douglass carmichael: core articles

Mon, 20 Sep 2004 23:11:27 GMT

A ver full discussion of the options in raq over at

http://scoop.agonist.org/story/2004/9/19/211433/693

It starts

First, the United States can effect what I would call a strategic and orderly retreat. This is the option that General Odom has called for in a recent National Interest essay. The benefits of this plan are limited to a pause in the tempo of our war fighting capability, offering us some much needed time to recoup our losses, refit and retrain. We would then have more freedom of action in Afghanistan, as more resources would be freed up for a more focused and judicious application in that sad land. The downside to this option would be the global and regional perception that we had been beaten, driven out by a rag-tag army of "dead-enders" and terrorist thugs. The perception would be akin to the loss of prestige suffered by the Israeli's upon their unilateral withdrawal from Lebanon, magnified ten times. This option would also reduce the amount of capital we are currently sinking into Iraq. This is no small sum as our current burn rate is roughly $4 billion a month. The success of this option would largely be in our hands, not that of the enemy. Success therefore, would be highly probable.
The second option is that which I believe the United States is currently considering. This option entails a large offensive into regions that are currently labeled by the media as "no-go" zones. These areas include, but are not limited to, Fallujah, Ramadi, Baquba and Samarra. The benefits of the successful conclusion of this option are significant. One would assume that the insurgency would be crippled, perhaps permanently. Furthermore, the United States and her allies would attain virtual freedom of action in the region to effect political accommodation by other, adversarial, regimes. However, this scenario is not without grave risks itself. First, one must take into consideration the plain fact that the enemy has a choice in this option too. Frankly, our performance has not been successful to date. If it were, there would be no insurgency. His vote, therefore, counts. However, I would not count out the bravery and determination of the American fighting force. Our will is formidable when the politicians do not meddle. This option would also grant us a small window of opportunity to effect some necessary political accommodations in Iraq, accommodations necessary to our future success.
There are other significant risks that I would call political. One, the fallout from the massive civilian deaths that would arise from such an offensive and the regional and global outcry would be significant and should not be underestimated. Second the amount of capital required to rebuild Iraq after the intense urban fighting this scenario calls for would be immense. A rough guess: double our current burn rate for a short time, perhaps six months, and then a return to the current rate. Finally, the amount of US casualties will also be extremely high. This option would probably not pass the "Dover Test" but in the current media environment would probably be feasible. Success in this option would be possible but not certain.
Finally, we come to the last option, which I would term the "More of the Same" option. We can continue down the fruitless path were are currently trudging. We would see the same amount of casualties, the same burn rate and a fighting force stretched to the very limits of effectiveness. This solution offers no political resolution in the region, maintains the strain on our fighting force and expenditures with few visible benefits other than delaying the inevitable choices mentioned above. One can hope that things will get better but hope is not a policy. The possibility of success arising from this option is virtually zero.
These are the options as I see them. This risk versus reward discussion is in no way complete. I simply lay it before you to consider. However, I believe these are the only realistic options we have. We can consider them with the full force of our reasoning faculties or we can bury our heads in the sand. But in the end, I believe we will be faced with two choices: one rich in blood and the possibility of victory; the other, simply an admission of our inability to effect our will. Either way, our choices are not good.

Mon, 20 Sep 2004 00:32:06 GMT

One way to understand america is by looking at apparently dissimilar countries where it is obvious the dynamics are actually quite similar. We have the opportunity in a very full two part article from the London Review on the state of politics and culture in contemporary france. Here are the listings, and I will have more to say later this week.

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v26/n17/print/ande01_.html

and

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v26/n18/print/ande01_.html

Thu, 16 Sep 2004 18:27:32 GMT

Highly recommend this review, from which excerpts.

Pasted from http://chronicle.com/free/v51/i04/04a01001.htm

From the issue dated September 17, 2004

Delving Into Democracy's Shadows

The sociologist Michael Mann took a detour from his epic study of power in human history. It led him straight to the horrors at the center of modern life.

The work begins with the dawn of civilization in Mesopotamia, charting the emergence of four distinct forms of power (ideological, military, economic, and political) that Mr. Mann finds operating throughout recorded history. The second volume, appearing in 1993, extended the analysis up to the outbreak of the First World War. A review in The Journal of Economic History began, simply, "Colossal!" Scholars often mention Max Weber's Economy and Society (1914), another work routinely called monumental, when discussing Mr. Mann's work.

But the edifice remains, as yet, unfinished -- because the 20th century turned out to be a nightmare. "As soon as I completed volume two," Mr. Mann says, "I began to write volume three, which continues the story from 1914 up to the present day. I spent a year in Spain, working at an institute with a wonderful library on fascism," he recalls. "So I began to write a chapter on fascism. That turned into a book in its own right."

He refers to Fascists, published by Cambridge in July, a comparative analysis of how fascist movements developed in half a dozen European countries between the World Wars. His research also drove Mr. Mann "to write about the Holocaust, about what the worst fascists did when in power" -- which led him, in turn, to study the more recent killing fields of Cambodia, Rwanda, and the Balkans. His contribution to the field of study now known as "comparative genocide" is forthcoming from Cambridge in November as The Dark Side of Democracy: Explaining Ethnic Cleansing.

At a time when pundits wax at length on the idea that economic globalization has undermined the old ideal of national sovereignty, Mr. Mann offers a very different view of the world. The ideal of the nation-state crystallized over the course of centuries, he says, and has taken root everywhere. It will not soon vanish. Mr. Mann interprets fascism as "merely the most extreme form" of "nation-statism."

His thesis in The Dark Side of Democracy is, if anything, more troubling: the extension of democracy throughout the world carries the seeds (if by no means the certainty) of mass murder.

