Los Angeles Times review of "Cochise County, USA : Cries from the Border. Every person with any measure of concern about our porous, unsafe borders should see this film.
Border Crossing
Citizen Cinema captures illegal immigration with 'Cochise County, USA.'
By Patrick Goldstein
June 13, 2006
IN the land of "American Idol" and YouTube, the era of Citizen Cinema is upon us. In one of those remarkable defining moments that exemplify the grass-roots nature of today's pop culture, the most compelling film about the immigration reform debate that's raging across the country today has come from a 63-year-old former schoolteacher living outside a tiny border town in southern Arizona.
With millions of immigrants marching in the streets and Congress squabbling over border security legislation, the tussle over illegal immigration has reached something of a fever pitch in America. But so far mainstream Hollywood has been silent on the subject, its portrayals of immigrants (with the exception of a great sequence with an enraged Sikh in the crime thriller "Inside Man") largely limited to cheap stereotyped laughs.
So Mercedes Maharis must have been crazy to think she could have an effect on an issue that has divided families and businesses as well as the entire Republican Party. After all, she was living in rural Cochise County, two miles north of the Mexican border, where she and her husband had moved in 2003, hoping to enjoy the open vistas and clean air. Only after they bought a home there did Maharis discover that about 100 feet from her new house was a smuggling trail used by hundreds of illegal immigrants to make nightly border crossings.
One evening she was jolted awake by the roar of a helicopter overhead, the wash from its blades rattling her windows as it chased a group of people toward a trio of nearby Border Patrol trucks. Maharis grabbed her video camera, ran outside in her nightgown and recorded the drama from her driveway. "It scared the daylights out of me," she told me. "With the helicopters flying by every night, it feels like you're living in a war zone. I thought, 'I have to film this, because otherwise no one is going to believe it.' "
Armed with an affordable video camera and a compelling idea, an angry homeowner can be transformed overnight into a documentary filmmaker.
Though it has never received a theatrical release, Maharis' film, "Cochise County, USA: Cries From the Border," has found a growing audience on the home-video front, having already sold close to 20,000 copies, an impressive tally for a documentary by an unknown filmmaker.
Distributed by Genius Products, the film has been touted by a growing number of conservative websites, talk radio hosts and the Wall Street Journal, which recently ran an op-ed piece offering a classic red-state endorsement, saying the film had "the wrong politics for Hollywood," adding that screenings of the film had been poorly attended "in the salons of Cambridge and San Francisco."
It's easy to see why conservatives have embraced the film. While Maharis does interview a few immigrants looking for work — she's fluent in Spanish — a healthy chunk of the movie is devoted to complaints from unhappy Cochise County locals, decrying car thefts, drug smuggling and property damage as well as the devastating toll that the influx of border-crossers has had on the local healthcare system. The film hardly mentions the benefits of having goods and services provided by cheap immigrant labor.
While the film is not especially sophisticated, Maharis, like Michael Moore, has an uncanny ability to capture both incendiary images and real human emotion. The movie opens with a striking sequence of a seemingly endless stream of people illegally ducking under a barbed-wire fence, crossing the border as we hear the famous Emma Lazarus poem that adorns the Statue of Liberty.
What's especially startling about the film is that its filmmaker doesn't fit any of our neat cultural preconceptions. To put it bluntly, Maharis is no liberal-baiting Ann Coulter. She spent much of her life in Santa Monica, where she worked as a volunteer in a homeless shelter, studied meditation, worked in interior design and ran a video firm that produced educational films. She has a master of arts in Latin American studies and has been a longtime advocate of prisoners' rights.
A political independent, she views the film as a nonpartisan educational tool. "As a teacher, I felt responsible for leaving a record of all this for sociology and law classes. It's like I told our sheriff: 'A picture is worth a thousand words.' Maybe if people see the bodies of people who've died trying to cross the border, maybe they'll be inspired to take some action."
Her pictures have stirred emotions at almost every turn. When she screened the film for Gerald Kicanas, the bishop of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Tucson, she says he became "very distressed" over what he felt was the film's lack of empathy for the immigrants. "He said, 'Stop this. I have to go.' And he left 20 minutes into the film."
On the other hand, when Rep. Tom Tancredo (R-Colo.), a staunch advocate of border protection, saw the film, he refused to sponsor a screening in Washington because the film had interviews, Maharis says, with illegal immigrants and "an ACLU propagandist."
Maharis' big break came when producer Christopher Bannon heard her on a talk radio station in Tucson. Bannon tipped off his brother, Stephen Bannon, an ex-Goldman Sachs investment banker who heads Genius Products, a hot independent home-video distributor that has partnered with Harvey and Bob Weinstein to handle the Weinstein Co.'s home-video releases. Bannon, who has directed a film himself — a 2004 documentary about President Reagan's battle against communism — sensed that Maharis was the perfect spokeswoman for such explosive material.
"If you called central casting and asked for someone from Middle America, with all the American characteristics of fairness and compassion, you'd get Mercedes," he says. "She wasn't someone from Greenwich Village flying in to do a movie. She's a real person from a very specific place who's telling a very personal story."
Bannon helped Maharis tighten up the film's dramatic arc but left much of its raw footage alone. "Its power comes from it being real cinema vérité," he says. "It reminded me of when I first saw 'Harlan County USA,' which shows how a region can be destroyed by forces beyond its control. For me, the film's 'ah-ha' moment is seeing that those illegal immigrants coming over the barbed wire are not the bad guys. Immigration is in the DNA of our country. It's what we represent."
Although Bannon is a true-blue conservative, he's in business with the Weinsteins, who are ardent liberals, and his company distributed the video of the John F. Kerry documentary "Going Up River." He has little time for what he calls the "conservative victimology" view of Hollywood. "I see a lot of films from young conservatives, and they just don't have the filmmaking chops yet," he says.
"That's not to say that if you walked into a studio with Sen. James Inhofe's lecture on global warming being a hoax, which is just as compelling as Al Gore's, I mean, you'd get laughed out of every meeting in town. But the system out here is very Darwinian. The conservative stuff I see just isn't very commercial. If it was, someone would do it."
What Bannon does see in today's movie world is how the arrival of new video technology has dramatically leveled the playing field in film. In this new bottom-up culture, amateur filmmakers are our new auteurs. One of the most talked-about films at the recent Tribeca Film Festival was "The War Tapes," an Iraq war documentary whose footage was shot by soldiers from the New Hampshire National Guard.
"It's almost like Paris in the '20s," says Bannon. "All you need to make a film is a credit card and a compelling idea. Whether it's Iraq or Darfur or Cochise County, the real world is just a lot more compelling than most Hollywood films."
Citizen Cinema also has a different style, one closer to the first-person intimacy of Web blogs than the blandness of most mainstream films or mass media. (Maharis reads the Lazarus poem herself and even sings some of the music heard in the film.)
"Cochise County, USA" doesn't smother its subject with carefully modulated objectivity, the way the immigration debate is often portrayed on network news or — ahem — in most newspapers. In an era when the bloody war in Iraq has largely been sanitized before it arrives in our living room — we often don't even get to see the flag-draped coffins — Maharis makes a point of including graphic footage of the bloated bodies of immigrants who have died trying to cross the border.
Every time Maharis screens her film, passions run high. When she showed the movie at a library in the town of Bisbee, Ariz., the place was packed with both anti-immigration ranchers and open-border advocates. Afterward, all hell broke loose. "Everyone started yelling and arguing, and the poor librarian couldn't stop them," Maharis recalls. "It felt good — maybe I was getting people riled up enough to act."
When I tell Maharis that she sounds like an idealist, she takes it as a compliment.
"That's what picking up this video camera has done — even an ordinary person can plant the seeds for responsible social change. It's a way for all of us to help end suffering." She laughs. "Now, don't I sound like I'm from Santa Monica or what!"
Saturday, August 12, 2006
From www.calendarlive.com:
How it all began
The Looming Tower Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11
Lawrence Wright
Alfred A. Knopf: 470 pp., $27.95
By Daniel Kurtz-Phelan
Daniel Kurtz-Phelan is a senior editor at Foreign Affairs.
August 13, 2006
JUST before Christmas 1948, a middle-aged Egyptian writer stepped off an ocean liner docked in New York Harbor and onto U.S. soil for the first time. He had come to escape the threat of persecution at home, but the next several months would bring a bitterness all their own.
The country's unabashed materialism repelled him. Americans seemed "a reckless, deluded herd that only knows lust and money," and he longed, as he told a friend, for someone to talk to "about topics other than dollars, movie stars, brands of cars — a real conversation on the issues of man, philosophy, and soul." He found the food "weird," the barbers incompetent, the racism appallingly pervasive, the religion empty and hypocritical and the women aggressive and promiscuous. "A girl looks at you," he wrote, "appearing as if she were an enchanted nymph or an escaped mermaid, but as she approaches, you sense only the screaming instinct inside her, and you can smell her burning body, not the scent of perfume but flesh, only flesh. Tasty flesh, truly, but flesh nonetheless."
These may have been little more than the observations of an embittered exile, but on Sept. 11, 2001, they would prove to have grand historic significance. The writer's name was Sayyid Qutb, and his "lonely genius," as Lawrence Wright puts it in "The Looming Tower," would "unsettle Islam, threaten regimes across the Muslim world, and beckon to a generation of rootless young Arabs who were looking for meaning and purpose in their lives." It was Qutb's U.S. sojourn that convinced him that the West and Islam were fundamentally opposed — a fundamental opposition that, half a century later, persuaded a generation of Muslim zealots to go to war against the West. "[T]o kill the Americans and their allies," proclaimed a then little-known terrorist group called Al Qaeda in 1998, "is an individual duty for every Muslim who can do it in any country in which it is possible to do it."
Wright's magisterial, beautifully crafted narrative of the path to Sept. 11 traces this notion of global jihad through Egyptian student movements, Saudi mosques and Afghan training camps, through the murderous fatwas of radical clerics and finally into the heads and hearts of a wealthy young Saudi named Osama bin Laden and the martyrdom-obsessed young men he recruited to Al Qaeda's ranks. But for Wright, a staff writer at the New Yorker, the story hinges less on ideas than it does on individuals — both those behind Al Qaeda and those in the United States working to stop them. "[T]he tectonic plates of history were shifting, promoting a period of conflict between the West and the Arab Muslim world," he writes, "however, the charisma and vision of a few individuals shaped the nature of this contest."
