re: "These things happen for a reason"

Lemuel Calhoon at Hillbilly White Trash ("Commenting about politics, religion, firearms, food, Celtic music, beer, science fiction and the Asheville Vortex. Home of the Hillbilly Ecosystem.") is experiencing some existential-level cognitive dissonance. And with good reason.

Money quote(s):

"America went to war with two nations in response to Islamic terrorism and we have killed or captured most of the top leadership of al Qaeda, including bin Laden himself. However our failure to identify the nature of the problem (which is nothing more or less than Islam itself) and our suicidal fealty to the culturally lethal ideologies of multiculturalism and political correctness have rendered us almost defenseless against this kind of home grown jihad and seriously hampered our ability to deal with the problem on an international level.

Right after Sept. 11 president Bush hosted Islamic religious leaders at the White House to prove that the US was not at war with Islam. Then it came out that most of those imams were tied to terrorism in some way. TSA screeners at airports are told not to pay any special attention to people who look Arab/Middle Eastern for fear of being accused of profiling."

Islam's problem seems to be either that it never underwent a reformation (which might have shifted it from its medieval moorings) or that the reformation it has undergone took it in the wrong (from Western perspective) direction.

I understand that Pres. Bush took pains to emphasize that the West, and the U.S. specifically, was not at war with Islam so as to head-off initiating the sort of Huntingtonian "clash of civilizations" that Osama Bin Ladin dreamed of waging. Not playing into what Al-Qaida wanted is a pretty good argument for Bush's policy there, whatever else you may think of the former president.

As for TSA screening guidance.... from a security perspective, you don't want to necessarily exempt non-Arabs/Middle Eastern persons from security screenings since that sort of loophole creates a security vulnerability that just begs to be taken advantage of.

But that doesn't seem to be how things are actually done; TSA gives the appearance of being more afraid of CAIR's press releases than is healthy or helpful. Going out of the way to avoid paying attention to the patterns and indicators of likely terrorists is a losing proposition and indicates a lack of courage of conviction.

That's a recipe of losing the larger war.

"Christian and Jewish clergy must be banned from the 9/11 memorial service at Ground Zero but a building ruined by wreckage from one of the 9/11 planes (making it as much a part of Ground Zero as the WTC site) must be torn down so that a giant Islamic Victory Mosque can be built.

The United States has helped to bring about regime change in Egypt and Libya (actually going to war in Libya's case) to replace governments that were bad but not currently supporting Jihad terrorism with far worse governments that are connected with organizations like the Muslim Brotherhood and al Qaeda.

The United States and Western Europe (that part of the world once known as Christendom) has seemingly lost faith in itself. In its value to the world. It is very likely too late for Europe but not for the US. That is if we screw up our courage and face facts and take appropriate action."


8/28

re: "Overcoming Our Dearth of Language Skills"

Morgan Smiley at the Small Wars Journal blog ("facilitates the exchange of information among practitioners, thought leaders, and students of Small Wars, in order to advance knowledge and capabilities in the field") looked forward at meeting the foreign language requirements of the future.

While this is from a military perspective, this is of diplomatic readiness relevence as well.

Money quote(s):

"In order to fully appreciate any culture we are learning about, especially if we expect to conduct operations in that particular culture, it follows that learning the language will not only help one learn about that culture but be able to operate more effectively once immersed in it."

This so blindingly obvious to anyone who has ever served abroad, in uniform or out, as to seem fairly condescending when plainly stated. It's not. Not condescending, that is. Those of us who serve their country abroad at any time in our lives are a minority of Americans. Let's not fail to make a persuasive argument by not laying the logical foundation necessary.

".... the importance of culture and language training by the US military due to the changing nature of the global security environment in which state-on-state conventional wars have been supplanted by smaller scale regional conflicts, trans-national and non-state terrorist actions, and other irregular security challenges conducted among local populations and lasting several years if not decades."

The language requirements of the State Dept. are much more constant and diffuse. State is responsible for over 260 diplomatic and consular posts requiring staffing by U.S. personnel speaking scores of languages, and the need to reliably refresh those positions with language-proficient replacements every 2-3 years.