Order, but No Law

Mr. Mann's sweeping vision of historical sociology does not boil down to formulas about the rise and fall of civilizations. (Any resemblance between his books and Oswald Spengler's Decline of the West or Arnold Toynbee's A Study of History is strictly at the level of ambition and heft.)

"No laws are possible in sociology," he wrote in the first volume of his magnum opus, "… for the number of cases is far smaller than the number of variables effecting the outcome." But Mr. Mann imposes some analytic order on what he calls "the patterned confusion" of human history by distinguishing four general categories of power operating at any given time -- the ideological, economic, military, and political forms.

Economic power derives from, as Mr. Mann puts it, "the human need to extract, transform, distribute, and consume the resources of nature for sustenance." It is distinct from political power ("the control of the state") and ideological power (basically, the myths and rituals that give human beings access to a sense of ultimate meaning). Each form of power is channeled through its own network of institutions. "In particular historical phases or periods," says Mr. Mann, "one source of social power may well be primary. "But over all, I don't think that general relations of primacy can be asserted. In that sense, I'm Weberian, rather than Marxian."

Mr. Mann goes one step beyond Max Weber, however -- questioning the German theorist's classic definition of the state as the institution possessing "a monopoly on legitimate violence." For Mr. Mann distinguishes military power ("the social organization of physical violence") as a distinct force, with its own institutions and norms. "In principle, all well organized militaries could seize state power," he notes, "but only a few actually do."

The ordinary citizen may be justifiably relieved to hear that. Sociologists would do well to ponder it as an intriguing paradox. Mr. Mann complains, however, that they have tended to neglect the military and warfare as important factors in social structure. Until the rise of industrialism, he notes, economic exchange usually occurred over short geographical distances. "Large areas and diverse peoples" became integrated largely through the force of arms. Other scholars commenting on Mr. Mann's work have pointed to his emphasis on military power as one of his most important contributions.

The Grid and the Cage

A four-dimensional model of power sounds abstract, even rather bloodless. In practice, though, Mr. Mann is unrelentingly empirical. He wields "the IEMP grid" (as some have dubbed his four-pronged approach) to integrate a wide range of specialist work by other scholars -- to which he adds his own crunchings of econometric data, for centuries for which it was available. Each of the forms of power he studies corresponds to networks of institutions that interlink with, struggle against, and shape one another. The result is a set of grand narratives of history that Randall Collins, a professor of sociology at the University of Pennsylvania, has called "our contemporary standard of knowledge" on several topics.

The energy really starts to flow through the IEMP grid when Mr. Mann analyzes the rise of the nation-state. It was not simply a matter of local markets integrating, over time, into national economies -- which then (under catchy slogans like "no taxation without representation!") reshaped the state to defend the interests of business. All of that did happen. But at the same time, new forms of military organization required the integration of large numbers of conscripts. People whose sense of identity once came from belonging to a particular village came to understand themselves as citizens of the same nation.

As each form of social power in his theoretical grid developed, says Mr. Mann, it generated its own vested interests. The revenues raised through taxation could be used not only to finance the military but to build roads, schools, and other public services -- giving the state "infrastructural power" in addition to its military control over territory. That growing infrastructure then reinforced economic growth. Meanwhile, the sense of national identity itself became a kind of ideological power, embodied in education, media, and the political organizations that sought to control the state.

As a result, all of these interests increasingly intersect to create what he calls the "cage" of the nation-state. It is a term with important overtones in classic social theory, calling to mind Weber's sense that modern life unfolds within an "iron cage of bureacracy."

By the early 20th century, nation-statism was an almost unquestioned fact of life in Europe and the United States. And the emergence of numerous successful anti-colonial movements showed that it had been exported throughout the world as well.

Street Fighting Men

In Fascists, Mr. Mann contends that the rise of right-wing authoritarian movements between the world wars can best be understood as, in effect, nation-statism forging not a cage but a concentration camp. His analysis puts him at odds with the Marxist interpretation of fascism, which treats it as a violent effort to preserve capitalism from the challenge of left-wing mobilizations following World War I. Mr. Mann also rejects efforts to treat fascism as a totalitarian "political religion" emerging in reaction against modernization and democracy.

All of Europe underwent severe economic crisis in the period between the wars, he notes. But fascists made no serious bid for power in countries where the state had both well-established institutions of representative democracy and a solid basis of infrastructural power. In England, for example, the black-shirted members of Oswald Mosley's British Union of Fascists were exotic and attention-grabbing, but ineffectual at much besides outbursts of street hooliganism.

Mr. Mann focuses on the countries where fascism did become a mass movement that either took control or strongly influenced the state: Germany, Italy, Austria, Hungary, Romania, and Spain. In each case, he contends, state power was divided between an established and narrowly based group (for example, landowners) and a new, relatively inexperienced set of parliamentary institutions. Mr. Mann calls this formation a "semi-authoritarian, semi-liberal state." Fascist movements were similarly hybrid. While the cult of national glory and calls for organic community might sound conservative, Mr. Mann observes that fascist movements also recruited on the basis of frustration with the slow pace of political elites in creating the infrastructure to provide basic services to the population.

Proto-fascist ideas began circulating among small groups of intellectuals throughout Europe in the late 19th century, but the movement took off in the 1920s, pulling in young men who had gone through the experience of "total war." Fascist movements always created paramilitary organizations, Mr. Mann says. But most of them also placed great emphasis on electioneering -- and proved very good at it. The fascists were enemies of democracy in the abstract, but devoted to mobilizing mass participation in ways that were often anathema to old-fashioned "conservative authoritarians."

Mr. Mann also says that "the degree of capitalist support for fascist movements … varied considerably between the different countries." What was consistent, however, was that the core fascist constituencies had strong vested interests in the growth and dynamism of the nation-state. "Soldiers and veterans above all, but also civil servants, teachers, and public-sector manual workers were all disproportionately fascist in almost all the countries of mass fascism," he writes. Students, too, were always heavily represented.

