If we are to take the Obama administration seriously, Egypt is not an ally of the United States and the U.S. ambassador to Libya was assassinated due to a cheesy video that was released on the Internet several months ago. While the incompetence of the current administration has often been on display and never been in doubt, the way in which the White House first paved the road to the Benghazi incident, then completely bungled its response to the assassination, is indicative of new depths of ineptitude.
Tag: war
An atheist critique of Sam Harris
A former Muslim, Theodore Sayeed, writes a long article criticizing Sam Harris and his godless militarism on Mondoweiss:
For a man who likes to badger Muslims about their “reflexive solidarity” with Arab suffering, Harris seems keen to display his own tribal affections for the Jewish state. The virtue of Israel and the wickedness of her enemies are recurring themes in his work. The End of Faith opens with the melodramatic scene of a young man of undetermined nationality boarding a bus with a suicide vest. The bus detonates, innocents die and Harris, with the relish of a schoolmarm passing on the facts of life to her brood, chalks in the question: “Why is it so easy, then, so trivially easy-you-could-almost-bet-your-life-on-it-easy to guess the young man’s religion?”
To which historians will answer: Because it is not….
It occurs to me that as much of a renegade as I am from Islam, I’m not alone in my betrayal. Sam Harris too is an apostate from the intellectual atheist tradition of Russell and Mencken that was built on the twin pillars of anti-mysticism and anti-militarism.
I found it interesting that Sayeed begins with precisely the same quote from The End of Faith that I did, and notes precisely the same blunder which many atheists unsuccessfully attempted to defend back in 2008. One thing Sayeed caught that I did not is Harris’s tribal identification with Israel and his continued attempts to defend Israeli militarism despite his repeated condemnations of tribalism. Readers may recall that in my own email exchange with Harris, he admitted that he was actually attacking tribalism rather than religious faith; the primary danger of religious faith was that it had the potential to create and exacerbate tribalism.
But, as Sayeed demonstrates, despite his atheism, Harris himself appears to be subject to a tribalism that is older than either Christianity or Islam, the two religions he primarily criticizes. And it is potentially significant to note how little he criticizes either Judaism or Israel, despite the fact that there is considerable criticism of the latter from secular Europeans who share his atheism.
Now, I don’t dislike Sam. Unlike Dawkins and Myers, I don’t think he’s an intrinsically dreadful individual. But his primary problem, aside from his apparent tribalism, is that he is simply not sufficiently detail-oriented or logical enough to be capable of successfully addressing the intellectual challenges he sets himself.
TIA: the meme spreads
Courtesy of Scott Atran, the argument that religion does not cause war has now reached both Science and The Chronicle of Higher Education:
it’s not the criticism of ecclesiastical overreach that bothers Wilson and Atran; it’s the conflation of science and advocacy. Wilson supports efforts to destigmatize atheism, like the running feature “Why I Am an Atheist” on Pharyngula, and said so in his anti-Dawkins posts. Atran believes that “attacking obscurantic, cruel, lunatic ideas is always a good idea.” It’s proclaiming that religion is rotten to the core that they think is misguided.
That includes laying the blame for much of human conflict at the feet of the faithful. In a recent Science article, Atran and Jeremy Ginges, an associate professor of psychology at the New School, cite evidence suggesting that “only a small minority of recorded wars” have been mainly motivated by religious disputes (though making distinctions between religious and political causes is notoriously knotty). They complain in the article that the New Atheists are quick to remind everyone how fundamentalism fuels Al Qaeda but neglect to mention the role of churches in the civil-rights movement. The New Atheists are, according to Atran and Ginges, cherry-picking the horrors. “Science produced a nuclear bomb. Therefore we should throw away science,” says Atran, to illustrate the baby-bathwater logic. “Sometimes it can be really noxious, and other times it can be quite helpful.”
The Science article is entitled “Religious and Sacred Imperatives in Human Conflict” and appears in Science 336, 855 (2012). The relevant passage cites The Encylopedia of Wars and states: “In fact, explicit religious issues have motivated only a small minority of recorded wars. There is little religious cause for the internecine Russian and Chinese conflicts and world wars responsible for history’s most lethal century of international conflict.”