This focus on character, along with Wright's five years of fierce on-the-ground reporting (he lists 560 interviewees), pays off. More-straightforward, analytical accounts often settle on dangerously simplistic explanations of terrorism's causes: Islam is inherently violent, on the one hand, or America is being punished for supporting Israel, on the other. Wright, in contrast, untangles the anxieties, resentments, aspirations and ideals that have driven and defined radical Islamism. Israel's victories over Arab armies in 1948 and 1967 "would shape the Arab intellectual universe more profoundly than any event in modern history," mostly because they seemed to encapsulate the decline of the Arab world. In the face of humiliating powerlessness, unsettling change and stifling autocratic governments, fundamentalism "provided a dam against the overwhelming, raging river of modernity."
At the same time, Wright manages to make the arch-villains of the Sept. 11 story scarily human. We learn, for example, what Bin Laden liked to watch on TV ("Bonanza"), what he discussed with his mother after school (his lunch), how he drove ("very fast"), what he read (Qutb) and what his classmates thought of the fundamentalist crowd he ran with ("only nerds"). After one of his four wives gave birth to a mildly retarded son, Wright relates, "bin Laden always insisted on including [that son], taking special care to make sure he was never left alone." Given what came later, such banal detail is unsettling.
Although Bin Laden had been a devout fundamentalist since his youth, his real initiation to jihad came in the 1980s with the fight against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. He helped pay travel and living expenses for the Arab volunteers who fought alongside anti-Soviet Afghan guerrillas. Most were posturing teenagers, their hapless brigades a motley assortment of aimless drifters and "pampered kids from the Persian Gulf" who would fire Kalashnikovs into the air, then "return home, boasting of their adventure." But, as Wright notes, Bin Laden's Afghan jihad "made no real difference in the tide of affairs," and the performance of his men under fire was generally pathetic.
Still, when the Soviets finally left Afghanistan at the end of the decade, these Arab volunteers claimed much of the credit for driving a godless superpower out of a Muslim land — a myth that fed Bin Laden's megalomaniacal delusions. Casting about for a new focus for his zealotry, he joined with the Egyptian jihadi ideologue Ayman Zawahiri. This relationship was defining for both of them: "Zawahiri wanted money and contacts, which bin Laden had in abundance. Bin Laden, an idealist given to causes, sought direction; Zawahiri, a seasoned propagandist, supplied it." Thus Al Qaeda was born, founded on the assumption that faith "is stronger than weapons or nations" and ready to do battle against the "distant enemy" — America.
When Wright turns his attention stateside, he finds his main protagonist in John O'Neill, a swaggering, loud-mouthed FBI agent who, as the head of its counterterrorism unit, became so obsessed with Bin Laden that "his colleagues began to question his judgment." For most Americans, within government and without, Al Qaeda was "too bizarre, too primitive and exotic" to take seriously. "Up against the confidence Americans placed in modernity and technology," Wright observes, "the defiant gestures of bin Laden and his followers seemed absurd and even pathetic."
O'Neill and a handful of his colleagues tried frantically to make everyone else grasp the danger, especially after Al Qaeda bombed U.S. embassies in Africa in 1998 and the U.S. destroyer Cole in 2000. One FBI agent, after being prevented by bureaucratic regulations from examining a suspected terrorist's laptop (which might have revealed the 9/11 plot weeks before it happened), angrily and eerily told his superiors that he was just "trying to keep someone from taking a plane and crashing it into the World Trade Center." But in most cases, these Cassandras had burned out by the time their unheeded warnings proved prescient. On the morning of Sept. 11, O'Neill had just started a lucrative new job as head of security at the World Trade Center.
How it all began
The Looming Tower Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11
Lawrence Wright
Alfred A. Knopf: 470 pp., $27.95
By Daniel Kurtz-Phelan
Daniel Kurtz-Phelan is a senior editor at Foreign Affairs.
August 13, 2006
JUST before Christmas 1948, a middle-aged Egyptian writer stepped off an ocean liner docked in New York Harbor and onto U.S. soil for the first time. He had come to escape the threat of persecution at home, but the next several months would bring a bitterness all their own.
The country's unabashed materialism repelled him. Americans seemed "a reckless, deluded herd that only knows lust and money," and he longed, as he told a friend, for someone to talk to "about topics other than dollars, movie stars, brands of cars — a real conversation on the issues of man, philosophy, and soul." He found the food "weird," the barbers incompetent, the racism appallingly pervasive, the religion empty and hypocritical and the women aggressive and promiscuous. "A girl looks at you," he wrote, "appearing as if she were an enchanted nymph or an escaped mermaid, but as she approaches, you sense only the screaming instinct inside her, and you can smell her burning body, not the scent of perfume but flesh, only flesh. Tasty flesh, truly, but flesh nonetheless."
These may have been little more than the observations of an embittered exile, but on Sept. 11, 2001, they would prove to have grand historic significance. The writer's name was Sayyid Qutb, and his "lonely genius," as Lawrence Wright puts it in "The Looming Tower," would "unsettle Islam, threaten regimes across the Muslim world, and beckon to a generation of rootless young Arabs who were looking for meaning and purpose in their lives." It was Qutb's U.S. sojourn that convinced him that the West and Islam were fundamentally opposed — a fundamental opposition that, half a century later, persuaded a generation of Muslim zealots to go to war against the West. "[T]o kill the Americans and their allies," proclaimed a then little-known terrorist group called Al Qaeda in 1998, "is an individual duty for every Muslim who can do it in any country in which it is possible to do it."
Wright's magisterial, beautifully crafted narrative of the path to Sept. 11 traces this notion of global jihad through Egyptian student movements, Saudi mosques and Afghan training camps, through the murderous fatwas of radical clerics and finally into the heads and hearts of a wealthy young Saudi named Osama bin Laden and the martyrdom-obsessed young men he recruited to Al Qaeda's ranks. But for Wright, a staff writer at the New Yorker, the story hinges less on ideas than it does on individuals — both those behind Al Qaeda and those in the United States working to stop them. "[T]he tectonic plates of history were shifting, promoting a period of conflict between the West and the Arab Muslim world," he writes, "however, the charisma and vision of a few individuals shaped the nature of this contest."
This focus on character, along with Wright's five years of fierce on-the-ground reporting (he lists 560 interviewees), pays off. More-straightforward, analytical accounts often settle on dangerously simplistic explanations of terrorism's causes: Islam is inherently violent, on the one hand, or America is being punished for supporting Israel, on the other. Wright, in contrast, untangles the anxieties, resentments, aspirations and ideals that have driven and defined radical Islamism. Israel's victories over Arab armies in 1948 and 1967 "would shape the Arab intellectual universe more profoundly than any event in modern history," mostly because they seemed to encapsulate the decline of the Arab world. In the face of humiliating powerlessness, unsettling change and stifling autocratic governments, fundamentalism "provided a dam against the overwhelming, raging river of modernity."
At the same time, Wright manages to make the arch-villains of the Sept. 11 story scarily human. We learn, for example, what Bin Laden liked to watch on TV ("Bonanza"), what he discussed with his mother after school (his lunch), how he drove ("very fast"), what he read (Qutb) and what his classmates thought of the fundamentalist crowd he ran with ("only nerds"). After one of his four wives gave birth to a mildly retarded son, Wright relates, "bin Laden always insisted on including [that son], taking special care to make sure he was never left alone." Given what came later, such banal detail is unsettling.
Although Bin Laden had been a devout fundamentalist since his youth, his real initiation to jihad came in the 1980s with the fight against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. He helped pay travel and living expenses for the Arab volunteers who fought alongside anti-Soviet Afghan guerrillas. Most were posturing teenagers, their hapless brigades a motley assortment of aimless drifters and "pampered kids from the Persian Gulf" who would fire Kalashnikovs into the air, then "return home, boasting of their adventure." But, as Wright notes, Bin Laden's Afghan jihad "made no real difference in the tide of affairs," and the performance of his men under fire was generally pathetic.
Still, when the Soviets finally left Afghanistan at the end of the decade, these Arab volunteers claimed much of the credit for driving a godless superpower out of a Muslim land — a myth that fed Bin Laden's megalomaniacal delusions. Casting about for a new focus for his zealotry, he joined with the Egyptian jihadi ideologue Ayman Zawahiri. This relationship was defining for both of them: "Zawahiri wanted money and contacts, which bin Laden had in abundance. Bin Laden, an idealist given to causes, sought direction; Zawahiri, a seasoned propagandist, supplied it." Thus Al Qaeda was born, founded on the assumption that faith "is stronger than weapons or nations" and ready to do battle against the "distant enemy" — America.
When Wright turns his attention stateside, he finds his main protagonist in John O'Neill, a swaggering, loud-mouthed FBI agent who, as the head of its counterterrorism unit, became so obsessed with Bin Laden that "his colleagues began to question his judgment." For most Americans, within government and without, Al Qaeda was "too bizarre, too primitive and exotic" to take seriously. "Up against the confidence Americans placed in modernity and technology," Wright observes, "the defiant gestures of bin Laden and his followers seemed absurd and even pathetic."
O'Neill and a handful of his colleagues tried frantically to make everyone else grasp the danger, especially after Al Qaeda bombed U.S. embassies in Africa in 1998 and the U.S. destroyer Cole in 2000. One FBI agent, after being prevented by bureaucratic regulations from examining a suspected terrorist's laptop (which might have revealed the 9/11 plot weeks before it happened), angrily and eerily told his superiors that he was just "trying to keep someone from taking a plane and crashing it into the World Trade Center." But in most cases, these Cassandras had burned out by the time their unheeded warnings proved prescient. On the morning of Sept. 11, O'Neill had just started a lucrative new job as head of security at the World Trade Center.
From Chronicles:
Britain’s Jihadist Fifth Column
By Srdja Trifkovic
The Islamic terrorist plot to blow up ten airliners en route from Great Britain to the United States is surprising only in one respect: It makes no sense for the Muslim diaspora in Europe to carry out terrorist acts since they can have Europe—the whole of Western Europe, anyway—if they play their hand right in the next 20-30 years. Blowing up airliners, or London Underground trains, is bad for the cause. It is not directed from “Islam Central”; it is literally “home-grown.”
Only a non-Chronicles reader will be puzzled by the fact that “mainstream” media all over the Western world have been reluctant to state three key facts about the British plot:
1. The 24 plotters arrested thus far are all Muslims;
2. 22 of them are UK-born Pakistanis, and two are British converts to Islam;
3. The plotters were motivated by Islam—by Muhammad’s faith as such, and not by some allegedly aberrant variety of the creed.
We’ve seen this same reluctance to name names with the rioting “youths” in France last fall. The ongoing scenario is becoming a tad tedious: (1) a bunch of murderously minded jihadists are arrested and accused of terrorist intent; (2) local Muslim “community activists” and selcted non-Muslim neighbors respond with a mix of indignation and denial, with the assurances of the suspects’ impeccable character, and accusations of anti-Muslim bias; (3) non-Muslim politicos go out of their way to reassure the Muslim community that it is loved and appreciated, and not in any way associated with the terrorists. It’s déjà vu all over again.
