Slowly coming back to posting (just ordered a Mac!). But for now, chew on this: the Left and Islamism.

Broken

Is what my computer is. Hence, the dearth of new posts and the discontinuation of my daily link-project. Will be back soon...

"Oussama Ben Laden serait mort"

Report, here.

In English, here.

See here for more...

Day 3: Ornette Coleman

"Though he is fascinated by music theory, he is suspicious of any construct of thought."

"The steady attrition of the self-preservation instinct"

"Opposing the war in Iraq was one thing, defensible in the light of events. But opting out of a serious fight against the Taleban, sabotaging efforts to get Iran off its path towards nuclear status, pre-emptively cringing to Muslim intolerance of free speech and criticism, all suggest something quite different."

Day 2: Gustave Flaubert

Here's my bed-time post from last night, as I was unable to get it down before I fell asleep...

We have a new portrait of the exemplary 19th century artist, the ultimate flaneur and quixotic genius, in Frederick Brown's recently published biography on Gustave Flaubert. It looks fabulous (certainly not "un livre sur rien”), and, given Flaubert's extensive travels through the Arab world, undoubtedly provides glimpses of our favorite region, glimpses at once illuminating as offensive, undoubtedly distorted through the ideological prism of a European dandy.

Flaubert was certainly one of the most interesting and bizarre artists of the 19th century, embodying the (pre) fin de siecle, and overwhelmingly Gallic, obsession with pathology, illness, and the artistic brilliance borne therefrom. A contemporary of Baudelaire (compare dates: Baudelaire 1821-1867, Flaubert 1821-1880) and a forerunner of Proust, whose works rival their's in originality and erotic brilliance.

Read:

"Brown is especially good at detailing the physical and moral portrait of the novelist: sense of the comic, his bluster and vituperations, his pet dislikes, his erotic fantasies, his loud laughter and stentorian voice, his fascination with imbecility, his jowls and increasingly drooping moustache, his scatological lexicon.Behind the vigorous façade there was, hidden from public view, a vulnerable being who sought refuge from every form of unwanted involvement (such as choosing a career) by welcoming the epilepsy that surfaced when he was in his twenty-third year. Above all, he needed friendship, and in that need he was well served."

The Master of Double-Speak

Ahmadinejad again stuns on-lookers with his ability to evade, deceive, and twist the language of his interlocutors into a wholly insincere and uncooperative rhetorical defense. Blackwill is spot on: "If this man represents the prevailing government opinion in Tehran, we are heading for a massive confrontation with Iran."

Did the Mullahs just hand-pick the guy who they thought clever enough to delude the world into thinking Iran represented some kind of moral defense against Western "imperialism"? Because he looked best able to buy them enough time to build a bomb and thus guarantee their permanent existence against the demands of the Iranian population?

This guy really, really scares me.

Day 1: TV on the Radio

I've decided, due to the recent incensed/desperate tenor of my posts, that for the next week I will post a link, before I go to bed, to something that is hopeful, creative, cheerful, or otherwise stimulating in a positive way. I could use it, at least, particularly as I breathe the last gasps of summer air and grudgingly greet the cold sighs of autumn wind...

To start, here.

"(Tunde) Adebimpe...is the best male rock singer to come along since Kurt Cobain."

Discuss.

Ann Coulter the Plagiarist?

Ha.

Chavez, Bush, the Devil

This has been an incredibly amusing meeting of the U.N.'s General Assembly. Bush delivered a pretty solid speech, surprisingly, Ahmadinejad a wild and ridiculous rhetorical romp, and Chavez called Bush the devil! At least these meetings are entertaining (said, sadly, with gulping irony).

An Article of Mine Published Today

"Moderation is crucial to handling Iran threat"

As the United Nations opens the 61st session of its General Assembly this week, it is apparent that the international community has finally agreed to take seriously Iran's nuclear ambitions. The assembly's agenda is devoted to reaching common ground on how best to deal with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's regime and its quest for nuclear weapons. While some advocate diplomatic pressure, others dialogue and still others military action, each party privy to this debate has had an incredibly hard time trying to figure out what course of action Ahmadinejad intends to take.