Hungary vs. Romania

Mr. Mann contends that, important as economic factors were, they are insufficient to understanding the movement. Consider the contrast between Hungary and Romania. "Hungary had probably the worst middle-class job prospects, Romania the best," writes Mr. Mann, "yet both produced fascism among those most affected, students and public-sector workers." He also notes that in both countries fascists "recruited more from proletarian than bourgeois backgrounds."

In Mr. Mann's analysis, fascism appealed not only to people seeking to preserve the status quo, or retreat to an early form of social order, but also to those who wanted modernization to continue under the firm hand of the nation-state.

The defeat of fascism on the battlefield in 1945 also meant its demise as a political force in Europe, says Mr. Mann. Authoritarian and xenophobic parties have sometimes won parliamentary representation. But no movement has had the combination of paramilitary and electoral support typical of fascism in the 1920s and '30s. "Institutionalized liberal democracy," as he puts it, "is proof against fascism." While currents embodying aggressive strands of nation-statism may yet emerge in Eastern Europe or the Russian federation, the requirement of democracy for entry into the European Union "has remained influential."

But that does not mean that Mr. Mann is quite ready to join Francis Fukuyama in celebrating liberal democracy as the end of history. In his forthcoming book, The Dark Side of Democracy, Mr. Mann contends that nation-statism and ethnic cleansing are intertwined in ways that make the spread of democracy problematic.

Ethnic violence existed before the rise of the nation-state. Still, Mr. Mann says it tended to be limited and instrumental. Killing was a means by which one group subjugated another, whether to enslave it (thereby integrating it into the conqueror's economic system) or to convert it (thus extending a religion's ideological power grid).

He sees violence used to drive an ethnic group out of a state, or to destroy it, as a relatively new thing in history -- and one closely associated with the emergence of democratic forms of political organization.

He points to the contrast between European colonies under authoritarian rule and those in which the settlers could control local institutions. In Spanish and Portuguese colonies, the use of violence by authoritarian governments tended to be limited. "Stable authoritarian regimes," says Mr. Mann, "tend to govern by divide and rule, balancing the demands of powerful groups, including ethnic ones." But the transition to democracy tends to unleash ethnic cleansing. "When settlers in North American and Australian states and colonies acquired de facto and de jure self-

government," he says, "murder also increased."

Mr. Mann makes a similar point about Rwanda. Between 1973 and 1994, the dictatorship of President Habyarima, a Hutu, was certainly oppressive to the Tutsi minority. But it also "somewhat restrained ethnic violence." In the early 1990s -- amidst an influx of Tutsi from Uganda -- the Rwandan government moved toward a multiparty, constitutional democracy. This shift accelerated the transformation of ethnic tensions into attempted extermination. In April 1994, Hutus were slaughtering Tutsis in an organized campaign of genocide at a rate of almost 300 per hour.

Power to the People

The problem, says Mr. Mann, comes from a fateful ambiguity at the heart of democracy -- "rule by the people," as the Greek source of the term has it. But within a nation-state, "the people" tends not to mean simply "the ordinary citizens," but those sharing a distinct culture -- an "ethnos." In a nation-state that is authoritarian but stable, ethnic violence may be routine, but it tends not to involve struggle for control of political power.

With democratization, however, the stakes increase. Ethnic nationalism proves strongest, and most deadly, when one group feels economically exploited or threatened by another. (In Rwanda, for example, Tutsis tended to be more prosperous than the Hutus.) Mr. Mann lists a series of steps through which the tensions may reach a brink -- at which point, in the name of democracy, ordinary people seek to purify the nation-state of any ethnic "contamination."

In calling genocidal violence "the dark side of democracy," Mr. Mann says he is not denouncing the institutions of the democratic nation-state itself. The demos need not be confused with, or limited to, one ethnos. The diversity of citizens is something, he writes, "which liberalism recognizes as central to democracy."

But according to David D. Laitin, a professor of political science at Stanford University, Mr. Mann "uses his erudition and keenness of subtle argument to cloud social reality rather than to clarify it." In a paper to appear in An Anatomy of Power: The Social Theory of Michael Mann, forthcoming next year from Cambridge University Press, Mr. Laitin contends that "the culprit" in genocide "is not democracy, but a form of politics that uses words similar to [those employed by] democrats, but in a different semantic sense."

Mr. Laitin also suggests that the argument of The Dark Side of Democracy itself rests on a kind of basic confusion. "Mann implies that because democracy and genocide are both modern, they implicate one another," he writes. "Logically, Mann is incorrectly linking two phenomena that are temporally but not causally linked. This type of reasoning would make democracy culpable for world war, AIDS, and rap music."

Striking Back at the Empire

Mr. Mann is now back to work on The Sources of Social Power. His long march through fascism and ethnic cleansing has transformed his sense of how to approach the 20th century. "I realized, through that, that I could not write volume three in the same detailed, empirical way that I'd written the first two. There's too much material, too much scholarship. Fascism was only one of a half-dozen topics for the 20th century, and I'd ended up writing a whole book about it."

Instead, he says, the third volume will offer "a mixture of historical narrative and conceptual analysis. There's a section on empire. There's one on the development of capitalism, and on the difference that wars and ideologies have made to it. The theme of globalization has always been there, and it comes to fruition in a section on the post-World War II period." In fact, the third volume will be called Globalizations. (Mann is considering a fourth volume in the series, which he describes as a theoretical summation of the project.)

The plural in that title is in keeping with the IEMP framework -- for Mr. Mann is very skeptical of ideas about a monolithic "world system" of capitalist development. "The expansion of the economy," he says, "has been paralleled by the expansion of the nation-state system, of wars, and of ideologies. These are not the same thing. They don't link together to form a global system." The different forms of globalization "sometimes produce major contradiction," he says. "More often, they produce disjunctions, because they're completely different, rather than contradictory."