This boringly predictable scenario is unfolding in England right now. “Stunned residents” of four English towns—Muslims, of course, although the Daily Mirror does not make it clear in its report—were upset: when “their quiet suburban lives were shattered when police swooped on neighbours suspected of being part of a huge terror plot to bomb airlines.” The suspects, we are told, included “two brothers who loved cricket, a university student, a builder, a pizza worker, a businessman and a dad-to-be.” The implication—that one’s love of cricket, or building buildings, or studying, or baking pizzas, or expecting a baby—is in some manner incompatible with Islaimc terrorism, is clearly made but not elaborated. What a million tabloid readers get instead is a nudge in the direction of righteous indignation at the treatment of poor, innocent Muslims:
One of the converts, Don Stewart-Whyte, was dragged from his car after an officer smashed the driver’s window. A neighbour said police had been lying in wait as he arrived home at High Wycombe with his Muslim wife. The 21-year-old switched to Islam six months ago and recently married after turning his back on a life of drugs and booze.
One can only hope that Don will go back to dope and booze, for his own good and that of his British neighbors. As for the other convert held, his name used to be Oliver Savant until he changed it to Ibrahim. His furious brother said “I’m outraged. We’re shocked and angry that we’re being put through this. He’s married, a newly-wed expecting a baby. Our parents are traumatised, as you would expect. There’s nothing that makes me think he’s linked to this and I’m confident the police will realise this has been a huge cock-up.”
By the time the cock-up is cleared circa 2050, when Ibrahim gets out of jail, he’ll be pleased to note that a simple majority of West European under-21s will be Muslim.
A mere four decades ago the suggestion that the working-class town of High Wycombe, or Birmingham—once a staid city of hard-working Midlanders—could become a hotbed of Islamic terrorism, would have sounded insane. Today it raises no eyebrows. The enormous growth and arrogant self-confidence of the Muslim immigrant community in Great Britain, coupled with the cultural enfeeblement and demographic decline of the English nation, has turned Birmingham and many other Victorian industrial cities into de facto self-governing Muslim ghettos. The formula was devised by Tariq Ramadan a decade ago: Muslims in the West should conduct themselves not as hyphenated citizens seeking to live by “common values” but as though they were already living in a Muslim-majority society.
Most British Muslims come from the Indian sub-continent. They are technically “British” but functionally, for the most part, Pakistanis or Bengalis. More significantly, their British-born offspring tend to consider themselves de facto autonomous, a community of believers opposed to the broader society of infidels. The result is a mature jihadist infrastructure, centered on a network of mosques and Islamic centers.
Britain’s Prime Minister Tony Blair is the villain of the piece. “What happened in America was not the work of Islamic terrorists, it was not the work of Muslim terrorists,” he declared after meeting a group of Muslim “community leaders” at 10 Downing Street, in the aftermath of 9-11. “It was the work of terrorists, pure and simple” who must not be honored “with any misguided religious justification,” because they “contravened all the tenets of Islam”:
It is . . . explicitly contrary to Islamic law to kill innocent civilians, to murder women and children and non-combatants… Islam is a peace-loving, tolerant, religion. Many of the world’s religions, indeed including Christianity, draw from the same spiritual heritage. We share the same values, and the same respect for the sanctity of human life . . . [W]e know of no specific threat in relation to this country and it is important that we are not alarmist about it. And I mean frankly some of the reports have been alarmist.
Echoing the Prime Minnister, two weeks after 9-11 former Home Office Minister John Denham pledged to cut out the “cancer of Islamophobia” infecting Britain, and declared that “the real Islam is a religion of peace, tolerance and understanding.” In line with the EU instructions he called on the media to avoid promoting “a distorted or caricatured or prejudiced” view of Muslims or the Islamic faith.
Dr. Richard Stone, chairman of the “Commission on British Muslims and Islamophobia,” criticized the Blair government for not addressing “in a deep way” the anti-Muslim prejudice in Britain: “There is now . . . mounting concern that the already fragile foothold gained by Muslim communities in Britain is threatened by ignorance and intolerance.” He added that the only area where there had been major improvement was “within Muslim communities themselves.” The key finding of his commission was that 9-11 had made life more difficult for Muslims. It castigated British public bodies for failing to address “institutional Islamophobia” and called for changes in the law to better protect Muslim communities (i.e., introduce censorship) and “a major effort” (i.e., affirmative action and specific quotas) to bring more Muslims into public life.
The Director of Public Prosecutions expressed concern that the War on Terror is “alienating whole communities” in Great Britain. Colelctively they have all contributed to the creation of a culture of Muslim victimhood in which “Islamophobia,” defined both as a legal crime and a moral outrage, inhibited all serious debate in Great Britain after 9-11 on the causes of terrorism.
Since then thousands of people have been murdered in jihadist attacks, in Bali, Moscow, Casablanca, Istanbul, Madrid, Beslan, Sharm-el-Sheik, Nairobi, and dozens of other places. Were it not for the arrests on August 10, several thousand airline travelers would have been added to the tally.
Can the British establishment learn anything, ever? The answer, on current form, is a clear “no.” Just over a year ago, on July 7, 2005, London’s transportation network was hit by four British-born and bred Muslim youths. The suicide bombers were four British citizens, three of them Pakistani by parentage. They attended British state schools, traveled on British passports, and spoke with Yorkshire accents. They also hated England and its people with such intensity that they were prepared to sacrifice their own lives in order to kill as many of them as possible. They were coldly premeditated, practicing their attacks on a dry run on June 28, nine days before their bombs killed 52 people and wounded 200. Mohammad Sidique Khan, the lead suicide bomber, recorded a video in which he declared, “We are at war and I am a soldier.”
The ranks of those potential soldiers are increasing, paradoxically enough, as the British-born young Muslims come of age. “What is striking about most second- and third-generation British Muslims is their intense religiosity. Asked how much of a role Islam played in their everyday lives, 45 percent of the respondents in the student survey said it played a role in everything while 48 percent said it played a role in most things. This is in sharp contrast with a comparable survey of the British public in which 66 percent said religion was not an important factor in their lives.”
According to a detailed survey of the attitudes of British Muslims prepared for the Daily Telegraph in the immediate aftermath of the London bombings of July 7, 2005, one in four sympathizes with motives of terrorists and six per cent insist that the bombings were “fully justified.” In absolute numbers this means there are over 100,000 Muslims in Great Britain who are either prepared to carry out terrorist acts, or ready to support those who do. And a substantial majority, 56 percent, say that, whether or not they sympathize with the bombers, they can at least understand why they behave in this way. The sheer scale of Muslim alienation from British society that the survey reveals is remarkable: nearly a third of them, 32 percent, believe that “Western society is decadent and immoral and that Muslims should seek to bring it to an end.”
The plot to bring down America-bound planes should not have come as a surprise. It has been known for years that trained al-Qaeda terrorists were present in the United Kingdom and operated in classic small cell structures. In December 2002, only a day after the arrest of seven Muslims suspected of terrorism in London and Edinburgh, British government sources acknowledged the existence of terrorist cells in the country and predicted that the most likely threat would take the form of a “explosives left in a public place” and attacks on transport networks.
Left by whom exactly? The British establishment remains adamant that the perpetrators are by definition apostates from Islam. When asked if the bombings across London on July 7, 2005, were the work of Islamic terrorists, the deputy assistant commissioner of London’s Metropolitan Police, Brian Paddick, responded that the culprits “certainly were not Islamic terrorists, because Islam and terrorism simply don’t go together.” He repeated, almost word for word, Tony Blair’s assurances on the subject given four years earlier.
In November 2005, Blair himself traveled to Leeds to meet with young Muslims in an attempt to understand how three “born-and-bred Yorkshire lads” (the fourth bomber, Lindsay, was a naturalized citizen born in Jamaica) could turn on their fellow citizens in such a murderous manner. His reference to the morbid jihadist trio as “lads”—an English term of endearment for the youthful male person, derived from Middle English ladde—is indicative of the fact that, after 7/7, he has learnt nothing and forgotten nothing.
Paddick’s boss, the Met’s Commissioner Sir Ian Blair, is out-Blairing his better known namesake. Britain’s most powerful policeman belongs to the same milieu as the Prime Minister: he has an Oxford degree, a Miro on his office wall, and the propensity to ascribe to Al-Qaeda “a late 19th-century nihilism.” He takes pride in his force’s “cultural and community resources unit” that enables police to call in Somalian-born officers to a Somalian case, but admits that “we do have some trouble providing Inuits.” Six months before the London bombs he made the unbelievable statement that “there is nothing wrong with being an Islamic fundamentalist.” When a journalist suggested that the family of Theo van Gogh, the Dutch film maker who was killed for questioning Islamic attitudes to women, could beg to differ on that one, Sir Ian replied,
There were lots of fundamentalist Muslims who didn’t shoot him . . . Look at Jerry Springer. Christian fundamentalists objected very strongly but they didn’t shoot the producer. And nor do 99.9 percent of Muslims want the sort of extremism that leads to violence. They know the consequences of terrorists claiming to be Muslim, so our job is to help.
The Mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, went one better by blaming Britain’s role in the war in Iraq for the explosions in his city. He also compared an outspoken Muslim scholar who backs suicide bombings, Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, to the late Pope John XXIII, because both believed that their faiths must engage with the world. While giving evidence to a House of Commons Home Affairs Select Committee inquiry into the terrorist attacks in London, Livingston said that Sheik Qaradawi is “very similar to the position of Pope John XXIII. An absolutely sane Islamist . . . Of all the Muslim thinkers in the world today he is the most positive force for change.”
Far from being a “moderate,” the sheikh is a mainstream member of the Muslim Brotherhood. His Ikhwani affiliations led to his imprisonment in Egypt in 1949, then in 1954-1956, and again in 1962. For some years Al-Qaradawi has been a media superstar in the Arab world, thanks to his regular program Al-Shariaa wa Al-Haya (Sharia and Life) on Al-Jazeera TV network. He has called on Muslims to fight foreigners in Iraq—troops and civilians—because they are occupiers, and fighting them is a religious duty. And yet in 2004 he came to Britain’s capital and spoke at the “European Council of Fatwa and Research” in London’s City Hall, and warmly welcomed by none other than the Mayor of London, Ken Livingstone. (“You are truly, truly welcome!”) At a public lecture during his stay, the good, sane sheikh asserted that female rape victims should be punished if they were dressed immodestly when they were raped. In his opinion, “For her to be absolved from guilt, a raped woman must have shown good conduct.”