Given the absurd assertions by science fetishists who insist that I do not understand science, I find it more than a little ironic that a number of real scientists are not only making use of my ideas, but my methods as well, in publishing professional peer-reviewed science.
Impeccable and ironic timing
As per Robert Prechter’s socionomic principle of the habitually delayed reaction of government to events, it is often a counterintuitive indicator of coming war when the democracies cut their military forces to minimal levels, which is why these British force reductions are somewhat ominous:
n which case Philip Hammond, the Defence Secretary, is taking an enormous gamble when he claims that the 20 per cent reduction in the size of the standing Army will be made up for by a sizeable increase in the number of reservists to 30,000. Ever since the Coalition announced last summer that it was downsizing the Army from around 102,000 to 82,000 as part of its cuts to the MoD budget, senior officers have been struggling to find a way to maintain some semblance of its war-fighting capabilities while reducing this once proud institution to its smallest size since the Duke of Wellington took on Napoleon’s Grande Armée.
Their task has been made all the more difficult by the knowledge that the Government’s decision to shed 20,000 jobs was dictated entirely by budgetary requirements rather than any grand strategic vision for our Armed Forces. For the changes announced by Mr Hammond yesterday are simply designed to cut spending. As most officers know only too well, the demands made on the 100,000-plus Army during a decade of almost continuous combat operations have stretched its resources to breaking point.
Nor is there any reason to believe – despite the Army’s withdrawal from Afghanistan, due to be completed by the end of 2014 – that the next decade will not be as challenging.
It’s interesting to see that the British Army is now smaller than it was after the disarmament program that followed the Great War and preceded World War II. There are obvious parallels to “the Geddes Axe” and the 10-Year Rule.
“In the immediate aftermath of the First World War, Britain faced serious economic woes and heavy defence cuts were consequently imposed by the British Government in the early 1920s as part of a reduction in public expenditure known as the “Geddes Axe” after Sir Eric Geddes. The Government introduced the Ten-Year Rule, stating its belief that Britain would not be involved in another major war for 10-years, and was abandoned in 1932.”
In the interwar period, the Regulars were reduced to 115,000, supported by a 150,000-strong reserve, the Territorial Army. That compares to today’s planned British Army of 82,000 plus 30,000 reservists. It’s interesting, is it not, to see how the force minimization tends to correspond to periods of economic weakness. The historical patterns are suggesting that large-scale war is on the horizon, the question is where and with whom?
However, it is the USA that matters most in this regard, and I don’t think its forces have been cut quite as drastically yet. So, I suspect we’ll need to see similar cuts in the USA, and more economic contraction, before this part of the pattern can be considered complete.
Flowers of the Arab Spring
Ain’t democracy grand! It’s an interesting result, given that it means American Jews can no longer justify US subsidies to Israel on the basis of it being the only democracy in the Middle East.
Islamist Mohamed Morsy of the Muslim Brotherhood was declared Egypt’s first democratic president on Sunday by the state election committee, which said he had defeated former general Ahmed Shafik with 51.7 percent of last weekend’s run-off vote.
Of course, some of those democratic enthusiasms might prove to be just be a little problematic. “Egypt’s New President: Our Capital ‘Shall Be Jerusalem, Allah Willing'”
Counterproductive
After Qaddafi is shot dead, Mubarak is sentenced to life in prison:
For nearly 30 years he was the pharaoh-like ruler whose word was law; the plunderer of billions of pounds of government money and controller of Egypt’s brutal police state. On Saturday night Hosni Mubarak began a new life as a convicted murderer. A broken and humiliated man of 84, he was flown by helicopter to Torah prison – where many of his enemies had once been jailed – just two hours after hearing a Cairo judge pronounce a life sentence on him for complicity in the murder of 850 protesters.
Well, if Western leaders are looking to make sure that Assad and the remaining Arab dictators fight to the very last drop of their people’s blood, they’re certainly going about it the right way. If you want to get rid of a rat, always leave him a safe out.