In the months leading up to the Iraq war, Mr. Mann took another detour from the third volume -- long enough to write Incoherent Empire (Verso, 2003), a scathing criticism of the idea that the United States can impose a Pax Americana upon the world. Quoting the White House's oft-repeated estimate that 100,000 international terrorists were trained by Al Qaeda in Afghanistan, Mr. Mann points out that most radical Islamists concentrate on struggles to dominate their own countries, rather than on exporting terrorism.

"The age of empires is over," says Mr. Mann. "We're in the age of nation-states, for better or worse."

One can see the dangers for the United States. One cost of Iraq is the number of americans who have served under total war conditions and have their identity formed by it. If we now have an estmatede 20,000 us wounded, 250,000, who have rotated in and out of Iraq, and 50,000 total Iraq dead, we see that the karmic buildup is fierce.

Sun, 22 Aug 2004 03:37:58 GMT

Two tough articles, one from the progressive and on from the neocon side. Both are serious attempts to name the reality. The emotional and value base is nearly orthogonal, missing each other. But the struggle to understand them, and what you think, and why, is really worth the hard work. My own copies are now about one third my notes, and I've just started to fully understand the nature of the beasts. Agre's is a brilliant analysis of conservative posturing, and Podhoretz's is as solid attempt to lay out the view that the US is the pinnacle of civilization (city on the hill) and we need to defined it with everything. That he treats Bush a the personification of American wit and will is of course in my mind, ludicrous. but Dealing with all the history and logic is not easy.

Pasted from <http://polaris.gseis.ucla.edu/pagre/conservatism.html>

What Is Conservatism and What Is Wrong with It?

Philip E. Agre

August 2004

Liberals in the United States have been losing political debates to conservatives for a quarter century. In order to start winning again, liberals must answer two simple questions: what is conservatism, and what is wrong with it? As it happens, the answers to these questions are also simple:

Q: What is conservatism?

A: Conservatism is the domination of society by an aristocracy.

Q: What is wrong with conservatism?

A: Conservatism is incompatible with democracy, prosperity, and civilization in general. It is a destructive system of inequality and prejudice that is founded on deception and has no place in the modern world.

These ideas are not new. Indeed they were common sense until recently. Nowadays, though, most of the people who call themselves "conservatives" have little notion of what conservatism even is. They have been deceived by one of the great public relations campaigns of human history. Only by analyzing this deception will it become possible to revive democracy in the United States.

//1 The Main Arguments of Conservatism

From the pharaohs of ancient Egypt to the self-regarding thugs of ancient Rome to the glorified warlords of medieval and absolutist Europe, in nearly every urbanized society throughout human history, there have been people who have tried to constitute themselves as an aristocracy. These people and their allies are the conservatives.

One weakness in his argument is that he says things about right authoritarians that also applies to left authoritarians. The article is an powerful analysis of self serving elites at the cost of others. True conservatives, one might think, work for the good of the whole society. but that there are such people might be an illusion. The alternative is a forthright and demanding democratic ethos.

This comp[ares with a very thorough article on why winning in Iraq is important part of a world war 4 (3 was the cold war). I hate the tone and logic of this piece, but it has important history, and force s one to think. It is a hard exercise, very worth while. the two together, rubbed together so to speak, will heat your mind - a hard workout.

Pasted from <http://www.commentarymagazine.com/podhoretz.htm>

Commentary

September 2004

World War IV: How It Started, What It Means, and Why We Have to Win

Norman Podhoretz

This past spring, when it seemed that everything that could go wrong in Iraq was going wrong, a plague of amnesia began sweeping through the country. Caught up in the particulars with which we were being assaulted 24 hours a day, we seemed to have lost sight of the context in which such details could be measured and understood and related to one another. Small things became large, large things became invisible, and hysteria filled the air.

Since then, of course, and especially after the hand over of authority on June 30 to an interim Iraqi government, matters have become more complicated. But the relentless pressure of events, and the continuing onslaught both of details and of their often tendentious or partisan interpretation, have hardly let up at all. It is for this reason that, in what follows, I have tried to step back from the daily barrage and to piece together the story of what this nation has been fighting to accomplish since September 11, 2001.

..

Telling the story properly has required more than a straight narrative leading from 9/11 to the time of writing. For one thing, I have had to interrupt the narrative repeatedly in order to confront and clear away the many misconceptions, distortions, and outright falsifications that have been perpetrated. In addition, I have had to broaden the perspective so as to make it possible to see why the great struggle into which the United States was plunged by 9/11 can only be understood if we think of it as World War IV.

My hope is that telling the story from this perspective and in these ways will demonstrate that the road we have taken since 9/11 is the only safe course for us to follow. As we proceed along this course, questions will inevitably arise as to whether this or that move was necessary or right; and such questions will breed hesitations and even demands that we withdraw from the field. Some of this happened even in World War II, perhaps the most popular war the United States has ever fought, and much more of it in World War III (that is, the cold war); and now it is happening again, notably with respect to Iraq.

He fails, in my view, to pay attention to culture, and to the complexity of events within the US and the market world, and fails to give weight to the obvious: that American democracy is not the only meaning of democracy, and that the destruction wrought by too aggressive an economy is devastating - as devastating as terrorism itself. He fails at empathy.

Wed, 18 Aug 2004 23:37:37 GMT

Highly recommend this article

http://polaris.gseis.ucla.edu/pagre/conservatism.html

What Is Conservatism and What Is Wrong with It?

Philip E. Agre
August 2004

Liberals in the United States have been losing political debates to conservatives for a quarter century. In order to start winning again, liberals must answer two simple questions: what is conservatism, and what is wrong with it? As it happens, the answers to these questions are also simple:

Q: What is conservatism?
A: Conservatism is the domination of society by an aristocracy.
Q: What is wrong with conservatism?
A: Conservatism is incompatible with democracy, prosperity, and civilization in general. It is a destructive system of inequality and prejudice that is founded on deception and has no place in the modern world.