With Messrs. Livingstone, Blair, Blair, and other such elected and appointed officials in charge, the Muslims can proceed with their shenanigans unobserved and unhindered. It is to be feared that if and when a plot is brought to fruition, possibly on a grander scale than the one thwarted earlier this week, the sleepwalking of those who are supposed to protect Britain will become more determined than ever before. With stern illiberalism that belies their self-professed respect for other cultures and belief systems they will continue to deny respect to the bombers who sacrifice their lives for the sake of their faith by denying them the right to define themselves.
Blairism is all–pervasive in the academia and EU-funded think-tank community that informs the policy-makers. “The bombs that killed more than 50 people in the heart of London in July served only to reinforce the realisation across the EU that more effective action is needed to ensure the integration of migrants, and their children, into our diverse societies,” writes Sarah Spencer of the Centre on Migration, Policy and Society at Oxford University, in an European Union-sponsored publication. We need to move beyond security and the fear of radicalization, she asserts, which “set a narrow and potentially divisive context” (i.e., law and order) for an agenda that “has to embrace broader outcomes,” such as greater access by the Muslim community to jobs, housing, health, education, poverty and civic participation. Such measures should be regulated by “an EU-wide approach to the integration of migrants,” Ms. Spencer concludes.
Historian David Starkey agrees. Addressing The Times Cheltenham Literature Festival in October 2005 he warned that “Britain is in danger of sleepwalking into a new era of religious intolerance after the July 7 bombings” and that the religious intolerance of previous centuries could be repeated unless society reconsiders its attitute. He voiced alarm at the trend towards “thought crimes” encapsulated in anti-terrorism legislation that include expressing any sympathy for suicide bombers. The key to present-day threats, Starkey concludes, is tolerance: “In the same way that a multitude of religious sects were allowed to continue without threat of being burnt at the stake after the Restoration, Britain today should tolerate Islam.”
The thought that British Muslims may be loath to integrate and accept being one among a multitude is inadmissible to the elite mindset. Even in the mundane Britain of commerce and banking, Islam has successfully planted the seeds of its acceptance as a legitimately parallel structure with the non-interest-based, sharia-compliant “Islamic mortgages”, which every self-respecting High Street home loan provider now feels obliged to offer:
It was an unusual sight—hundreds of businessmen listening attentively while a small group of top-notch Islamic scholars instructed them on the intricacies of Muslim ethics. These were bankers, and what they wanted to know was how they could do better business with Muslims. The Islamic Real Estate Finance conference . . . came after The Bank of England’s request for high street banks to create financial solutions for Muslims . . . Islamic scholars were called in to advise on the Sharia-compliance of the new mortgages. On the whole they were happy, but some expressed concern that the banks may be using money in non-permissible activities, like financing breweries or non-halal meat companies.
This is but one manifestation of the ongoing legitimization of the sharia as a legal and moral code with a legitimate role in the public life of Great Britain. It has penetrated culture, high as well as popular. As for the British courts, they are already Sharia-compliant. A key tenet of sharia is that non-Muslims cannot try Muslims, or even testify against them. A judge at London’s Central Criminal Court, the Old Bailey, accepts the concept. He may not be familiar with the Islamic law but he observed its commandments when he banned Jews and Hindus—and anyone married to one—from serving on the jury in the trial of Abdullah el-Faisal, accused of soliciting the murder of “unbelievers.” The judge reportedly announced, “For obvious reasons, members of the jury of the Jewish or Hindu faith should reveal themselves, even if they are married to Jewish or Hindu women, because they are not fit to arbitrate in this case.” One can only speculate what the reaction would be if equally “obvious reasons” were invoked in an attempt to exclude Muslims from a trial of an alleged Islamophobe.
At the time of this writing Muslims control large areas of dozens of industrial cities in the Midlands and Yorkshire, from which non-Muslims—by no means only the white ones—move out as soon as they can. Both the “moderates” and the “radicals” believe in the goal of an Islamized Britain:
There are two main religious traditions among Pakistani-British Muslims. The Barelwi majority believe in a slow evolution, gradually consolidating their gains and finally achieving an Islamic state. The Deobandi minority argue for a quicker process using politics and violence to achieve the same result. Ultimately, both believe in the goal of an Islamic state in Britain where Muslims will govern their own affairs and, as the finishing touch, everyone else’s affairs as well.
The latest terrorist plot is a logical outcome of the Blairite forma mentis, the size of Muslim immigration into the country, and the dynamics of that growing community’s symbiotic interaction with the elite consensus. Even before the Rushdie affair allowed Muslims in Britain to flex their muscles in open opposition to the law of the land, a Declaration issued by the Islamic Foundation in Leicester stated, urbi et orbi, that its goal is to change the existing British society into “an Islamic society based on the Qur’an and the Sunna and make Islam, which is a code for entire life, supreme and dominant, especially in the socio-political spheres.”
A generation later mosques and Islamic centers have multiplied all over Britain and provide the backbone to terrorist support network. The Home Office approved visas to Muslim clerics, primarily from Pakistan, sympathetic to the radicals. Mosques provide venues for the faithful “to hail Osama bin Laden as a hero and to evoke the ‘positive outcomes’ of the attacks in New York and Washington.”
The way in which the war against terrorism is waged in today’s Downing Street resembles the atmosphere at Rastenburg in 1944. With the Blairites in charge T.S. Eliot may yet be proved right in his warning that the West would end, “not with a bang but a whimper.” Some decades earlier, in 1899, 26 year old Winston Churchill expressed hope “that if evil days should come upon our own country, and the last army which a collapsing Empire could interpose between London and the invader were dissolving in rout and ruin, that there would be some—even in these modern days—who would not care to accustom themselves to a new order of things and tamely survive the disaster.”
Even Churchill’s precience could not have envisaged the possibility that “the invader” would have his friends and allies at No. 10, Downing Street, and London’s County Hall. The reality is absurd and the principals involved are abnormal. Only when Blair, Livingstone & Co. are permanently ousted will it become possible for Britain to defend herself, and to be herself once again.
Britain’s Jihadist Fifth Column
By Srdja Trifkovic
The Islamic terrorist plot to blow up ten airliners en route from Great Britain to the United States is surprising only in one respect: It makes no sense for the Muslim diaspora in Europe to carry out terrorist acts since they can have Europe—the whole of Western Europe, anyway—if they play their hand right in the next 20-30 years. Blowing up airliners, or London Underground trains, is bad for the cause. It is not directed from “Islam Central”; it is literally “home-grown.”
Only a non-Chronicles reader will be puzzled by the fact that “mainstream” media all over the Western world have been reluctant to state three key facts about the British plot:
1. The 24 plotters arrested thus far are all Muslims;
2. 22 of them are UK-born Pakistanis, and two are British converts to Islam;
3. The plotters were motivated by Islam—by Muhammad’s faith as such, and not by some allegedly aberrant variety of the creed.
We’ve seen this same reluctance to name names with the rioting “youths” in France last fall. The ongoing scenario is becoming a tad tedious: (1) a bunch of murderously minded jihadists are arrested and accused of terrorist intent; (2) local Muslim “community activists” and selcted non-Muslim neighbors respond with a mix of indignation and denial, with the assurances of the suspects’ impeccable character, and accusations of anti-Muslim bias; (3) non-Muslim politicos go out of their way to reassure the Muslim community that it is loved and appreciated, and not in any way associated with the terrorists. It’s déjà vu all over again.
This boringly predictable scenario is unfolding in England right now. “Stunned residents” of four English towns—Muslims, of course, although the Daily Mirror does not make it clear in its report—were upset: when “their quiet suburban lives were shattered when police swooped on neighbours suspected of being part of a huge terror plot to bomb airlines.” The suspects, we are told, included “two brothers who loved cricket, a university student, a builder, a pizza worker, a businessman and a dad-to-be.” The implication—that one’s love of cricket, or building buildings, or studying, or baking pizzas, or expecting a baby—is in some manner incompatible with Islaimc terrorism, is clearly made but not elaborated. What a million tabloid readers get instead is a nudge in the direction of righteous indignation at the treatment of poor, innocent Muslims:
One of the converts, Don Stewart-Whyte, was dragged from his car after an officer smashed the driver’s window. A neighbour said police had been lying in wait as he arrived home at High Wycombe with his Muslim wife. The 21-year-old switched to Islam six months ago and recently married after turning his back on a life of drugs and booze.
One can only hope that Don will go back to dope and booze, for his own good and that of his British neighbors. As for the other convert held, his name used to be Oliver Savant until he changed it to Ibrahim. His furious brother said “I’m outraged. We’re shocked and angry that we’re being put through this. He’s married, a newly-wed expecting a baby. Our parents are traumatised, as you would expect. There’s nothing that makes me think he’s linked to this and I’m confident the police will realise this has been a huge cock-up.”
By the time the cock-up is cleared circa 2050, when Ibrahim gets out of jail, he’ll be pleased to note that a simple majority of West European under-21s will be Muslim.
A mere four decades ago the suggestion that the working-class town of High Wycombe, or Birmingham—once a staid city of hard-working Midlanders—could become a hotbed of Islamic terrorism, would have sounded insane. Today it raises no eyebrows. The enormous growth and arrogant self-confidence of the Muslim immigrant community in Great Britain, coupled with the cultural enfeeblement and demographic decline of the English nation, has turned Birmingham and many other Victorian industrial cities into de facto self-governing Muslim ghettos. The formula was devised by Tariq Ramadan a decade ago: Muslims in the West should conduct themselves not as hyphenated citizens seeking to live by “common values” but as though they were already living in a Muslim-majority society.
Most British Muslims come from the Indian sub-continent. They are technically “British” but functionally, for the most part, Pakistanis or Bengalis. More significantly, their British-born offspring tend to consider themselves de facto autonomous, a community of believers opposed to the broader society of infidels. The result is a mature jihadist infrastructure, centered on a network of mosques and Islamic centers.
Britain’s Prime Minister Tony Blair is the villain of the piece. “What happened in America was not the work of Islamic terrorists, it was not the work of Muslim terrorists,” he declared after meeting a group of Muslim “community leaders” at 10 Downing Street, in the aftermath of 9-11. “It was the work of terrorists, pure and simple” who must not be honored “with any misguided religious justification,” because they “contravened all the tenets of Islam”:
It is . . . explicitly contrary to Islamic law to kill innocent civilians, to murder women and children and non-combatants… Islam is a peace-loving, tolerant, religion. Many of the world’s religions, indeed including Christianity, draw from the same spiritual heritage. We share the same values, and the same respect for the sanctity of human life . . . [W]e know of no specific threat in relation to this country and it is important that we are not alarmist about it. And I mean frankly some of the reports have been alarmist.
