was:

Hizb was a large family in many ways: a group offering social support, comradeship, a sense of purpose and validation. At 21, it was intoxicating to me. I embraced my new Islamist identity and family with eagerness. Islamism transcends cultural norms, so it not only prompted me to reject my British identity but also my ethnic South Asian background. I was neither eastern, nor western; I was a Muslim, a part of the global ummah, where identity is defined through the fraternity of faith.

This point about the radical de-nationalized identity is so crucial. Same was seen with the ring leader of the London bombing. He wanted to choose his own (Islamic) wife, not an arranged marriage--a la Urdu Tribal Custom. Amber over red.

Further proof of the amber (blue) mythic-imperial-transnational nature:

Islamists insist this identity is not racist because Islam welcomes people of all colours, ethnicities and backgrounds. That was true, but our world view was still horribly bipolar. We didn’t distinguish on the basis of colour, but on creed. The world was simply divided into believers and nonbelievers. It was a reality that came back to haunt me last month when I realised that Bilal Abdullah and Kafeel Ahmed, the two men linked with the alleged plot to attack London and Glasgow, were among my closest friends when I studied at Cambridge University.

This world is not constructed around nationality or tribal affiliation but Islamic or non-Islamic (Dar al Islam versus Dar al Gharb).

But what is more interesting to me is his way out:

My time in Cambridge was a turning point. I was studying for a doctorate, researching the development of Islamic political thought in late colonial India, which proved to be my saviour. My research caused me to find marked points of rupture in both the historical and theological narrative of what the Hizb was having me believe. Previous generations had failed, the Hizb told me, to apply Islam to the reality of a changed and changing world in the early 20th century. What I found could not have been further from this. Throughout my thesis I was able to survey a wide range of Muslim opinion across the Indian subcontinent, among whom Abul Kalam Azad was a leading figure. He explained how Islam obliged Muslims to create a harmonious society. He was adept at offering lucid explanations from the texts of the Koran to show a secular state was validated through Islam.

Shiraz then details leaving HT, based on his own changed (transformed) theological viewpoint. He lost his social Islamist support network. But then met Ed Husain, author of The Islamist, also a former Hizb member. They are changing the terms of debate from within--a wider, more inclusive, plural, and open-minded Islam.

He writes:

The significance of this [his connection with Husain] should not be underestimated. When I first left, I emphasised that the challenges of Islamist extremism could never be overcome until the Muslim community formulated its own response. Since meeting Ed and becoming aware of the emerging network of other former members, many of them also holding a senior rank at one time, I was reassured. An influential figure still within the movement, but who is close to leaving, told me and Ed recently, “Don’t worry, your message is being heard.”

The way of modern ("orange") Islam. The key paradigm is getting back into the tradition ("return to the sources" resourcement a la Vatican II RC Theo.), getting into many many of these voices and letting them all have a place. Some will no doubt be drawn to the hardline tradition of say an al Tamiyya, but others increasingly will be drawn to the Reformist trajectories.

Ron Brownstein on Rep. Mods and Mavs

2007-08-12T18:23:00.001-07:00

In the LATimes:

[Rep. Christopher] Shays and [Sen. Lindsey] Graham embody the two forms of dissent from the dominant conservative orthodoxy in the modern Republican Party. In one category are traditional moderates like Shays, who pursue a centrist course, especially on social and foreign policy issues, but whose numbers have relentlessly declined for decades. In the second are maverick figures like Graham or Nebraska Sen. Chuck Hagel, who are too conservative to be considered moderates but too eclectic and unpredictable to be considered reliable allies by the right. Both of these groups -- moderates and mavericks -- are under siege at a moment when Republicans are struggling to reach independent and swing voters disillusioned by Bush and the war.

Shays (one of the smarter politicians out there imo) faces his challenge from the left, riding the anti-Bush/anti-Republican/anti-war wave that is going to be a factor (as it was in '06) in Congressional, Gubenatorial, and Local races in '08.

Graham faces attack from his right---because he broke with conservative "base" orthodoxy on immigration reform and torture (aligned both times with McCain his mentor).