These ideas are not new. Indeed they were common sense until recently. Nowadays, though, most of the people who call themselves "conservatives" have little notion of what conservatism even is. They have been deceived by one of the great public relations campaigns of human history. Only by analyzing this deception will it become possible to revive democracy in the United States.

I think he fails to analyze left authoritarianism, but the aalysis is so good, and raises such good questions, and is so courageous - read it.

Tue, 25 May 2004 03:13:00 GMT

A long worthwhile history of the ME in terms of the brits and france starting beginning of the 20th century.

http://logosonline.home.igc.org/watenpaugh_iraq.htm

Thu, 13 May 2004 19:51:31 GMT

Another must read.. Friedman in the NYT shifts..

http://nytimes.com/2004/05/13/opinion/13FRIE.html

Why, in the face of the Abu Ghraib travesty, wouldn't the administration make some uniquely American gesture? Because these folks have no clue how to export hope. They would never think of saying, "Let's close this prison immediately and reopen it in a month as the Abu Ghraib Technical College for Computer Training — with all the equipment donated by Dell, H.P. and Microsoft." Why didn't the administration ever use 9/11 as a spur to launch a Manhattan project for energy independence and conservation, so we could break out of our addiction to crude oil, slowly disengage from this region and speak truth to fundamentalist regimes, such as Saudi Arabia? (Addicts never tell the truth to their pushers.) Because that might have required a gas tax or a confrontation with the administration's oil moneymen. Why did the administration always — rightly — bash Yasir Arafat, but never lift a finger or utter a word to stop Ariel Sharon's massive building of illegal settlements in the West Bank? Because while that might have earned America credibility in the Middle East, it might have cost the Bush campaign Jewish votes in Florida.

And, of course, why did the president praise Mr. Rumsfeld rather than fire him? Because Karl Rove says to hold the conservative base, you must always appear to be strong, decisive and loyal. It is more important that the president appear to be true to his team than that America appear to be true to its principles. (Here's the new Rummy Defense: "I am accountable. But the little guys were responsible. I was just giving orders.")

Add it all up, and you see how we got so off track in Iraq, why we are dancing alone in the world — and why our president, who has a strong moral vision, has no moral influence.

Wed, 28 Apr 2004 20:49:03 GMT

Must read article, recommended by several, on the background of Muqtada al-Sadr

http://www.csmonitor.com/2004/0427/p01s03-woiq.html

Wed, 07 Apr 2004 19:25:26 GMT

Very helpful article. Goes to the core of comparative risk analysis, and the problem of overblown self serving rhetoric.

The war on terror misfired. Blame it all on the neocons
The legitimate grievances of Muslims were never listened to by the west
David Clark
Wednesday April 7, 2004
The Guardian

http://www.guardian.co.uk/print/0,3858,4896760-103550,00.html

It was never going to be easy to keep a sense of perspective in the face of a terrorist campaign as violent as the one being waged by al-Qaida; some have found it harder than others. The claim by James Woolsey, the former CIA director, that we are in the process of fighting "world war three" stands out as a particularly silly example of the hyperbolic overdrive that has characterised much of the debate over the past two-and-a-half years. So does Tony Blair's assertion that the terrorist threat is "existential" in its scope.
Islamist terrorism poses a threat to the physical existence of those who stand to be killed as a result of its actions, as yesterday's news of a plot to explode a chemical bomb in Britain reminded us. But it is not comparable to the threat posed to western democracy and European Jewry by Nazism in the 1930s and 1940s, let alone the prospect of nuclear annihilation during the cold war. Policy choices that proceed from that assumption are almost certain to be wrong.

Isreal, the arabs and the west...complex cross contamination.

Sat, 20 Mar 2004 17:31:01 GMT

A very interesting review, seemingly off the beaten path, pays high rewards.Extensive quotes from

Seeds of Revolution By Avishai Margalit, lan Buruma he New York Review of Books:

http://www.nvbooks.com/articles/16955

Theodor Herzl, founding father of the Zionist movtment..his novel, Altneuland (Old-New Land) is a blueprint of the perfect Jewish state, a technocratic Utopia, a socialist dream with all the advantages of capitalism, an idealistic colonial enterprise, ....blinkered faith in economic progress; trust in social engineering by the state; a fetishistic taste for power plants and big dams....

This is all most gratifying, but what do the Arabs make of it all? What about their traditions, beliefs, and aspirations to be proud and free? Not to mention their "identity." The question does in fact come up. Kingscourt, impressed as he is by the Zionists' great achievements, asks an Arab named Reschid Bey whether his people resent the new interlopers on their tribal lands. "What a question!" he replies. "It was a great blessing for all of us." The landowners sold their land to the Jews at high prices, and "those who had nothing stood to lose nothing, and could only gain." Nothing, he continued, was more wretched than an Arab village in the late nineteenth century. "The peasants' clay hovels were unfit for stables. The children lay naked and neglected in the streets, and grew up like dumb beasts." But now everything was different. For everyone "benefitted from the progressive measures of the New Society, whether they wanted to or not, whether they joined it or not." The s*wamps were drained, canals dug, trees planted. And there was plenty of work for everyone. Only begging was now strictly forbidden. ...