Echoing the Prime Minnister, two weeks after 9-11 former Home Office Minister John Denham pledged to cut out the “cancer of Islamophobia” infecting Britain, and declared that “the real Islam is a religion of peace, tolerance and understanding.” In line with the EU instructions he called on the media to avoid promoting “a distorted or caricatured or prejudiced” view of Muslims or the Islamic faith.
Dr. Richard Stone, chairman of the “Commission on British Muslims and Islamophobia,” criticized the Blair government for not addressing “in a deep way” the anti-Muslim prejudice in Britain: “There is now . . . mounting concern that the already fragile foothold gained by Muslim communities in Britain is threatened by ignorance and intolerance.” He added that the only area where there had been major improvement was “within Muslim communities themselves.” The key finding of his commission was that 9-11 had made life more difficult for Muslims. It castigated British public bodies for failing to address “institutional Islamophobia” and called for changes in the law to better protect Muslim communities (i.e., introduce censorship) and “a major effort” (i.e., affirmative action and specific quotas) to bring more Muslims into public life.
The Director of Public Prosecutions expressed concern that the War on Terror is “alienating whole communities” in Great Britain. Colelctively they have all contributed to the creation of a culture of Muslim victimhood in which “Islamophobia,” defined both as a legal crime and a moral outrage, inhibited all serious debate in Great Britain after 9-11 on the causes of terrorism.
Since then thousands of people have been murdered in jihadist attacks, in Bali, Moscow, Casablanca, Istanbul, Madrid, Beslan, Sharm-el-Sheik, Nairobi, and dozens of other places. Were it not for the arrests on August 10, several thousand airline travelers would have been added to the tally.
Can the British establishment learn anything, ever? The answer, on current form, is a clear “no.” Just over a year ago, on July 7, 2005, London’s transportation network was hit by four British-born and bred Muslim youths. The suicide bombers were four British citizens, three of them Pakistani by parentage. They attended British state schools, traveled on British passports, and spoke with Yorkshire accents. They also hated England and its people with such intensity that they were prepared to sacrifice their own lives in order to kill as many of them as possible. They were coldly premeditated, practicing their attacks on a dry run on June 28, nine days before their bombs killed 52 people and wounded 200. Mohammad Sidique Khan, the lead suicide bomber, recorded a video in which he declared, “We are at war and I am a soldier.”
The ranks of those potential soldiers are increasing, paradoxically enough, as the British-born young Muslims come of age. “What is striking about most second- and third-generation British Muslims is their intense religiosity. Asked how much of a role Islam played in their everyday lives, 45 percent of the respondents in the student survey said it played a role in everything while 48 percent said it played a role in most things. This is in sharp contrast with a comparable survey of the British public in which 66 percent said religion was not an important factor in their lives.”
According to a detailed survey of the attitudes of British Muslims prepared for the Daily Telegraph in the immediate aftermath of the London bombings of July 7, 2005, one in four sympathizes with motives of terrorists and six per cent insist that the bombings were “fully justified.” In absolute numbers this means there are over 100,000 Muslims in Great Britain who are either prepared to carry out terrorist acts, or ready to support those who do. And a substantial majority, 56 percent, say that, whether or not they sympathize with the bombers, they can at least understand why they behave in this way. The sheer scale of Muslim alienation from British society that the survey reveals is remarkable: nearly a third of them, 32 percent, believe that “Western society is decadent and immoral and that Muslims should seek to bring it to an end.”
The plot to bring down America-bound planes should not have come as a surprise. It has been known for years that trained al-Qaeda terrorists were present in the United Kingdom and operated in classic small cell structures. In December 2002, only a day after the arrest of seven Muslims suspected of terrorism in London and Edinburgh, British government sources acknowledged the existence of terrorist cells in the country and predicted that the most likely threat would take the form of a “explosives left in a public place” and attacks on transport networks.
Left by whom exactly? The British establishment remains adamant that the perpetrators are by definition apostates from Islam. When asked if the bombings across London on July 7, 2005, were the work of Islamic terrorists, the deputy assistant commissioner of London’s Metropolitan Police, Brian Paddick, responded that the culprits “certainly were not Islamic terrorists, because Islam and terrorism simply don’t go together.” He repeated, almost word for word, Tony Blair’s assurances on the subject given four years earlier.
In November 2005, Blair himself traveled to Leeds to meet with young Muslims in an attempt to understand how three “born-and-bred Yorkshire lads” (the fourth bomber, Lindsay, was a naturalized citizen born in Jamaica) could turn on their fellow citizens in such a murderous manner. His reference to the morbid jihadist trio as “lads”—an English term of endearment for the youthful male person, derived from Middle English ladde—is indicative of the fact that, after 7/7, he has learnt nothing and forgotten nothing.
Paddick’s boss, the Met’s Commissioner Sir Ian Blair, is out-Blairing his better known namesake. Britain’s most powerful policeman belongs to the same milieu as the Prime Minister: he has an Oxford degree, a Miro on his office wall, and the propensity to ascribe to Al-Qaeda “a late 19th-century nihilism.” He takes pride in his force’s “cultural and community resources unit” that enables police to call in Somalian-born officers to a Somalian case, but admits that “we do have some trouble providing Inuits.” Six months before the London bombs he made the unbelievable statement that “there is nothing wrong with being an Islamic fundamentalist.” When a journalist suggested that the family of Theo van Gogh, the Dutch film maker who was killed for questioning Islamic attitudes to women, could beg to differ on that one, Sir Ian replied,
There were lots of fundamentalist Muslims who didn’t shoot him . . . Look at Jerry Springer. Christian fundamentalists objected very strongly but they didn’t shoot the producer. And nor do 99.9 percent of Muslims want the sort of extremism that leads to violence. They know the consequences of terrorists claiming to be Muslim, so our job is to help.
The Mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, went one better by blaming Britain’s role in the war in Iraq for the explosions in his city. He also compared an outspoken Muslim scholar who backs suicide bombings, Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, to the late Pope John XXIII, because both believed that their faiths must engage with the world. While giving evidence to a House of Commons Home Affairs Select Committee inquiry into the terrorist attacks in London, Livingston said that Sheik Qaradawi is “very similar to the position of Pope John XXIII. An absolutely sane Islamist . . . Of all the Muslim thinkers in the world today he is the most positive force for change.”
Far from being a “moderate,” the sheikh is a mainstream member of the Muslim Brotherhood. His Ikhwani affiliations led to his imprisonment in Egypt in 1949, then in 1954-1956, and again in 1962. For some years Al-Qaradawi has been a media superstar in the Arab world, thanks to his regular program Al-Shariaa wa Al-Haya (Sharia and Life) on Al-Jazeera TV network. He has called on Muslims to fight foreigners in Iraq—troops and civilians—because they are occupiers, and fighting them is a religious duty. And yet in 2004 he came to Britain’s capital and spoke at the “European Council of Fatwa and Research” in London’s City Hall, and warmly welcomed by none other than the Mayor of London, Ken Livingstone. (“You are truly, truly welcome!”) At a public lecture during his stay, the good, sane sheikh asserted that female rape victims should be punished if they were dressed immodestly when they were raped. In his opinion, “For her to be absolved from guilt, a raped woman must have shown good conduct.”
With Messrs. Livingstone, Blair, Blair, and other such elected and appointed officials in charge, the Muslims can proceed with their shenanigans unobserved and unhindered. It is to be feared that if and when a plot is brought to fruition, possibly on a grander scale than the one thwarted earlier this week, the sleepwalking of those who are supposed to protect Britain will become more determined than ever before. With stern illiberalism that belies their self-professed respect for other cultures and belief systems they will continue to deny respect to the bombers who sacrifice their lives for the sake of their faith by denying them the right to define themselves.
Blairism is all–pervasive in the academia and EU-funded think-tank community that informs the policy-makers. “The bombs that killed more than 50 people in the heart of London in July served only to reinforce the realisation across the EU that more effective action is needed to ensure the integration of migrants, and their children, into our diverse societies,” writes Sarah Spencer of the Centre on Migration, Policy and Society at Oxford University, in an European Union-sponsored publication. We need to move beyond security and the fear of radicalization, she asserts, which “set a narrow and potentially divisive context” (i.e., law and order) for an agenda that “has to embrace broader outcomes,” such as greater access by the Muslim community to jobs, housing, health, education, poverty and civic participation. Such measures should be regulated by “an EU-wide approach to the integration of migrants,” Ms. Spencer concludes.
Historian David Starkey agrees. Addressing The Times Cheltenham Literature Festival in October 2005 he warned that “Britain is in danger of sleepwalking into a new era of religious intolerance after the July 7 bombings” and that the religious intolerance of previous centuries could be repeated unless society reconsiders its attitute. He voiced alarm at the trend towards “thought crimes” encapsulated in anti-terrorism legislation that include expressing any sympathy for suicide bombers. The key to present-day threats, Starkey concludes, is tolerance: “In the same way that a multitude of religious sects were allowed to continue without threat of being burnt at the stake after the Restoration, Britain today should tolerate Islam.”
The thought that British Muslims may be loath to integrate and accept being one among a multitude is inadmissible to the elite mindset. Even in the mundane Britain of commerce and banking, Islam has successfully planted the seeds of its acceptance as a legitimately parallel structure with the non-interest-based, sharia-compliant “Islamic mortgages”, which every self-respecting High Street home loan provider now feels obliged to offer:
It was an unusual sight—hundreds of businessmen listening attentively while a small group of top-notch Islamic scholars instructed them on the intricacies of Muslim ethics. These were bankers, and what they wanted to know was how they could do better business with Muslims. The Islamic Real Estate Finance conference . . . came after The Bank of England’s request for high street banks to create financial solutions for Muslims . . . Islamic scholars were called in to advise on the Sharia-compliance of the new mortgages. On the whole they were happy, but some expressed concern that the banks may be using money in non-permissible activities, like financing breweries or non-halal meat companies.
This is but one manifestation of the ongoing legitimization of the sharia as a legal and moral code with a legitimate role in the public life of Great Britain. It has penetrated culture, high as well as popular. As for the British courts, they are already Sharia-compliant. A key tenet of sharia is that non-Muslims cannot try Muslims, or even testify against them. A judge at London’s Central Criminal Court, the Old Bailey, accepts the concept. He may not be familiar with the Islamic law but he observed its commandments when he banned Jews and Hindus—and anyone married to one—from serving on the jury in the trial of Abdullah el-Faisal, accused of soliciting the murder of “unbelievers.” The judge reportedly announced, “For obvious reasons, members of the jury of the Jewish or Hindu faith should reveal themselves, even if they are married to Jewish or Hindu women, because they are not fit to arbitrate in this case.” One can only speculate what the reaction would be if equally “obvious reasons” were invoked in an attempt to exclude Muslims from a trial of an alleged Islamophobe.