In U.S. foreign policy circles, two principal positions in this debate have been articulated, each representing a different theory of international relations. But a proper response to the threat Iran poses should be found somewhere in between the pessimism of one and the optimism of the other.

On one side, there are those - many of whom would be considered "neo-conservatives" - who take Ahmadinejad's public statements on Islam, U.S. foreign policy and Israel at face value and who believe that when he says he is dedicated to wiping Israel off the map that this is exactly what he means and intends to do. This camp takes seriously Ahmadinejad's self-proclaimed religiosity, reading his public statements as proof of an ideological commitment to furthering the Shiite cause throughout the Middle East at whatever price, rather than as the public appeals of a demagogue to a religious populace. And, this side believes, since Ahmadinejad's commitment to confrontation with Israel and the West is rooted in religious conviction, there is no rational, diplomatic means to deal with him. Military action is the only viable option.

On the other side, there are those who believe that Ahmadinejad, like most politicians, is essentially rational, and that he will not acquire and use nuclear weapons when this would all but guarantee the destruction of his regime and the annihilation of Iran. This camp - roughly, foreign policy "realists" - believes that even the claims of religion are not strong enough to motivate a leader to pursue policies obviously not in the interests of his state. This camp argues that strong diplomatic pressure and dialogue with Ahmadinejad should be able to convince him that the pursuit of nuclear weapons is ultimately not in Iran's interests. Thus, despite his apparent conviction of being divinely ordained to do battle with the enemies of Islam throughout the world, Ahmadinejad will eventually give up his program if we pursue diplomacy calmly and rationally.

Somewhere in between these two extremes lies a position much closer to reality. This position dismisses the neo-conservative insistence that Ahmadinejad's religiosity would drive him to suicidal military conflict, while also distancing itself from the realist's optimism that straighforward diplomatic efforts will work. It takes the form of a hypothetical question: What if Ahmadinejad, even as a rational actor who would theoretically respond to diplomatic carrots and sticks, simply cannot be convinced that the acquisition of nuclear weapons is not in Iran's favor? What if he is either so foolish or so self-confident that he believes he can get away with it?

If so, there remain two things the international community must do to prevent Iran from getting the bomb. First, it must think of new ways to convince Iran that the price it will pay by violating international nonproliferation treaties really is much higher than the potential benefit of a nuclear arsenal. On the one hand, this would require a revamped and more thorough program of sanctions. On the other, it would require abandoning the rhetoric of regime change and military preemption; the more the Iranian government comes to believe it will be attacked or invaded, the more it will see its survival as dependent upon the acquisition of nuclear weapons.

Second, Ahmadinejad cannot be allowed to believe that the West, riddled with internal divisions and feelings of distrust, will sit back and watch while he pursues his nuclear program. But if sanctions prove ineffectual due to Russia's and China's intransigence, the only threat that may carry any weight will be that of military action. Not only would the danger of such action be enormous, but, as we have seen, even the threat of a military operation will make nuclear weapons appear all the more attractive to the regime. Thus, the international community must think of a new way to frighten Iran, with something stronger than sanctions but weaker than direct military action.

Only by refusing to fall prey to the Scylla of apocalyptic neo-conservatism and the Charybdis of naive optimism can we hope to find any way out of this puzzle. Let us hope Ahmadinejad's government really is several years away from the bomb. It will take some time for us to clean out our own from the extremists that fill its ranks and to replace them with minds equipped for the task.

A Good Thing To Remember

"The downfall of Athens didn't occur due to enemy operations, but because of a grandiose campaign against Syracuse, the wealthiest and most powerful of Greek colonies, dreamed up by the city's resident wild man, Alcibiades. The Syracuse campaign was carried on well past the limits of sanity, much less common sense, resulting in the complete annihilation of the Athenian army, and setting in motion the tailspin that ended only in the city's defeat and occupation."
- J.R. Dunn

See James Fallows great article in last month's Atlantic.