Altneuland is worth reading because it contains so much that is grand and hopeful about Western thought since the eighteenth-century Enlightenment. From this kind of thinking came the Industrial Revolution, liberal democracy, scientific discovery, and civil rights. But the same Promethean dreams of European rationalists, taken to logical extremes and brutally implemented, often by nonEuropeans who wanted to catch up with Western progress, have ended in the mass graves of the gulag and the killing fields of China and Cambodia. Europeans justified their imperial conquests with claims of progress and enlightenment. Asian tyrants murdered millions with the same justifications. Reactions to the rationalist dreams of Eastern tyrants or Western empires have been just as bloody. The Islamist revolutionary movement that currently stalks the world, from Kabul to Java, would not have existed without the harsh secularism of Reza Shah or the failed experiments in state socialism in Egypt, Syria, and Algeria. This is why it was such a misfortune, in many ways, for the Middle East to have encountered the modern West for the first time through echoes of the French Revolution. Robespierre and the Jacobins were inspiring heroes for Arab radicals: •ogressive, egalitarian, and opposed to the Christian Church. Later models for Arab •ogress— Mussolini's Italy, Nazi Germany, and the Soviet Union—were even more disastrous. But to see the upheavals of the twentieth century as a pendulum, winging from Western rationalism to Oriental religious zeal, would be a mistake, for the two extremes are dangerously entangled.

The furnace for such syntheses is often located in the West itself. Pol Pot melded revolutionary Marxism with Khmer nationalism as a student of radio technology in Paris. The Iranian revolutionary scholar Ali Shari'ati was only a few years younger than Pol Pot, and like him spent some years studying in Paris, where he translated the works of Frantz Fanon and Che Guevara. Shari'ati's views on "Islam as practical socialism" were a conscious fusion of secular and religious dogmas. His faith was turned into the vehicle of armed struggle. Martyrdom ("red death") was promoted as the highest form of existence—not just an end, but a goal in itself. He had turned from Marxism to a purist version of Islam. And yet he used the political terminology of freedom and equality.

Sati' al-Husri (1880-1968) was a secular thinker whose concept of Arab unity was based less on Islam than on blood ties, history, and language. An activist in Damascus when the French ruled Syria in the 1920s, he was a keen student of German Romantic thinkers, such as Fichte and Herder, who countered the French Enlightenment by promoting the notion of an organic, volkisch nation, rooted in blood and soil. His ideal of pulling the Arab world together in a huge organic community was directly inspired by pan-German theories that held sway in fascist circles in Vienna and Berlin in the 1920s. An Arab Volksgemeinschaft, bound by military discipline and heroic individual sacrifice, was what he dreamed of. And, by the way, some of the early Zionists were just as much in thrall of the same German ideas. In his memoirs, one such figure, Hans Kohn, writes that young Jews "transferred Fichte's teaching" into the "context of our own situation...we accepted his appeal to bring forth the ideal community by placing all the power of the rationally and ethically mature individual at the service of his own nation." .... The aim, in any case, was to overcome "abstract Western thinking" and free the Arab people from feudalism, colonialism, imperialism, and Zionism. This, along with a version of totalitarian socialism, is still the official ideology of the Baathists today.

k Although Christian fundamentalists speak of a crusade, the West is not at war with slam. Indeed, the fiercest battles will be fought inside the Muslim world, not strictly between religionists and secularists, but between those who favor civil liberties and freedom of thought and those who wish to impose a theocracy. The religious revolution will have to be halted preferably not by outside intervention but by Muslims themselves. In fact, Western intervention often makes things harder for non-Western liberals, ..Where political, religious, and intellectual freedom has already been established, it must be defended against its enemies, with force, if need be, but also with conviction. What should be clear is that we have not been witnessing the Manichaean history of one civilization at war with another. On the contrary, it is a tale of crosscontamination, the spread of bad ideas. This could happen to us now if we fall for the temptation to fight fire with fire, Islamism with our own forms of intolerance. Religious authority, especially in the United States, is already having a dangerous influence on political governance. We cannot afford to close our societies as a defense against those who have closed theirs. For then we would all become Occidentalists, bent on the destruction of an ill-defined, less than human, alien enemy, and there would be nothing left to defend.

Method of unpacking cultural events, and events that at first glance are not cultural.

Tue, 16 Mar 2004 22:59:21 GMT

I highly recommend this chapter (hard to read in its PDF format) on a new methodology for unpacking social events. Taking "trauma" it shows how a trauma is not a human reaction to a natural event, but a highly culture dependent interpretation into daily life.

http://research.yale.edu/ccs/wpapers/trauma.pdf

and his manifesto paper on cultural sociology

http://research.yale.edu/ccs/strong.html

To believe in the possibility of a “cultural sociology” is to subscribe to the idea that every action, no matter how instrumental, reflexive or coerced vis-a-vis its external environments (Alexander 1988), is embedded to some extent in a horizon of affect and meaning.

Culturally unmusical scholars have depicted human action as insipidly or brutally instrumental, as if it were constructed without reference to the internal environments of actions that are established by the moral structures of sacred-good and profane-evil.

the usefulness for today of

Wendy Griswold (1983), for example, shows how the trickster figure was transformed with the emergence of Restoration drama. In the medieval morality play, the figure of “vice” was evil. He was later to morph into the attractive, quick thinking “gallant”. The new character was one that could appeal to an audience of young, disinherited men who had migrated to the city and had to depend on their wits for social advancement.

Kagan: power and Weakness

Mon, 08 Mar 2004 04:31:23 GMT

This is extremely helpful. The hobbes/kant argument needs to be understood: basically that europe can be civilized in the US plays the bad cop. Is there another policy possible?

Europe’s evolution to its present state occurred under the mantle of the U.S. security guarantee and could not have occurred without it. Not only did the United States for almost half a century supply a shield against such external threats as the Soviet Union and such internal threats as may have been posed by ethnic conflict in places like the Balkans. More important, the United States was the key to the solution of the German problem and perhaps still is. Germany’s Fischer, in the Humboldt University speech, noted two “historic decisions” that made the new Europe possible: “the usa’s decision to stay in Europe” and “France’s and Germany’s commitment to the principle of integration, beginning with economic links.” But of course the latter could never have occurred without the former. France’s willingness to risk the reintegration of Germany into Europe — and France was, to say the least, highly dubious — depended on the promise of continued American involvement in Europe as a guarantee against any resurgence of German militarism. Nor were postwar Germans unaware that their own future in Europe depended on the calming presence of the American military.