If these types are eliminated, expect the Republicans (minus a possible Giuliani or [far less likely in my mind] Romney prez win) to become an even more ideologically pure but much smaller party.

If Romney wants to pick up some steam, he should start adopting (wholesale I would say) the message of Newt Gingrich. Run as a change anti-Bush conservative. Giuliani has already taken the Mr.9/11, Mr. Security mantel. And I think Thompson is, as Michael Duffy (of Time) said on Meet the Press today "a hologram candidate."

Bad, very bad

2007-08-12T16:48:00.000-07:00

From the AP:

BAGHDAD - Iraq's most senior Sunni politician issued a desperate appeal Sunday for Arab nations to help stop what he called an "unprecedented genocide campaign" by Shiite militias armed, trained and controlled by Iran. The U.S. military reported five American soldiers were killed, apparently lured into an al-Qaida trap. Adnan al-Dulaimi said "Persians" and "Safawis," Sunni terms for Iranian Shiites, were on the brink of total control in Baghdad and soon would threaten Sunni Arab regimes which predominate in the Mideast.

The Persians and Safawis is almost like the "n"word in American discourse. It is saying that the Shia Iraqi Arabs are not Arabs--they are Persians Puppets nor Iraqi nationalists. This conveniently suits Dulaimi's argument (Sunni fundamentalist). The Shia equivalent is calling Sunni extremists "Wahabists" (saying they are really Saudi pawns) or nawasib, again like the "n" word in vitriol.

This is going to put more pressure on the governments of Jordan, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia to bakc up the Sunnis in Iraq.

Exhibit A (Dulaimi again):

"Arabs, your brothers in the land of the two rivers and in Baghdad in particular are exposed to an unprecedented genocide campaign by the militias and death squads that are directed, armed and supported by Iran," al-Dulaimi said. And he castigated fellow Sunnis in the Middle East, saying they "did not make any move and did not even bother to denounce what is taking place against your brothers at the hands of Iranian militias and death squads."

I saw Vali Nasr, one of my favorites on Charlie Rose the other night and he said the Pakistanis love the government of Karzai in Afghanistan about as much as the Saudis accept Maliki in Iraq. Meaning not much.

Maliki's party, the Dawa (Islamic Call) Party is a Shia Fundamentalist. It is the most conspiratorial and least flexible of the three major Shia parties: Mahdi, SIIC, and Dawa. When Maliki was nominated for PM post, Nir Rosen, one of the most connected voices on Iraq, said that Maliki was even more hardline Shia than Ibrahim Jaafri. (former PM, also Dawa and now trying to come back into power on a pan-sectarian platform). He was right. Years ahead of the curve.

The Sunnis are cleansed from Baghdad. They have lost. The tribal sheiks in Anbar may temporarily align with Maliki (at least with Americans) in order to become de facto warlords of the future Anbar-istan. We worked with warlords in Afghanistan, why not Anbar-istan? But the US is stupidly laying blame on Iran. As if we haven't put in a pro-Iranian regime in Iraq with the Kurds who have veto power and exercise it only to minimize their safe haven autonomy in the north.

I think for all the talk, while there will be some push from the Western Arab heartland, it will not be enough to get the Sunni Iraqis back in power (contra John Burns). But it could be bloody. No doubt about that. Generally I think the Iraqi Sunnis are headed the way of Palestinians. Generations (I'm afraid to say) in refugee camps, suicide bombings, a sense of occupation, and (very probably) radicalized elements. Radicalized "nationalist" (religious or not) Sunni Iraqis and radicalized (much smaller percentage) Caliphate/Trans-national AQ types.

The Sunni Arab world needs to see that it is not Israeli, American, and now Persian/Iranian conspiracies solely to blame for their backwardness--politically, economically, educationally, scientifically, religiously, etc. The sooner that happens, the sooner they can join the rest of the world, particularly Asia.

The only thing the US could be stupid enough to do in this situation is pick a fight with the "Persians." Accept what our policy has wrought and go from there.