Again, from Amis.

"The age of terror, I suspect, will also be remembered as the age of boredom. Not the kind of boredom that afflicts the blasé and the effete, but a superboredom, rounding out and complementing the superterror of suicide-mass murder. And although we will eventually prevail in the war against terror, or will reduce it, as Mailer says, to 'a tolerable level' (this phrase will stick, and will be used by politicians, with quiet pride), we haven't got a chance in the war against boredom. Because boredom is something that the enemy doesn't feel. To be clear: the opposite of religious belief is not atheism or secularism or humanism. It is not an 'ism'. It is independence of mind - that's all. When I refer to the age of boredom, I am not thinking of airport queues and subway searches. I mean the global confrontation with the dependent mind."

"It is painful to stop believing in the purity, and the sanity, of the underdog."

From novelist Martin Amis.

"Suicide-mass murder is astonishingly alien, so alien, in fact, that Western opinion has been unable to formulate a rational response to it. A rational response would be something like an unvarying factory siren of unanimous disgust. But we haven't managed that. What we have managed, on the whole, is a murmur of dissonant evasion. Paul Berman's best chapter, in Terror and Liberalism, is mildly entitled 'Wishful Thinking' - and Berman is in general a mild-mannered man. But this is a very tough and persistent analysis of our extraordinary uncertainty. It is impossible to read it without cold fascination and a consciousness of disgrace. I felt disgrace, during its early pages, because I had done it too, and in print, early on. Contemplating intense violence, you very rationally ask yourself, what are the reasons for this? And compassionately frowning newscasters are still asking that same question. It is time to move on. We are not dealing in reasons because we are not dealing in reason...

...suicide-mass murder presented the West with a philosophical crisis. The quickest way out of it was to pretend that the tactic was reasonable, indeed logical and even admirable: an extreme case of 'rationalist naivete', in Berman's phrase. Rationalist naivete was easier than the assimilation of the alternative: that is to say, the existence of a pathological cult...

Suicide-mass murder is more than terrorism: it is horrorism. It is a maximum malevolence. The suicide-mass murderer asks his prospective victims to contemplate their fellow human being with a completely new order of execration....

There are vast pluralities all over the West that are thirsting for American failure in Iraq - because they hate George Bush. Perhaps they do not realise that they are co-synchronously thirsting for an Islamist victory that will dramatically worsen the lives of their children."

Former Iranian President Mohammad Khatami, in an interview with Time, admits the benefits of the Iraq War for the Iranian regime. Priceless.

"I don't know what President Bush, the father, would have done. But I know that eliminating Saddam [Hussein] has been to our benefit, to the benefit of Iran."

Check out the interview. Confirms my belief that the brilliance and terrifying insidiousness of despots like Khatami remains their ability to use the language of the West--the rhetoric of freedom, democracy, and human rights--to critique the West's excesses, while their own regimes not only violate these same values, but explicitly refuse to graft them into their political systems. It's laughable, actually, that a regime that has sponsored art exhibits glorifying the Holocaust would challenge the West to combat on the level of democratic and humanitarian values. But they know how easily people in the West dissatisfied with the Bush/Blair Administrations will sympathize with this language. Nasrallah becomes Che, Hamas the revolutionary defenders of the oppressed...

Perfect quote from an unsettling article:

"To attribute the West’s problems to our colonial past contains some truth. But it is again to misunderstand the inner strength of Islam’s revival, which is owed not to victimhood but to advancing confidence in its own belief system.

Moreover, to Islam’s further advantage, it has led most of today’s “progressives” to say little, or even to keep silent, about what would once have been regarded as the reactionary aspects of Islam: its oppressive hostility to dissent, its maltreatment of women, its supremacist hatred of selected out-groups such as Jews and gays, and its readiness to incite and to use extremes of violence against them. Mein Kampf circulates in Arab countries under the title Jihadi."