"(W)hat languages & regions to focus on given the changing security environment and our role in it. After all, conflicts affecting US and allied interests - whether they involve foreign internal defense, counterinsurgency, counter-terrorism, or post-conflict reconstruction efforts - could spring up most anywhere."

Language proficiency is a labor-intensive undertaking, and carries the opportunity costs, particularly for military personnel, of whatever training is forgone in favor of that gaining, and maintaining, that skill. It's also something of a long-lead-time item, resistant (up to a point) to surge procurement, since qualified language instructors don't just grow on trees either.

"Read Samuel Huntington's "Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order" and Thomas P.M. Barnett's "The Pentagon's New Map: War and Peace in the Twenty-First Century". In "Clash of Civilizations", Huntington talks of potential conflicts arising along cultural "fault lines", for example, where Christianity meets Islam (Central Asia/ Turkey/ Caucasus regions) or where Hindu culture meets Sinic culture (Himalaya/ Central Asian region). In "The Pentagon's New Map", Thomas Barnett posits that the world is divided between the "connected" (primarily Western) regions/ countries and the "disconnected" or "Gap" areas, with many of those "gap" regions being in Africa, the Middle East, Central Asia, etc. Given these two authors & ideas they put forth, the Army may want to look at educating Soldiers in Turkish, Persian, Hindi, and Chinese as well as focusing on those areas for cultural/ regional education." (Emphasis in original text. - CAA.)

Here Brother Smiley makes a mildly adventurous but intellectually-defensible leap about how to hedge one's future bets about where language training should be focused as a long-lead-time item, making an educated guess about where future conflicts are likely to be found.

"(W)e may want to revive the British concept of a "shooting leave" (we'll call it something else of course). During the period of British rule in India, both Company and Government, a "shooting leave" involved a British officer taking a few weeks or months of leave in order to travel through potentially hostile lands and gather information and intelligence, which involved the possibility of shooting or being shot at. For our purposes, our officers ought to be able to take a sabbatical, perhaps no more than 3 to 6 months, and embed themselves in non-governmental organizations (NGO) operating in one of the regions we are interested in (with Doctors Without Borders in Tajikistan for instance) so that he may use/ improve his language capabilities, learn first-hand information about the region he is in, and work with organizations that we may end up dealing with should we become involved in those areas."

Embedding military personnel, unless they are also medical personnel, in NGOs such as Doctors Without Borders is problematic, to say the least. There still seems to be something of a cultural wall between the two worlds, although perhaps a program of this nature would help in this regard.

"Building partner capacity has been identified as a key area of concern as we look for better, and cheaper, ways to assist friends and allies, and help others defend themselves as Mr. Gates put it. In order to do this effectively, we must field more leaders that can communicate with host-nations forces in their own languages which will allow us to better understand those host-nation environments since little will be lost in translation and cultural understanding will be enhanced. Improving our language skills may lead to more effective and efficient techniques for building the capacity of our current and future partners and reduce the need for deployments of robust US forces." (Bold typeface added for emphasis. - CAA.)

8/23

re: "But What if it’s True?"

Lex at Neptunus Lex ("The unbearable lightness of Lex. Enjoy!") exhibited a much higher opinion of Spencer Ackerman than I can suspend my disbelief to stomach.

(Bear in mind, the scalp, i.e. Scooter Libby's indictment, of which he is so proud was not the official actually responsible.)

That being said, Lex addresses the issues Ackerman is blind to.

Money quote(s):

"For my own part, I would like to draw a necessarily blurry line between what Mr. Ackerman and the FBI call “main stream” American Muslims and the “pious and devout.” Because the possibility never occurs to the former at least that to be a pious and devout Muslim necessarily means super-ordinating the will of God, as expressed to his Prophet 14 centuries ago in an inalterable text, and that this potentially places the believer in conflict with the values of modern Western Civilization. Most will find a way to live with that conflict. A notable few, weak-minded or otherwise deficient, have spectacularly failed to do so."