Barnett Column

2007-08-12T15:53:00.000-07:00

One of his best (imo). Read it here.

Amen to this:

How can America grow so disconnected from the world at a point in history when everything — and everyone — grows more interconnected? In a global economy increasingly modeled on our own pioneering political and economic union, why have we isolated ourselves from the very same global trends that we spent so much blood and treasure to enable? Why have we Americans grown so uncomfortable in this world of our creation?

As proof, how 'bout this?:

Despite America’s intransigence on its trade-distorting agricultural
subsidies in the World Trade Organization’s Doha “development round,” the rest of the world is forming free-trade agreements (FTAs) like there’s more than enough tomorrows to go around. Over a hundred FTAs have been negotiated in the Asia-Pacific Rim alone since 9/11, and roughly half the world’s trade now flows through them. But America participates in only half as many FTAs as the European Union and barely one-third as many as China currently negotiates or proposes. A recently concluded U.S.-South Korean FTA now languishes in the Democrat-controlled Congress, while China, Korea’s biggest trade partner, promises one with its neighbor as soon as possible.

Damn those protectionist Europeans, er us? Still think it was smart Condi Rice has three times now skipped the ASEAN summit to go sell a bunch of weapons that will rot in a Saudi depot?

The key point is that the sourcecode of this phase of Globalization (3.0/4.0 depending on who is counting) is the US code. Not the European one (a la the colonialism of late 19th century and WWI/II). Bush's twinning of isolationism and unilateralism is the marriage of the two outside (and most destructive arguably) minor & counter-trends to the mainline American policy. Wonder why then we are where we are.

Question is does that code needs its source--will it go off the rails without its "mother" or will it leave her long gone?

Latest Weapon in War on Terror

2007-08-11T12:57:00.000-07:00

The Musical?

not good

2007-08-11T12:49:00.001-07:00

clipped from news.yahoo.com

CAIRO, Egypt - An Egyptian Muslim who converted to Christianity and then took the unprecedented step of seeking official recognition for the change said he has gone into hiding following death threats.

ADVERTISEMENT

Mohammed Hegazy, who sparked controversy when pictures of him posing with a poster of the Virgin Mary were published in newspapers, was shunned by his family and threatened by an Islamist cleric vowing to seek his execution as an apostate.

pack attack

2007-08-10T12:25:00.001-07:00

clipped from www.newyorker.com

These days, anything coming from Iraq—even an account of soldiers running over dogs—becomes a high-stakes skirmish in the propaganda war. Yes, the criticism of O’Hanlon and Pollack was based on their past judgments, not the factual claims in their Op-Ed. But that’s just the point. What if the two Brookings analysts had come back last month with tales of a potential catastrophe in the making, as Pollack did in 2005? Would the same critics have combed the archives for foolish statements and wrong assessments? It was the failure to pause for a minute and weigh the implications of their report before trashing it that revealed the toxic intellectual atmosphere clouding arguments over the war. Like the attacks on Beauchamp and The New Republic, that failure showed that objectivity is no longer an aspiration of people who make it their business to comment on the war every day.

What is smart

2007-08-08T12:28:00.000-07:00

In a comment thread between Matthew and I (on-going) here, he criticized a proposition (I quoted approvingly) from Barack Obama which stated that small vs. large gov't shouldn't be the primary issue but rather smart gov't should be.

I then went on to define what I considered smart (which may or may not line up with Obama's definition of smart)

Here 'tis:

Smart mostly means for me de-centralized networked resiliency.

My point about smart over small/large was connected to a larger point about gov't being a necessary evil (or at least a beast of burden) so better smart than dumb.

I didn't elaborate on what de-centralized networked resiliency means. Wanted to flesh that a bit more.

I finished reading a book entitled It's Alive: The Coming Convergence of Information, Biology, and Business. [For Kurzweil geeks out there....C4, Vince he gives a positive review on back cover].

The title is so too sci-fi with the bad Frankenstein's monster reference. But the book is very good (imo). My only general criticism is that it tends to reduce everything to science, technology, business. [All metaphors are drawn from complexity science]. But that being said, it still gave me a great deal of food for thought.