At the time of this writing Muslims control large areas of dozens of industrial cities in the Midlands and Yorkshire, from which non-Muslims—by no means only the white ones—move out as soon as they can. Both the “moderates” and the “radicals” believe in the goal of an Islamized Britain:
There are two main religious traditions among Pakistani-British Muslims. The Barelwi majority believe in a slow evolution, gradually consolidating their gains and finally achieving an Islamic state. The Deobandi minority argue for a quicker process using politics and violence to achieve the same result. Ultimately, both believe in the goal of an Islamic state in Britain where Muslims will govern their own affairs and, as the finishing touch, everyone else’s affairs as well.
The latest terrorist plot is a logical outcome of the Blairite forma mentis, the size of Muslim immigration into the country, and the dynamics of that growing community’s symbiotic interaction with the elite consensus. Even before the Rushdie affair allowed Muslims in Britain to flex their muscles in open opposition to the law of the land, a Declaration issued by the Islamic Foundation in Leicester stated, urbi et orbi, that its goal is to change the existing British society into “an Islamic society based on the Qur’an and the Sunna and make Islam, which is a code for entire life, supreme and dominant, especially in the socio-political spheres.”
A generation later mosques and Islamic centers have multiplied all over Britain and provide the backbone to terrorist support network. The Home Office approved visas to Muslim clerics, primarily from Pakistan, sympathetic to the radicals. Mosques provide venues for the faithful “to hail Osama bin Laden as a hero and to evoke the ‘positive outcomes’ of the attacks in New York and Washington.”
The way in which the war against terrorism is waged in today’s Downing Street resembles the atmosphere at Rastenburg in 1944. With the Blairites in charge T.S. Eliot may yet be proved right in his warning that the West would end, “not with a bang but a whimper.” Some decades earlier, in 1899, 26 year old Winston Churchill expressed hope “that if evil days should come upon our own country, and the last army which a collapsing Empire could interpose between London and the invader were dissolving in rout and ruin, that there would be some—even in these modern days—who would not care to accustom themselves to a new order of things and tamely survive the disaster.”
Even Churchill’s precience could not have envisaged the possibility that “the invader” would have his friends and allies at No. 10, Downing Street, and London’s County Hall. The reality is absurd and the principals involved are abnormal. Only when Blair, Livingstone & Co. are permanently ousted will it become possible for Britain to defend herself, and to be herself once again.
All the News That Fits
By Thomas Fleming
‘Airlines terror plot’ disrupted
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/4778575.stm
Find: Muslim Not Found
Find: Islam Not Found
Find: The Truth Not Found
In reading, seeing, or hearing news reports on the terrorist plot, hatched in the UK against the US, don’t bother to look for any description of the terrorists beyond the phrase used by the government, “home-grown.”
Anyone hearing this might imagine a couple of London Cockneys, working with some Geordies and Taffies, had decided to go into the terrorist business. NPR came the closest with this allusive paragraph.
“The identities of the suspects were not revealed, but London’s Metropolitan Police commissioner told reporters that before the overnight raids, “community leaders” had been alerted. A U.K. police official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the case, told the AP that the suspects were “homegrown,” though it was not immediately clear if they were all British citizens. Police were working closely with the South Asian community, the official said.”
In the good old days in America, “community” meant African-American. Now, at least in Britain, it means Muslim, just as South Asian means Pakistani. Interviewing NPR reporter Rob Gifford (British), Renée Montaigne did elicit the confession that the government was concerned to avoid the impression that police were “targeting the Muslim community,” and said this was not about any one faith or community. That is obviously why Michael Chertoff says it has the earmarks of an Al Qaeda operation.
Meanwhile, many UK/US flights have been cancelled or delayed, and new security measures mean long lines and frustration in US airports. Mr. Chertoff says we should be patient and let the “professionals” do their job. Professional now means a rude and untrained TSA employee shouting at the people whose taxes and ticket prices pay his salary.
I predict that the American people will swallow this one, just as they swallow every other line the clumsy propaganda apparatus flips into their the suburban fish-tank in which they spend their days and nights, numbed by lies and tranqs. A third of us say President Lyndon Baines Bush is doing a good job. (One more guns-and-butter Texan would finish off this country for good.) Nearly half of us still think Iraq had substantial amounts of WMD’s. Years go by and, apparently, our military force is too incompetent to find them.
They say they are fighting a war against terrorism, but they continue to deny that the problem is Islam per se, not Islamism or Wahabism or militant Islam or even, as Mr. Bush is now saying, “Islamic fascists”, but just the plain old vanilla-flavored Islam that has been making war on Christendom since the days of the “Prophet.” In refusing to name names, Prime Minister Blair and President Bush are lying to their respective peoples and in refusing to keep those people out of our countries, they are endangering our lives.
The US is pretending to fight terrorism in Iraq in order to have an excuse for doing nothing to fight it here in the US.
By Thomas Fleming
‘Airlines terror plot’ disrupted
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/4778575.stm
Find: Muslim Not Found
Find: Islam Not Found
Find: The Truth Not Found
In reading, seeing, or hearing news reports on the terrorist plot, hatched in the UK against the US, don’t bother to look for any description of the terrorists beyond the phrase used by the government, “home-grown.”
Anyone hearing this might imagine a couple of London Cockneys, working with some Geordies and Taffies, had decided to go into the terrorist business. NPR came the closest with this allusive paragraph.
“The identities of the suspects were not revealed, but London’s Metropolitan Police commissioner told reporters that before the overnight raids, “community leaders” had been alerted. A U.K. police official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the case, told the AP that the suspects were “homegrown,” though it was not immediately clear if they were all British citizens. Police were working closely with the South Asian community, the official said.”
In the good old days in America, “community” meant African-American. Now, at least in Britain, it means Muslim, just as South Asian means Pakistani. Interviewing NPR reporter Rob Gifford (British), Renée Montaigne did elicit the confession that the government was concerned to avoid the impression that police were “targeting the Muslim community,” and said this was not about any one faith or community. That is obviously why Michael Chertoff says it has the earmarks of an Al Qaeda operation.
Meanwhile, many UK/US flights have been cancelled or delayed, and new security measures mean long lines and frustration in US airports. Mr. Chertoff says we should be patient and let the “professionals” do their job. Professional now means a rude and untrained TSA employee shouting at the people whose taxes and ticket prices pay his salary.
I predict that the American people will swallow this one, just as they swallow every other line the clumsy propaganda apparatus flips into their the suburban fish-tank in which they spend their days and nights, numbed by lies and tranqs. A third of us say President Lyndon Baines Bush is doing a good job. (One more guns-and-butter Texan would finish off this country for good.) Nearly half of us still think Iraq had substantial amounts of WMD’s. Years go by and, apparently, our military force is too incompetent to find them.
They say they are fighting a war against terrorism, but they continue to deny that the problem is Islam per se, not Islamism or Wahabism or militant Islam or even, as Mr. Bush is now saying, “Islamic fascists”, but just the plain old vanilla-flavored Islam that has been making war on Christendom since the days of the “Prophet.” In refusing to name names, Prime Minister Blair and President Bush are lying to their respective peoples and in refusing to keep those people out of our countries, they are endangering our lives.
The US is pretending to fight terrorism in Iraq in order to have an excuse for doing nothing to fight it here in the US.
From Daily Pundit:
George Bush: Where I Stand
In order to know where we stand today in evaluating George W. Bush, it is necessary to know where we - and he - stood five (yes, five) years ago. Three weeks after 9/11, the President addressed a joint session of congress and said:
Our enemy is a radical network of terrorists, and every government that supports them. (Applause.)
...Every nation, in every region, now has a decision to make. Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists. (Applause.) From this day forward, any nation that continues to harbor or support terrorism will be regarded by the United States as a hostile regime.
Four months after 9/11, President Bush delivered the State of the Union Address, in which he said the following:
Our second goal is to prevent regimes that sponsor terror from threatening America or our friends and allies with weapons of mass destruction. Some of these regimes have been pretty quiet since September the 11th. But we know their true nature. North Korea is a regime arming with missiles and weapons of mass destruction, while starving its citizens. Iran aggressively pursues these weapons and exports terror, while an unelected few repress the Iranian people's hope for freedom. Iraq continues to flaunt its hostility toward America and to support terror. The Iraqi regime has plotted to develop anthrax, and nerve gas, and nuclear weapons for over a decade. This is a regime that has already used poison gas to murder thousands of its own citizens -- leaving the bodies of mothers huddled over their dead children. This is a regime that agreed to international inspections -- then kicked out the inspectors. This is a regime that has something to hide from the civilized world. States like these, and their terrorist allies, constitute an axis of evil, arming to threaten the peace of the world. By seeking weapons of mass destruction, these regimes pose a grave and growing danger. They could provide these arms to terrorists, giving them the means to match their hatred. They could attack our allies or attempt to blackmail the United States. In any of these cases, the price of indifference would be catastrophic. We will work closely with our coalition to deny terrorists and their state sponsors the materials, technology, and expertise to make and deliver weapons of mass destruction. We will develop and deploy effective missile defenses to protect America and our allies from sudden attack. (Applause.) And all nations should know: America will do what is necessary to ensure our nation's security. We'll be deliberate, yet time is not on our side. I will not wait on events, while dangers gather. I will not stand by, as peril draws closer and closer. The United States of America will not permit the world's most dangerous regimes to threaten us with the world's most destructive weapons. (Applause.)
Think about those words: "Our enemy is...terrorists...and every government that supports them." "Any nation that continues to harbor or support terrorism will be regarded by the United States as a hostile regime." "States like these [Iraq, Iran, North Korea] constitute an axis of evil." "The United States of America will not permit the world's most dangerous regimes to threaten us with the world's most destructive weapons."
I cheered those words. I was glad I had voted for Bush, and not for Al Gore. I looked forward to President George Bush making good on his words and defending our nation against the nations of the axis of evil, and the terrorists they and others supported.
Shortly after that I happened on the writings of Angelo Codevilla, and understood the most effective strategy, in fact, the only proven effective strategy, available for waging and winning the war against Islamist fundamentalist terrorism: It would be necessary for us to destroy the regimes that sponsored, armed, trained, supported, protected, and used these Islamist terror organizations. Just as the seemingly ubiquitous communist "revolutionary fronts" all over the world seemed to dry up overnight with the destruction of their sponsor, the Soviet communist regime, removing the regimes in Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Syria, North Korea, and elsewhere that similarly succored a host of Islamist terror organizations would both give us a clear-cut, straightforward strategy, and also give us the standards by which victory would be measured: the destruction of those regimes would signal victory.