A deeper than bumper sticker slogan knowledge is required of anyone attempting to realistically address the issue of Islamic-based terrorism and jihad.

(Is CAA an expert? Hell no! But I've got a shelf of much-read books which attest to my attempts at defeating my own ignorance of the issues.)

"Steeped in the culture of Western liberalism, he declines to even recognize this possibility: To the degree you are a good Muslim, as defined by rigorously following and promoting the entirety of the Koran (with Islam lacking as it does any centralized institution to contextualize those 7th Century scriptures in a 21st Century world, what other definition could there be?) it becomes increasingly difficult to be a good citizen.

Because the great monotheistic faiths of the world are fundamentally different, or else Samuel Huntington never would have gotten published (you don’t have to agree with the man’s conclusions to appreciate his command of history)."

Huntington himself knew, and wrote, that (I paraphrase) his "clash of civilizations" theoretical framework didn't explain everything. Modestly (for him), he put it forth as a useful theoretical lense.

(Oh, and to sell books.)

"There are Muslims who are good citizens who point out to us the more radically dangerous among them, and those of Islamic (as opposed to Islamist) traditions who eschew the active “lesser” Jihad to await God’s inevitable ordering of the world under Sharia. But to be a truly pious and devout Muslim – of the Wahabist and Salafist sects in particular – requires the follower to accept as unquestioned the guidance and example of Mohammed, and act on them, straight down the line. It is useful to remember that “Islam” means submission to God’s will, and God wills the believer to act.

(Some well-meaning civil rights activists say that to acknowledge these inconvenient truths is render oneself an “Islamophobe”, subject to the non-rebuttable charge of racism. But Islam is not a race, it is rather a set of beliefs. These beliefs are open to scrutiny and analysis.)" (Emphasis in original text. - CAA.)

By definition, a "phobia" is an irrational fear. How someone with access to news media over the past decade or so could term a fear of Islam or islamists (or even garden variety muslims) to be wholly irrational, to the point where it merits a clinical-style name, is something CAA couldn't do with a straight face.

"In his Regensburg lecture, the man who would become Pope Benedict XVI committed an impolitic gaffe – one in the character of inadvertently blurting out the truth – when he said quoted 14th Century Byzantine emperor Manuel II Palaiologos (thanks, Zane), “Show me just what Muhammad brought that was new and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached.” The lecture caused quite a stir, not because it was untrue necessarily but because it was likely to make certain people deeply unhappy. And you know how they get when they’re unhappy." (Emphasis in original text. - CAA.)

Clearly His Holiness didn't get the memo about whitewashing European history to fit politically-correct fashions.

9/15

re: "The Strange Case Of Pastor Terry Jones: A Sunday Screed"

The Curmudgeon Emeritus at Eternity Road rejects the "Religion of Peace" construct. Emphatically.

Money quote(s):

"Were we ever to rid ourselves of the notion that Islam is "a religion of peace," we'd fall upon the Middle East, North Africa, Sudan, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Muslim enclaves in Europe, and every other Islamic hellhole in a body. We'd purge that noxious creed from the world out of righteous wrath and humanitarian concern for all decent persons who want only to live in peace. Anyone who would dare to suggest that we'd be wrong to do so would earn our undying contempt."

I've got to say, as un-fond as I am of, the counterfactual ROP mantra, it's always seemed to me that Prof. Huntington's Clash of Civilizations theory was as much a warning as a paradigm. And that Pres. Bush (43) was correct in not making the GWOT into an intercivilizational war.

"There is absolutely no possibility of "reforming" Islam. Islam is founded on violence. It's made all its gains in the world through violence and intimidation."

And behavior which is rewarded will be repeated. Got that part.

re: "Maniacal Missionaries, Myanmar to Mideast"

Gerald at Avuncular American ("An expatriate view of America and the world from Europe") remarks on some intersections of religion, consular work, and public diplomacy.