They have a very handy-dandy categorization and life-cycle for the change from scientific innovation to business (and from then to wider social) application. They label four stages Q1-Q4.

Q1:Science
Q2:Technology
Q3:Business (applications of technology)
Q4:Organization

And then there are waves of these (paradigm shifts in Kurzweil-eze).

Continue Reading

So for example with regards to the industrial economy (pp.20-21 of the book)
Q1:Electrical engineering, chemistry
Q2:Steel plants, oil refineries
Q3:Automobiles, consumer prod.
Q4:Command and control hierarchy, "scientific management"

Q4 is when the cycle reaches maturity, even senescence (in terms of innovation, it still likely has strong influence in society). Q4 then bleeds over into arenas beyond business: politics, education, law, etc.

As regards the industrial economy, the link between the "scientific management" model (of Taylor and Ford) and the large-scale public education as a factory is well documented.

According to the authors (Meyer and Davis) the information economy is just now reaching Q3 Business and the molecular economy (the next iteration/paradigm) is just reaching Q2. Molecular economy involves nanotech, biotech, possibly robotics.

They theorize on the Q3 Business Stage of the Molecular Economy (similar to Kurzweil's The Singularity): matter compiler, experience machine ("virtual reality"). Q4 of the Molecular Economy has yet to emerge.

And Q4 of the Informational Economy, just starting to get glimpses that will translate into huge change in the coming decade, they call "The Adaptive Enterprise". The rest of the book is a detailing of the Adaptive Enterprise. The Q4 of the Informational Economy.

What this whole vision points out is how much the exterior-business realms can accelerate and outpace the political-educational-legal structures. Because as we see business by nature tends to be the one that first changes cognitively-organizationally (Q4) which grows first and foremost out of the practices (Q3) that are undertaken. Worldview (Q4) arises as superstructure out of base (Q3).

And then does it filter across to the other domains. Meanwhile the new layers of science (Q1) and technology (Q2) are already taken off in terms of the next paradigm. The key is to make sure by the time the political-legal-military-educational nexus catches up isn't already out of date (relative to the new scientific-technological paradigm).

And just to make to clear, the only major political figure (versus academics) who is consistently talking about this--the lag time that is--as far as I know is Newt Gingrich. While I don't agree with his position on immigration and (what he calls) WWIV (Terrorism), I do think he is hitting all the right buttons on the facileness of the political (non)debates in the parties, the pathetic nature of our media-hyped political process (30 second sound bytes) and the fact that government should be measured against the standards of the business world. At least in terms of efficiency and standards. Not perfect I know (the corporate world that is) but a helluva lot better.

What smart government would be then is the Adaptive Enterprise (Q4 of Informational) mindset related to political organization. [The Q2 of Informational is things like chips, WWW. Q3 is new media, information technology services, social networking].

Smart government could then cut across the four major sectors key for the future:
1)domestic ("the government")....entitlements, Welfare State, health care
2)national security apparatus ("the state")
3)environmental resiliency
4)Department of Reconstruction

Right now in US politics we have issue #1 mostly dominated by Democrats. 2 by Republicans. 3 and 4 with no party vehicle--except maybe Governors.

[Remember in my thinking gov't is this necessary evil--I'd rather it work well than not. This is not still the issue of limited government and individual rights/liberties. I realize for now I have to put that in brackets.]

I can't go through all of their recommendations. But some of the more important ones:
--"A key principle of general evolution is that the bottom-up interactions of agents create adaptive systems." (p.101). Seekers in William Easterly's terms. (versus top-down planners).

The problem generally with planners/top-down approach is that it assumes the myth of the given, a single world easily recognizable for everyone involved. Adaptive enterprise/complexity science is chaotic, I wanted to say postmodern in the (good) sense of enaction (a la Maturana and Varela).