Viewed in that context, the invasion of Iraq and the toppling of the Hussein regime made perfect sense, especially in a military geostrategic sense. A liberated Iraq, serving as a base and jumping-off point for further military action against Iran and, perhaps, Syria, was an obvious first target for a campaign designed to destroy the regimes comprising the most immediate threats, and for placing enormous pressure on the Saudis to cease their Wahabbist support of Sunni terror organizations globally.
It is now five years later. The Taliban - which turned out to be merely puppets of al Qaeda, which had assumed regime status in Afghanistan, has been overthrown. al Qaeda is now stateless again. It has been badly damaged, but certainly not yet destroyed, as events yesterday in London make crystal clear. The Hussein regime in Iraq has been overthrown, but not destroyed, and much of the country, including the critical oil-bearing regions, is in the hands of Shia militias that answer as much to the Mullahs of Iran as they do to any purported "democratic" government in Baghdad - where, yesterday, hundreds of thousands demonstrated in support of Iranian sponsored terror group Hizb'Allah in their attacks on Israel.
The Mullahs of Iran remain in power and, far from being cowed by the Bush actions in Iraq, are poised to push the United States out of that country entirely. They are also poised to become the second Islamic republic to attain nuclear weapons. Their terrorist surrogates slaughter Americans in Iraq, and Jews in Israel.
The Syrian regime remains intact, and provides unlimited support to anti-American and Islamist terror groups, as it has for decades.
North Korea, a primary member of the "axis of evil," today "threaten[s] us with the world's most destructive weapons." - as does, or will soon, Iran.
Bush's proud words of five years ago stand revealed as hollow and meaningless. What happened?
What happened was one of the biggest failures of leadership in Presidential history. Bush supporters will claim that Bush was done in by a liberal media and the ferocious hatred of liberals and leftwingers, but that is one of the things true leadership is all about: Managing and overcoming opposition in order to achieve the necessary goals - in this case, the destruction of world Islamist terrorism and the regimes that support it.
Bush turned out to be singularly ill-equipped for this task, both by skill and by temperament. His public relations management was curiously hesitant and badly timed, and, of course, his inabilty to speak effectively in public was a gigantic handicap. His temperament, it eventually became clear, was hesitant, overly calculating, timid, and "compassionate." Compassion has its place, but not in warfighting. The Bush we know would not have pulled the trigger on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. He abdicated the hard decisions in favor of political maneuvering and meaningless gestures.
Looking back, it becomes obvious that Bush never intended, or, perhaps, never intended with any conviction to actually do what he said he would do. His own brave promises reveal their hollowness with the passage of time. The world is a far more dangerous place for the United States, thanks to Bush's failures. Today, we stand threatened "by the world's most dangerous regimes with the world's most destructive weapons." And the Wahabbis of Saudi Arabia continue to fund a global terror support machine the likes of which we have not seen since the Soviet regime financed and trained every two-bit communist terror organization it could find.
That is unlikely to change under the Bush administration and, indeed, I expect it to grow worse, as I don't believe Bush has any intention of keeping an effective US military force in the region capable of giving pause to Iran, or to Saudi Arabia.
Instead, we are treated to distractions that give the impression that somebody (in this case, Israel) is doing something about some Islamist terrorists (in this case, open Iranian surrogates), and the US is "doing its part" by "protecting" Israel against the likes of France. And Bush's vaunted "political credit" (which probably never existed in the first place) has dribbled down the drain of his own incompetence.
As for me? I've moved on. The first administration of the first century of the American Third Millennium will, in my estimation, be remembered as one of the biggest failures of that century. Bush's great failure was, not invading Iraq, but not weathering the adversity that followed through acts of real leadership, and then pressing on with the necessary military destruction of the other regimes he, himself, named as most dangerous five years ago.
I'm hoping we can get through the next two years without any major disasters, and then I'm looking to elect a real war leader to the White House - somebody with a warrior's temperament and a leader's skills. George Bush has neither. He is a dangerous failure, and America will be well rid of him.
America's last great war leader was a man from New York. Hmm. Is anybody like that running for President in 2008?
Posted by Bill Quick on August 11, 2006 09:07 AM
George Bush: Where I Stand
In order to know where we stand today in evaluating George W. Bush, it is necessary to know where we - and he - stood five (yes, five) years ago. Three weeks after 9/11, the President addressed a joint session of congress and said:
Our enemy is a radical network of terrorists, and every government that supports them. (Applause.)
...Every nation, in every region, now has a decision to make. Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists. (Applause.) From this day forward, any nation that continues to harbor or support terrorism will be regarded by the United States as a hostile regime.
Four months after 9/11, President Bush delivered the State of the Union Address, in which he said the following:
Our second goal is to prevent regimes that sponsor terror from threatening America or our friends and allies with weapons of mass destruction. Some of these regimes have been pretty quiet since September the 11th. But we know their true nature. North Korea is a regime arming with missiles and weapons of mass destruction, while starving its citizens. Iran aggressively pursues these weapons and exports terror, while an unelected few repress the Iranian people's hope for freedom. Iraq continues to flaunt its hostility toward America and to support terror. The Iraqi regime has plotted to develop anthrax, and nerve gas, and nuclear weapons for over a decade. This is a regime that has already used poison gas to murder thousands of its own citizens -- leaving the bodies of mothers huddled over their dead children. This is a regime that agreed to international inspections -- then kicked out the inspectors. This is a regime that has something to hide from the civilized world. States like these, and their terrorist allies, constitute an axis of evil, arming to threaten the peace of the world. By seeking weapons of mass destruction, these regimes pose a grave and growing danger. They could provide these arms to terrorists, giving them the means to match their hatred. They could attack our allies or attempt to blackmail the United States. In any of these cases, the price of indifference would be catastrophic. We will work closely with our coalition to deny terrorists and their state sponsors the materials, technology, and expertise to make and deliver weapons of mass destruction. We will develop and deploy effective missile defenses to protect America and our allies from sudden attack. (Applause.) And all nations should know: America will do what is necessary to ensure our nation's security. We'll be deliberate, yet time is not on our side. I will not wait on events, while dangers gather. I will not stand by, as peril draws closer and closer. The United States of America will not permit the world's most dangerous regimes to threaten us with the world's most destructive weapons. (Applause.)
Think about those words: "Our enemy is...terrorists...and every government that supports them." "Any nation that continues to harbor or support terrorism will be regarded by the United States as a hostile regime." "States like these [Iraq, Iran, North Korea] constitute an axis of evil." "The United States of America will not permit the world's most dangerous regimes to threaten us with the world's most destructive weapons."
I cheered those words. I was glad I had voted for Bush, and not for Al Gore. I looked forward to President George Bush making good on his words and defending our nation against the nations of the axis of evil, and the terrorists they and others supported.
Shortly after that I happened on the writings of Angelo Codevilla, and understood the most effective strategy, in fact, the only proven effective strategy, available for waging and winning the war against Islamist fundamentalist terrorism: It would be necessary for us to destroy the regimes that sponsored, armed, trained, supported, protected, and used these Islamist terror organizations. Just as the seemingly ubiquitous communist "revolutionary fronts" all over the world seemed to dry up overnight with the destruction of their sponsor, the Soviet communist regime, removing the regimes in Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Syria, North Korea, and elsewhere that similarly succored a host of Islamist terror organizations would both give us a clear-cut, straightforward strategy, and also give us the standards by which victory would be measured: the destruction of those regimes would signal victory.
Viewed in that context, the invasion of Iraq and the toppling of the Hussein regime made perfect sense, especially in a military geostrategic sense. A liberated Iraq, serving as a base and jumping-off point for further military action against Iran and, perhaps, Syria, was an obvious first target for a campaign designed to destroy the regimes comprising the most immediate threats, and for placing enormous pressure on the Saudis to cease their Wahabbist support of Sunni terror organizations globally.
It is now five years later. The Taliban - which turned out to be merely puppets of al Qaeda, which had assumed regime status in Afghanistan, has been overthrown. al Qaeda is now stateless again. It has been badly damaged, but certainly not yet destroyed, as events yesterday in London make crystal clear. The Hussein regime in Iraq has been overthrown, but not destroyed, and much of the country, including the critical oil-bearing regions, is in the hands of Shia militias that answer as much to the Mullahs of Iran as they do to any purported "democratic" government in Baghdad - where, yesterday, hundreds of thousands demonstrated in support of Iranian sponsored terror group Hizb'Allah in their attacks on Israel.
The Mullahs of Iran remain in power and, far from being cowed by the Bush actions in Iraq, are poised to push the United States out of that country entirely. They are also poised to become the second Islamic republic to attain nuclear weapons. Their terrorist surrogates slaughter Americans in Iraq, and Jews in Israel.
The Syrian regime remains intact, and provides unlimited support to anti-American and Islamist terror groups, as it has for decades.
North Korea, a primary member of the "axis of evil," today "threaten[s] us with the world's most destructive weapons." - as does, or will soon, Iran.
Bush's proud words of five years ago stand revealed as hollow and meaningless. What happened?
What happened was one of the biggest failures of leadership in Presidential history. Bush supporters will claim that Bush was done in by a liberal media and the ferocious hatred of liberals and leftwingers, but that is one of the things true leadership is all about: Managing and overcoming opposition in order to achieve the necessary goals - in this case, the destruction of world Islamist terrorism and the regimes that support it.
Bush turned out to be singularly ill-equipped for this task, both by skill and by temperament. His public relations management was curiously hesitant and badly timed, and, of course, his inabilty to speak effectively in public was a gigantic handicap. His temperament, it eventually became clear, was hesitant, overly calculating, timid, and "compassionate." Compassion has its place, but not in warfighting. The Bush we know would not have pulled the trigger on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. He abdicated the hard decisions in favor of political maneuvering and meaningless gestures.
Looking back, it becomes obvious that Bush never intended, or, perhaps, never intended with any conviction to actually do what he said he would do. His own brave promises reveal their hollowness with the passage of time. The world is a far more dangerous place for the United States, thanks to Bush's failures. Today, we stand threatened "by the world's most dangerous regimes with the world's most destructive weapons." And the Wahabbis of Saudi Arabia continue to fund a global terror support machine the likes of which we have not seen since the Soviet regime financed and trained every two-bit communist terror organization it could find.
That is unlikely to change under the Bush administration and, indeed, I expect it to grow worse, as I don't believe Bush has any intention of keeping an effective US military force in the region capable of giving pause to Iran, or to Saudi Arabia.
Instead, we are treated to distractions that give the impression that somebody (in this case, Israel) is doing something about some Islamist terrorists (in this case, open Iranian surrogates), and the US is "doing its part" by "protecting" Israel against the likes of France. And Bush's vaunted "political credit" (which probably never existed in the first place) has dribbled down the drain of his own incompetence.