Money quote(s):

"John Yettaw, who got Burmese opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi into hot water with the country's dictators, apparently just wanted to give the (Buddhist) woman a (Christian) Bible. No wonder the US State Department publicly expressed its outrage over the arrest of Aung San Suu Kyi, while quietly sending consular officials to meet with the "missionary" in jail.
Embassies have to do that"

Yes, we do. Every country's diplomats and consuls can, or should, do this. It's all spelled-out in the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations.

"In some countries (think Mexico), the "arrest/detention of American citizens" requires a considerable investment of Embassy time."

&

"(T)he US has something far more dangerous: a cadre of people in the Pentagon and in the US military bent on spreading their Christian beliefs, at the point of a gun. In the Middle Ages, they called that the Crusades. That is the last thing that the US needs with thousands of troops surrounded by millions of Muslims in Iraq and Afghanistan. In fact, religion is exactly what the region does not need more of."

Hmm, I always thought the Crusades were about freeing the Holy Land (i.e., Jerusalem and surrounding environs), previously the very heart of Christendom, which had been conquered by the followers of a certain "religion of peace" which just happened to spread its beliefs at the point of a sword.

That being said, Gerald is right about us not making things any more difficult for ourselves by getting into the business of Christian evangelism overseas. And by us I mean both the military and civilian arms of the U.S. Government.

Or at least not until or unless this is adopted as part of a future public diplomacy/slash/information warfare policy in some sort of nightmarish Huntington scenario that is (apologies to the late Professor, I'm pretty sure this isn't what he had in mind).

re: "Mr. President: War Is Not A 'Struggle' Or 'Situation' "

Mark Tapson at Big Hollywood is adamant about nomenclature (among other things).

Money quote(s):

"President Obama jettisoned the admittedly empty and useless phrase “war on terror,” a label which pleased pretty much no one, primarily because it didn’t specify an enemy"

"The aim of all this muting of the language in the War with No Name is twofold: for the Obama administration to distance itself from George W. Bush’s “politics of fear,” and to whitewash a plain fact that liberals are suicidally reluctant to acknowledge - that we are at war with radical Islam."

"“Our administration does not believe in a clash of civilizations,” Vice-President Joe Biden announced at his February address in Munich, referring to the now-famous title of Samuel Huntington’s prescient 1998 book The Clash of Civilizations. Well frankly, I don’t believe in it either; I believe instead that we’re embroiled in a clash of civilization versus barbarism, and that it is the defining conflict of our time."

Mr. Tapson should be forgiven if he overlooked that the 1998 book was based upon the late Prof. Huntington's 1995 article in Foreign Policy.

My nuanced take on Mr. Tapson's last point is that the whole objective of much of former Pres. Bush's soft-pedaling was to prevent the clash of global/Western civilization with certain Islamic barbarians from escalating into a true clash of civilizations and cultures.

There would be considerable differences of scale between our "global" war as we've fought it thus far and a "world war" as could have resulted (and might yet).

"(T)he left in general think the conflict is just one big cultural misunderstanding which can be resolved by reassuring fundamentalist Muslims (like the mythical “moderate Taliban“) that we’ll sit down with them, listen to their so-called grievances, and make whatever concessions are necessary (like throwing Israel under the bus) to move forward as mutually respectful partners in a brave new world of prosperity and inter-faith pablum."

"Muslim extremists have been hammering home the point for decades, all across the Muslim world, that America, the Great Satan, is the enemy. Believing he can defuse Islamist hostility by being more “respectful,” by engaging them in still more “dialogue,” and by offering to make their grievances right - all of which the Islamists consider signs of weakness - is a fantasy."

"(A)s much as Islamists would like us to believe this clash is about American foreign policy, it isn’t about their grievances, though their skewed perspective on our foreign policy sometimes provides them with useful recruiting points. In the words of a former Hezbollah leader: “We are not fighting you because we want something from you. We’re fighting you because we want to destroy you.”"

&

"(O)ur Islamist enemies love death more than life, reject freedom in favor of absolute submission to a totalitarian ideology, and won’t be happy until the world is entirely Islamic. They cannot be swayed from their goal by promises of economic prosperity and peaceful coexistence with infidels."