If you study how a bird sees its environment it does not see the same environment you and I see when we look in the same general say field or forest. A bird literally does not see that with which it does not interact with--a literal world-space. Which is why the Gaia proponents (especially as cited for public policy, say on environmental-economic issues) have a serious flaw: no other animal, other than some humans, sees this Nature/Gaia. It is not a flat neutral space on which all the other animals, creatures, planets, etc. are acted upon and then must respond.

Rather what is Nature is in part a co-creation of these agents. And onion-like layers of Nature at that.

Similar with the gov't/business model of adaptive enterprise. You do not plan for a single identity/solution that you then try to enforce on a neutral background (commerce or politics) that is the same for all. Rather you create the organization such that its primary code is ability to adapt and ride the chaos, thereby seeding its own worldspace. Works as a feedback mechanism, with the envio and agents responding to each other, helping creating each other.

This is why I prefer say with climate change work on resiliency. Then you cut through the miasma of the politics and debate on human/non-human. agnostics, deniers, true believers, apocalyptic believers, etc. Whatever happens the system, the network itself is ready to respond. Rather than trying to predict what the future will be, then massively shifting the entire human resource base to try to be ready for a change we're not even entirely sure will come in the first place and we are not sure that even if we were to undertake this massive change (i.e. massive economic regulation) it would not change the environment so that a new set of problems would emerge which we would still be unprepared to deal with.

Riding the chaos. This is the key. Requires a great deal of technology to sense and respond in real-time. Seed in multiple directions, see which pans out, and then dive into that stream. Then re-seed multiply from within that stream, see which works, and respond.

It also requires managers (politicians?) to no longer be those who hold special information guardedly at the top (as in a command control economy/politics/military), having to wait from orders from even higher up, or having your intelligent employees nannied into a state of waiting for permission to prosper. The real job of the manager (pol?) will be to recognize talent (sense and respond) and get them in the right places AQAP (as quickly as possible).

Agent-based, bottom-up, open-source networks. Not for example, as with the warantless wiretapping these huge dragnets of planned obsolescence where eventually everybody (and therefore nobody in particular) ends up on some list. As an example, Lawrence Wright, author of The Looming Tower, his daughter ended up a surveillance list (as I think maybe he did) during his research for the book.

I know others will disagree with this, but I think we could start with smart government as a means of working together across political divides, then still have our discussions about the actual size (some always favoring less, others more) from that place.

tags technorati : kurzweil

tags technorati : adpative enterprise

tags technorati : complexity

tags technorati : resiliency

Rajan Menon on Pakistan

2007-08-07T16:56:00.001-07:00

Outlines four possible scenarios:

1)Musharraf stays in and continues to lose legitimacy
2)Another general leads a coup
3)Civil war (State and violent hardline Islamists)
4)Musharraf-Bhutto Alliance.

None are good. And none make clear how to defeat the extremist elements and destroy their sanctuary, stop cross-border raids into Afghanistan.

clipped from newamerica.net

A fourth possibility is a compact between Musharraf and the opposition political parties. The result would be an interim national unity government that schedules elections that would be held under terms acceptable to all sides and monitored by international observers to verify their fairness.
Regrettably, Musharraf has spurned the moderate opposition parties rather than reaching out to them. For all their faults -- which include running inept and corrupt governments -- Pakistan’s democrats, whether secularists or moderate Muslims, regard the extremists as a dire threat (as does the majority of the public, despite its opposition to Musharraf’s participation in the White House’s "war on terror").

But the only plausible outcomes for Pakistan in its present state are bad, terrible, and uncertain ones. If anyone has a plan for a better result, it’s a good time to present it.

Surprise Surprise Surprise

2007-08-07T11:47:00.001-07:00

Why is Iran, the natural ally in the fight against Pashtun nationalist Taliban/al-Qaeda and Sunni Baathist or Salafi jihadism, still isolated? I just don't get it.

clipped from www.nytimes.com

CAMP DAVID, Md., Aug. 6 — President Bush and President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan, close allies in fighting terrorism, found much to agree on as they completed a two-day meeting here on Monday, with one major exception: the role of Iran in Afghanistan.