Exit Europa
Most Americans want US troops out of Europe:
The Rasmussen polling organization is out with a shock poll that the entire Washington establishment needs to study: 51 percent of voters surveyed said they wanted all US troops out of Europe, now. Only 29 percent favored keeping the troops where they are. US troops have been in Europe since World War Two. In the Cold War, they not only kept the Russians out; they gave the rest of the Old World the confidence that Germany would not come storming back for a rematch. The presence of US troops helped give western Europe its longest era of peace since Roman times.
Since the end of the Cold War the US presence in Europe has made much less sense to the average American, but foreign policy junkies like yours truly think that it still serves a purpose. Not only do those troops provide security in new NATO countries like Poland and the Baltic republics; US bases in Europe are important in dealing with terror and other problems in the Middle East and without the US presence in Europe it is unlikely that NATO in its present form can survive.
Being a sophisticated foreign policy junkie, but not, apparently, a historian or an economist, Walter Russell Mead completely fails to understand the crucial point. It’s not that “the arguments for the US presence in Europe are credible, clear and compelling”, it’s something else that entirely supersedes them. You’re BANKRUPT, dude! The USA cannot afford to pay for the US presence in Iraq, in Afghanistan, in South Korea, or in Europe. It’s done. It’s over. Even the slow-witted American public has finally figured it out.
And the more Hispanics and other third-worlders that enter the country, the less the average American is going to give a damn about the wet dreams of foreign policy junkies.
RAF heroics
I don’t care if it’s true or not, it’s just funny:
[Y]ou can hardly eff and blind when addressing a leading independent school such as Brighton College. Not unless you happen to be a war hero like Douglas Bader, who reputedly treated the girls of Roedean or Cheltenham Ladies’ College (the uncertainty hints at urban myth, but we’ll let that pass) to a story of airborne derring-do in which one Fokker appeared on his tail, another Fokker attacked him from above… and so on, until the headmistress tried to staunch the pubescent giggling with: “Gels, I should perhaps explain that the, ahem, Fokker was a Second World War German fighter plane.” “Madam, that may very well be,” so legend has Bader responding. “These buggers were in Messerschmitts.”
Belatedly coming to their senses
Republicans finally turn against the decade-long military occupation of Afghanistan:
Support for the war in Afghanistan has fallen to an all-time low with the majority of Americans saying the U.S. should withdraw all of its troops from Afghanistan before the 2014 deadline set by the Obama administration, according to a new poll. The CNN/ORC International survey released Friday indicated only 25% of Americans favored the war in the Asian country. A majority of Republicans voiced opposition to it, for the first time since the war began in 2001.
I still find it amazing that Obama has gotten a pass for continuing the occupation, considering that the only reason he beat out Hilary for the nomination was because he was supposedly the anti-war candidate. Republicans may be stupid and slow to grasp the obvious, but the cognitive dissonance of the American liberal truly knows no bounds.
NRO turns against the Afghan occupation
Are these cracks in the neocon dam or just a sign that their attention is turning to Iran and/or Syria?
Today, in another war – as Mark noted — there’s been a spate of Afghan “friendlies” assassinating American and U.N. troops in the wake of Staff Sgt. Robert Bales’s alleged murder of 17 Afghan villagers while they slept. This comes on the heels of widespread rioting over the incineration of Korans, which were used by Taliban prisoners to pass messages — and for which the U.S. profusely apologized. Restrictive rules of engagement hamper our troops even as a group of foolish senators – all of them irrelevant to today’s politics — proclaim the fight worth continuing.
This is not a Good War.
In other words, I’m with Andy: It’s time to wrap up this decade-long farce, time for both civilian leaders and military brass to take a long, hard look at the demoralizing mess we’ve made in Afghanistan, and to ask how America can avoid such mistakes in the future.
We might start by forgetting the concept of “nation-building” in places where there are no nations to build. The nation-state, it should be remembered, is very much a Western concept, forged over 1,000 years of often painful European history.
Of course, it is as foolish to believe that non-Western barbarians are going to magically be transformed into civilized Westerners by virtue of physical residence in the West as it is to think that barbarian societies will be magically transformed into Western civilizations by virtue of military occupation.
But since it’s taken 11 years for these brilliant commentators to recognize the obvious in Afghanistan, we probably shouldn’t hold our breath waiting for them to do the same in America.