The United States, in short, solved the Kantian paradox for the Europeans. Kant had argued that the only solution to the immoral horrors of the Hobbesian world was the creation of a world government. But he also feared that the “state of universal peace” made possible by world government would be an even greater threat to human freedom than the Hobbesian international order, inasmuch as such a government, with its monopoly of power, would become “the most horrible despotism.”¹¹ How nations could achieve perpetual peace without destroying human freedom was a problem Kant could not solve. But for Europe the problem was solved by the United States. By providing security from outside, the United States has rendered it unnecessary for Europe’s supranational government to provide it. Europeans did not need power to achieve peace and they do not need power to preserve it.

The current situation abounds in ironies. Europe’s rejection of power politics, its devaluing of military force as a tool of international relations, have depended on the presence of American military forces on European soil. Europe’s new Kantian order could flourish only under the umbrella of American power exercised according to the rules of the old Hobbesian order. American power made it possible for Europeans to believe that power was no longer important. And now, in the final irony, the fact that United States military power has solved the European problem, especially the “German problem,” allows Europeans today to believe that American military power, and the “strategic culture” that has created and sustained it, are outmoded and dangerous.

Most Europeans do not see the great paradox: that their passage into post-history has depended on the United States not making the same passage. Because Europe has neither the will nor the ability to guard its own paradise and keep it from being overrun, spiritually as well as physically, by a world that has yet to accept the rule of “moral consciousness,” it has become dependent on America’s willingness to use its military might to deter or defeat those around the world who still believe in power politics.

Some Europeans do understand the conundrum. Some Britons, not surprisingly, understand it best. Thus Robert Cooper writes of the need to address the hard truth that although “within the postmodern world [i.e., the Europe of today], there are no security threats in the traditional sense,” nevertheless, throughout the rest of the world — what Cooper calls the “modern and pre-modern zones” — threats abound. If the postmodern world does not protect itself, it can be destroyed. But how does Europe protect itself without discarding the very ideals and principles that undergird its pacific system?

“The challenge to the postmodern world,” Cooper argues, “is to get used to the idea of double standards.” Among themselves, Europeans may “operate on the basis of laws and open cooperative security.” But when dealing with the world outside Europe, “we need to revert to the rougher methods of an earlier era — force, preemptive attack, deception, whatever is necessary.” This is Cooper’s principle for safeguarding society: “Among ourselves, we keep the law but when we are operating in the jungle, we must also use the laws of the jungle.”

Cooper’s argument is directed at Europe, and it is appropriately coupled with a call for Europeans to cease neglecting their defenses, “both physical and psychological.” But what Cooper really describes is not Europe’s future but America’s present. For it is the United States that has had the difficult task of navigating between these two worlds, trying to abide by, defend, and further the laws of advanced civilized society while simultaneously employing military force against those who refuse to abide by those rules. The United States is already operating according to Cooper’s double standard, and for the very reasons he suggests. American leaders, too, believe that global security and a liberal order — as well as Europe’s “postmodern” paradise — cannot long survive unless the United States does use its power in the dangerous, Hobbesian world that still flourishes outside Europe.

What this means is that although the United States has played the critical role in bringing Europe into this Kantian paradise, and still plays a key role in making that paradise possible, it cannot enter this paradise itself. It mans the walls but cannot walk through the gate. The United States, with all its vast power, remains stuck in history, left to deal with the Saddams and the ayatollahs, the Kim Jong Ils and the Jiang Zemins, leaving the happy benefits to others.

An acceptable division?

s this situation tolerable for the United States? In many ways, it is. Contrary to what many believe, the United States can shoulder the burden of maintaining global security without much help from Europe. The United States spends a little over 3 percent of its gdp on defense today. Were Americans to increase that to 4 percent — meaning a defense budget in excess of $500 billion per year — it would still represent a smaller percentage of national wealth than Americans spent on defense throughout most of the past half-century. Even Paul Kennedy, who invented the term “imperial overstretch” in the late 1980s (when the United States was spending around 7 percent of its gdp on defense), believes the United States can sustain its current military spending levels and its current global dominance far into the future. Can the United States handle the rest of the world without much help from Europe? The answer is that it already does. The United States has maintained strategic stability in Asia with no help from Europe. In the Gulf War, European help was token; so it has been more recently in Afghanistan, where Europeans are once again “doing the dishes”; and so it would be in an invasion of Iraq to unseat Saddam. Europe has had little to offer the United States in strategic military terms since the end of the Cold War — except, of course, that most valuable of strategic assets, a Europe at peace.

The United States can manage, therefore, at least in material terms. Nor can one argue that the American people are unwilling to shoulder this global burden, since they have done so for a decade already. After September 11, they seem willing to continue doing so for a long time to come. Americans apparently feel no resentment at not being able to enter a “postmodern” utopia. There is no evidence most Americans desire to. Partly because they are so powerful, they take pride in their nation’s military power and their nation’s special role in the world.

Afghan juvenile released from Guantanamo

Tue, 10 Feb 2004 17:54:41 GMT

A first interview with released Guantanamo prisoners..

http://news.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2004/02/08/wguan08.xml

From the Atlantic on what happened to WMD?

Tue, 13 Jan 2004 19:04:56 GMT

The follow excerpt is from another important article. It shows that Saddam was much more motivated by appearance and power than by policy or long term thinking. Things like the war in Kuwait were minor mistakes. The problem is, such mistakes by leaders cost dearly in the lives of ordinary people.