Mr. Karzai characterized Iran as “a helper” in a CNN interview broadcast Sunday. But when the two men greeted reporters here on Monday, Mr. Bush pointedly disagreed, saying, “I would be very cautious about whether the Iranian influence in Afghanistan is a positive force.”

Ouch--to the Manhood

2007-08-07T11:43:00.000-07:00

BANGKOK, Aug. 7 — It is the pink armband of shame for wayward police officers, as cute as can be with a Hello Kitty face and a pair of linked hearts. No matter how many ribbons for valor a Thai officer may wear, if he parks in the wrong place, or shows up late for work, or is seen dropping a bit of litter on the sidewalk, he can be ordered to wear the insignia.

Timbuktu

2007-08-07T11:27:00.000-07:00

Too little known wonder of ancient learning. Making a comeback?

Preview of Coming Attractions

2007-08-07T11:07:00.001-07:00

A surge without a strategy is just moving chess pieces around on the board and temporarily keeping certain kinds of violence (sorta) down.

It's clusterf--k gang on gang warfare. US Army is just a really big gang in this fight sad to say.

clipped from www.washingtonpost.com

For the past four years, the administration's narrative of the Iraq war has centered on al-Qaeda, Iran and the sectarian violence they have promoted. But in the homogenous south -- where there are virtually no U.S. troops or al-Qaeda fighters, few Sunnis, and by most accounts limited influence by Iran -- Shiite militias fight one another as well as British troops. A British strategy launched last fall to reclaim Basra neighborhoods from violent actors -- similar to the current U.S. strategy in Baghdad -- brought no lasting success.

Control Room

2007-08-06T12:25:00.000-07:00

This is the documentary about al-Jazeera and its coverage of the run up/early phases (to overthrow of Saddam) of the Iraq War.

Warning: Graphic imagery in the movie.

It covers obviously a lot of the controversy surrounding the media outlet. I think it's interesting that they are criticized by the Hussein govt, Sunni monarchs (e.g. Saudi Arabia), the Americans, even some Iraqi guerillas (for being American propagandists).

One of the more interesting characters (in terms of reflection and growth) is a young American Lt. working in the Coalition Media Center. You can see him, unlike many other people in the film (on both sides Arab and Western) actually starting to put himself in the position of the other side and noting commonality to his feelings and theirs. Also his comparison between al-Jazeera which plays to its nationalist card with its own demographic and FoxNews to its.

The other character I found most intriguing was a (British-educated) Arab reporter for al-Jazeera (whose wife is a Westerner). He criticizes a friend of his for blaming Israel, with the fabulous line that "If a water pipe breaks in Damascus, Israel is behind it." Saying that the conspiratorial thinking in the Arab world needs to turn the light on themselves. But he is no fan of the American invasion, as you will see.

The most fascinating point for me is simply the optics of it all. Is al-Jazeera staging shots after an American bombing? Are the Americans/British when you see the soldiers greeted by locals (with cameras on them are the locals afraid not to smile?).

And humanely speaking to see the Arab point of view. To see coverage you will never see from the Western press, no matter what one's opinion of al-Jazeera.

And lastly, I should note the highly controversial charge that the Americans targeted their offices purposefully and killed one of their journalists. Can watch the film, find other voices arguing against and make your own determination.

Not to mention the even more controversial supposed memo from Bush to Blair considering targeted bombings of al-Jazeera headquarters. [If you Google it you can find all kinds of discussion either way....].

A Limerick: Ode to Shi--y Bill

2007-08-06T11:07:00.000-07:00

[Note of explanation: I've starting working part time as a custodian at my Church, which is downtown Vancouver. Shitty Bill is the nickname for a rather unfriendly street fellow who has taken to using our alleyway as his toilet. Yesterday I had the great privilege of cleaning up his "deposit" off the side of the church building. And if you have never had the experience, it's everything and more they say it is.]

There once was a man named Shitty Bill
Who had not public restroom to use to unfill
He dropped in a squat,
I cleaned it up with Quat***,
And all involved got a thrill.

***Quat is the shorthand name for the disinfectant we use