An op-ed of mine published today

"Now more than ever, type of retaliation is key"

As students, we step into a new school year inevitably affected by the experiences we have had during the summer. We gain something useful from them — we hope — and learn new ways to navigate through the academic year. Similiarly, as a nation emerging from a summer marked by the outbreak of a new war in the Middle East and a narrowly avoided terrorist attack on British and American airlines, we are afforded an opportunity to reassess our foreign-policy goals based on the changing nature of our security needs.

The threats of this past summer were different from those we have grown accustomed to during the past five years of the so-called “war on terror.” While news of bombings, beheadings and shootings have become commonplace, we had yet to face the possibility of a post-Sept. 11 attack on the scale of the British bombing plot or one organized by such a motley crew of European Islamist extremists. Nor had we to face the threats posed by a rising Middle Eastern power like Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s Iran, one willing to wage proxy war against our allies and hellbent on acquiring nuclear weapons. The novel nature of these threats offers distinct, new lessons.

First, we have been reminded that, despite the significant weakening of al-Qaida’s operational capacity, the threat posed to us by small groups of Islamist terrorists still exists. In the foiling of the British bombing plot, however, we have witnessed one of the greatest success stories in the campaign against terror and have learned how well-organized and diligent police effort, international law-enforcement coordination, and the sharing of intelligence can effectively combat terrorist threats before they are realized. This comes as a shock to a nation bombarded with the rhetoric of warfare, battle and impending apocalypse. But Scotland Yard’s excellent work has given us an effective, nonmilitary model to deal with the increasingly decentralized and diffuse nature of international Islamist terror.

We should consider this success an overdue reality check. A world free of terrorism is impossible, even with the mightiest military in history at our disposal. If we recognize this fact, we can shift the focus of our security strategy away from military pre-emption toward better integration of our domestic law-enforcement and intelligence services. This will enable us better to combat particular threats as they arise, and unburden our military from the impractical goal of crushing every possible source of terror throughout the world. While military force will remain necessary at times to deny terrorists sanctuary, we should bear in mind what terrorism has always been and what it will remain: criminal activity used by the weak and alienated, not means of conventional warfare waged by an able and equal enemy. The hands of the military must be freed to deal with the possibility of greater, state-based security threats, such as those posed by a nuclear-armed Iran.

This brings us to a second important lesson: Iran’s repeated aggressions against Israel and the West throughout the summer have implicitly reminded us of what ill can come from responding to terrorism with exaggerated and inappropriate military action. It has become cliche to speak of the ways the United States’ poorly planned and executed invasion of Iraq has abetted the rise of Ahmadinejad’s regime. Indeed, by toppling Iran’s most powerful regional adversary in Saddam’s Iraq and granting Iran a sphere of influence in Iraq’s predominantly Shiite regions, the United States practically guaranteed that Iran would test its newfound power by goading the West into further conflict. Moreover, the arrogant dismissal of our allies by the Bush administration in the run up to the Iraq conflict has made it increasingly difficult to produce a unified front against Iran’s nuclear ambitions, although cooperation between European and American diplomats has admittedly improved during the last few months. The strategic tunnel vision we have displayed throughout the Iraq war has undeniably made the region more dangerous and has given Iran the strength and audacity to trick and tease the West at every occasion.

Let’s not forget the lessons of this summer. If we keep in mind that even the most deadly of terrorist threats can be effectively combated by nonmilitary means and that overly ambitious military endeavors can have very dangerous consequences, then we can chart new strategic responses to security threats as they emerge. Remember exactly the effect bin Laden desired from Sept. 11: an American military response in Afghanistan that would lead to the kind of quagmire that helped topple the aging Soviet Union in the 1980s. The greatest threat now posed to us in this conflict is the possibility of being pulled into more unnecessary and debilitating military campaigns against illusionary foes. If we are not to become our own worst enemy, we must remain patient and humble in distinguishing which threats require handcuffs and which require bombs.