Bush too seems to be making mistakes, mistakes that may turn out to enhance his position. The problem is, these ego moves by "leaders" have terrible effects on real lives. That is what a democratic governance was supposed to prevent: the glaring indiscretions of tyrannical elites.

by Kenneth M. Pollack

et's start with one truth: last March, when the United States and its coalition partners invaded Iraq, the American public and much of the rest of the world believed that after Saddam Hussein's regime sank, a vast flotsam of weapons of mass destruction would bob to the surface. That, of course, has not been the case. In the words of David Kay, the principal adviser to the Iraq Survey Group (ISG), an organization created late last spring to search for prohibited weaponry, "I think all of us who entered Iraq expected the job of actually discovering deployed weapons to be easier than it has turned out to be." Many people are now asking very reasonable questions about why they were misled.

Democrats have typically accused the Bush Administration of exaggerating the threat posed by Iraq in order to justify an unnecessary war. Republicans have typically claimed that the fault lay with the CIA and the rest of the U.S. intelligence community, which they say overestimated the threat from Iraq—a claim that carries the unlikely implication that Bush's team might not have opted for war if it had understood that Saddam was not as dangerous as he seemed.

Depressing american studies

Fri, 12 Dec 2003 16:21:09 GMT

Very good article in the boston review on the revisioning american studies. I'll edit this later today.

Rereading Unger

Wed, 03 Dec 2003 17:30:11 GMT

Some rough notes I scanned rereading Umberto Unger

Reading Unger.

Review of Democracy Realized by Anne Kornhauser on Roberto Unger is up for grabs: the future of the welfare state; the shape of post-Cold War military policy; the structure of the global economy; and the organization of emerging democracies. [remember the issue of republics]existing institutional and political arrangements could be thoroughly revolutionized and in the process made considerably more democratic

-bu actual revolution. …. A post-welfare-state democratic politics. …. Jnger does not, however, reject the basic goals of the welfare state: greater equality and personal autonomy. Rather, he significantly complicates the picture as t …. There is no reason, for example, that we cannot simultaneously increase government activism and free enterprise….: a virtual manifesto for "deepening democracy," which for him means breaking down existing hierarchies and social roles, reducing economic inequality, enhancing people's imaginative and critical capacities, and increasing popular political participation.

He rejects the revolutionary and deterministic vision of Marxism and liberalism's reliance on a neutral state and neutral institutions. Politics always has a purpose and therefore must promote a particular way of life …. Politics must also be relentlessly pluralist. "No one should have to live in a society in which public policy and institutional arrangements express the outlook of a particular part of the people against other parts." …. ….

It too often reads as if the practical suggestions are grafted onto his theory.

"progressives" must look beyond "the established institutional framework ….The corollary of this is that significant institutional change can be practical and achievable, rather than simply wide-eyed utopianism. …. The very process of institutional experimentation is crucial to democracy as it empowers individuals by providing an important source of knowledge about the possibilities for arranging political and social life to decentralize existing institutions and create new ones at the local level. But at adding huge structures to the central government, such as a new, quasijudicial branch of government that would enforce social and economic rights, including at the local level and in civil society—without fully grappling with the problems that centralized mechanisms may pose for his populist vision. (Another example of centralization in his program is his proposal for the automatic unionization of all workers. What sort of structure, if any, would coordinate this sort of labor organization?) …. Rather than jettisoning redistnbutionist policies altogether, Linger wishes to supplement them with structural changes in the economy. These include the virtual banning of private inheritance in favor of social inheritance mechanisms into which the rich pay; the

Much of Unger's attention is directed toward increasing access to what he calls the "vanguard," or advanced sectors of the economy, which are to be found, in varying degrees, in both older industrial democracies and emerging democracies. These sectors are characterized by greater degrees of capital investment; a higher premium on knowledge or skill; unionization; and full-time work, often with the opportunity for advancement. Unger contrasts the "vanguard" with the "rearguard," those economic sectors characterized by low- or unskilled work, part-time jobs, little or no unionization, id a lack of protection and investment by the by the government and private sector alike

But they are only farfetched, Unger would be quick to tell us, if we're looking through the lenses of extant institutions and of assumptions about what is politically possible.

Mon, 24 Nov 2003 02:06:34 GMT

Highly recommend this review, and possibly the book to which it refers

The Looting of Asia

Chalmers Johnson

It may be pointless to try to establish which World War Two Axis aggressor, Germany or Japan, was the more brutal to the peoples it victimised. The Germans killed six million Jews and 20 million Russians; the Japanese slaughtered as many as 30 million Filipinos, Malays, Vietnamese, Cambodians, Indonesians and Burmese, at least 23 million of them ethnic Chinese. Both nations looted the countries they conquered on a monumental scale, though Japan plundered more, over a longer period, than the Nazis. Both conquerors enslaved millions and exploited them as forced labourers - and, in the case of the Japanese, as prostitutes for front-line troops. If you were a Nazi prisoner of war from Britain, America, Australia, New Zealand or Canada (but not Russia) you faced a 4 per cent chance of not surviving the war; the death rate for Allied POWs held by the Japanese was nearly 30 per cent.

The real differences between the two nations, however, developed in the years and decades after 1945. Survivors and relatives of victims of the Holocaust have worked for almost six decades to win compensation from German corporations for slave labour and to regain possession of works of art stolen from their homes and offices. Litigation continues against Swiss banks that hid much of the Nazi loot. As recently as July 2001, the Austrian Government began to disburse some $300 million out of an endowment of almost $500 million to more than 100,000 former slave labourers. The German Government has long recognised that, in order to re-establish relations of mutual respect with the countries it pillaged, serious gestures towards restitution are necessary. It has so far paid more than $45 billion in compensation and reparations. Japan, on the other hand, has given its victims a mere $3 billion, while giving its own nationals around $400 billion in compensation for war losses.