As for me? I've moved on. The first administration of the first century of the American Third Millennium will, in my estimation, be remembered as one of the biggest failures of that century. Bush's great failure was, not invading Iraq, but not weathering the adversity that followed through acts of real leadership, and then pressing on with the necessary military destruction of the other regimes he, himself, named as most dangerous five years ago.
I'm hoping we can get through the next two years without any major disasters, and then I'm looking to elect a real war leader to the White House - somebody with a warrior's temperament and a leader's skills. George Bush has neither. He is a dangerous failure, and America will be well rid of him.
America's last great war leader was a man from New York. Hmm. Is anybody like that running for President in 2008?
Posted by Bill Quick on August 11, 2006 09:07 AM
From Chris Roach's blog at AFF DoubleThink:
Are the "Right" and "Left" Useful Distinctions?
Posted on August 10
Everyone from mainstream conservatives, died-in-the-wool paleocons, and anarcho-libertarians participate in the American Conservative's symposium on whether conservatism and liberalism (right and left) are still meaningful and concrete distinctions? John Lukacs, John Derbyshire, Heather MacDonald, Taki, and many others make an appearance. It's noticably more thoughtful and cerebral than some of the pablum coming from the once great National Review. I've yet to tackle all the articles, but I like this point by Heather MacDonald; it reminds me of my own alienation from the "Religious RIght" even though I consider myself both religious and a man of the right:
Upon leaving office in November 2004, Attorney General John Ashcroft thanked his staff for keeping the country safe since 9/11. But the real credit, he added, belonged to God. Ultimately, it was God’s solicitude for America that had prevented another attack on the homeland.
Many conservatives hear such statements with a soothing sense of approbation. But others—count me among them—feel bewilderment, among much else. If God deserves thanks for fending off assaults on the United States after 9/11, why is he not also responsible for allowing the 2001 hijackings to happen in the first place?
Skeptical conservatives—one of the Right’s less celebrated subcultures—are conservatives because of their skepticism, not in spite of it. They ground their ideas in rational thinking and (nonreligious) moral argument. And the conservative movement is crippling itself by leaning too heavily on religion to the exclusion of these temperamentally compatible allies.
To this, I can only say, Amen.
Are the "Right" and "Left" Useful Distinctions?
Posted on August 10
Everyone from mainstream conservatives, died-in-the-wool paleocons, and anarcho-libertarians participate in the American Conservative's symposium on whether conservatism and liberalism (right and left) are still meaningful and concrete distinctions? John Lukacs, John Derbyshire, Heather MacDonald, Taki, and many others make an appearance. It's noticably more thoughtful and cerebral than some of the pablum coming from the once great National Review. I've yet to tackle all the articles, but I like this point by Heather MacDonald; it reminds me of my own alienation from the "Religious RIght" even though I consider myself both religious and a man of the right:
Upon leaving office in November 2004, Attorney General John Ashcroft thanked his staff for keeping the country safe since 9/11. But the real credit, he added, belonged to God. Ultimately, it was God’s solicitude for America that had prevented another attack on the homeland.
Many conservatives hear such statements with a soothing sense of approbation. But others—count me among them—feel bewilderment, among much else. If God deserves thanks for fending off assaults on the United States after 9/11, why is he not also responsible for allowing the 2001 hijackings to happen in the first place?
Skeptical conservatives—one of the Right’s less celebrated subcultures—are conservatives because of their skepticism, not in spite of it. They ground their ideas in rational thinking and (nonreligious) moral argument. And the conservative movement is crippling itself by leaning too heavily on religion to the exclusion of these temperamentally compatible allies.
To this, I can only say, Amen.
Thursday, August 10, 2006
From The Australian:
Why Islam is the new Marx
In the war of ideas, political Islamism has come to replace communism
By Tanveer Ahmed
THE central conflict in the war on ideas lies in the underlying stuff of man and how we think societies should be organised. Regardless of what ideology has ruled human affairs, they have all provided answers to this question. This is true in religion as it is in politics.
As the conflict in the Middle East continues, the secular influences of groups such as Hamas and Hezbollah are not obvious to the neutral observer. Nor is their attraction to the young Muslim in the Sydney street or the professional living in Indonesia clear.
"The core problem," as Paul Kelly argued on this page on Wednesday, "seems to be the attraction of the Islamist movement."
The 20th century saw the demise of communism, despite its attraction to millions of people who felt poor or downtrodden. It was exposed as a totalitarian system that stifled the aspirations of man. But its stain is spreading within the casing of Islamic fundamentalism. This does not seem obvious, especially considering Osama bin Laden himself was instrumental in defeating the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan more than two decades ago. And the Iranian revolution of 1979 was in part a reaction to the perceived godlessness of communism knocking at its doorstep.
This was mimicked to a lesser degree throughout the Middle East, from Egypt to Jordan.
But the old Marxists are extending their influence in many of the Islamic political parties that are rapidly rising in popularity, in response to inept, autocratic Arab governments. Arab governments have closed off opportunity to such an extent that secular forces such as communism or liberalism have minimal outlets.
One of the few places for a political voice is at the mosque and through religion. Religion provides the cloak for what is essentially politics.
As a result, political Islam is on the rise throughout the Arab world. The first municipal election in Saudi Arabia delivered wins for Islamic parties and, of course, there was the election of Hamas by the Palestinians. Many of the leaders representing political Islam have previous ties to Arab socialism. This is particularly true in Egypt, where the Muslim Brotherhood won one-fifth of the vote in elections last year.
Veteran foreign correspondent Mary Ann Weaver writes in her book A Portrait of Egypt: "A number of my former professors from the American University of Cairo were Marxists 20 years ago: fairly adamant, fairly doctrinaire Marxists. They are now equally adamant, equally doctrinaire Islamists."
The developments in Egypt are potent for it has long been a leader in the region.
The similarities of communism and Islam are considerable. Both are egalitarian and advocate radical economic change. They both demand a domination of the public space and share a dogmatic, ideological view of the world.
Political Islam is also supplying the social services in a collective context that communism promised, and the status of groups such as Hamas and Hezbollah depends on this. Their facilities are often described by locals as superior to those provided by the ruling governments.
Islam also promises to deliver the poor masses from oppression, but there is a difference: instead of the working class rising up against the bourgeoisie, the uprising to be encouraged is by hapless, impoverished Muslims against their oppressive Western masters or puppet Arab leaders. And like communism, Islam believes the collective must be preserved at the expense of the individual. We are social beings first, individuals second.
Like communism, Islamism promises a better life for the poor, oppressed and alienated. It is cloaked in God, but its essence is strongly secular. Unless the West fights the war of ideas at this level, offering a competing vision of morality as well as economics and technology, the lure of Islamic extremism will continue to flourish.
And this will especially be the case as television shows the Western class oppressors dropping bombs on the Muslim proletariat.
Tanveer Ahmed, a Sydney psychiatrist, is writing a book that is a comic look at Muslim life in Australia.
Why Islam is the new Marx
In the war of ideas, political Islamism has come to replace communism
By Tanveer Ahmed
THE central conflict in the war on ideas lies in the underlying stuff of man and how we think societies should be organised. Regardless of what ideology has ruled human affairs, they have all provided answers to this question. This is true in religion as it is in politics.
As the conflict in the Middle East continues, the secular influences of groups such as Hamas and Hezbollah are not obvious to the neutral observer. Nor is their attraction to the young Muslim in the Sydney street or the professional living in Indonesia clear.
"The core problem," as Paul Kelly argued on this page on Wednesday, "seems to be the attraction of the Islamist movement."
The 20th century saw the demise of communism, despite its attraction to millions of people who felt poor or downtrodden. It was exposed as a totalitarian system that stifled the aspirations of man. But its stain is spreading within the casing of Islamic fundamentalism. This does not seem obvious, especially considering Osama bin Laden himself was instrumental in defeating the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan more than two decades ago. And the Iranian revolution of 1979 was in part a reaction to the perceived godlessness of communism knocking at its doorstep.
This was mimicked to a lesser degree throughout the Middle East, from Egypt to Jordan.
But the old Marxists are extending their influence in many of the Islamic political parties that are rapidly rising in popularity, in response to inept, autocratic Arab governments. Arab governments have closed off opportunity to such an extent that secular forces such as communism or liberalism have minimal outlets.
One of the few places for a political voice is at the mosque and through religion. Religion provides the cloak for what is essentially politics.
As a result, political Islam is on the rise throughout the Arab world. The first municipal election in Saudi Arabia delivered wins for Islamic parties and, of course, there was the election of Hamas by the Palestinians. Many of the leaders representing political Islam have previous ties to Arab socialism. This is particularly true in Egypt, where the Muslim Brotherhood won one-fifth of the vote in elections last year.
Veteran foreign correspondent Mary Ann Weaver writes in her book A Portrait of Egypt: "A number of my former professors from the American University of Cairo were Marxists 20 years ago: fairly adamant, fairly doctrinaire Marxists. They are now equally adamant, equally doctrinaire Islamists."
The developments in Egypt are potent for it has long been a leader in the region.
The similarities of communism and Islam are considerable. Both are egalitarian and advocate radical economic change. They both demand a domination of the public space and share a dogmatic, ideological view of the world.
Political Islam is also supplying the social services in a collective context that communism promised, and the status of groups such as Hamas and Hezbollah depends on this. Their facilities are often described by locals as superior to those provided by the ruling governments.
Islam also promises to deliver the poor masses from oppression, but there is a difference: instead of the working class rising up against the bourgeoisie, the uprising to be encouraged is by hapless, impoverished Muslims against their oppressive Western masters or puppet Arab leaders. And like communism, Islam believes the collective must be preserved at the expense of the individual. We are social beings first, individuals second.
Like communism, Islamism promises a better life for the poor, oppressed and alienated. It is cloaked in God, but its essence is strongly secular. Unless the West fights the war of ideas at this level, offering a competing vision of morality as well as economics and technology, the lure of Islamic extremism will continue to flourish.
And this will especially be the case as television shows the Western class oppressors dropping bombs on the Muslim proletariat.
Tanveer Ahmed, a Sydney psychiatrist, is writing a book that is a comic look at Muslim life in Australia.
Books of The Times
The Evolution of Al Qaeda and the Intertwining Paths Leading to 9/11
Review by MICHIKO KAKUTANI
“The Looming Tower,” the title of Lawrence Wright’s remarkable new book about Al Qaeda and 9/11, refers not only to the doomed towers of the World Trade Center, but also to a passage in the Koran, which Osama bin Laden quoted several times in a speech exhorting the 19 hijackers to become martyrs to their cause: “Wherever you are, death will find you/even in the looming tower.”
Mr. Wright’s book, based on more than 500 interviews — ranging from Mr. bin Laden’s best friend in college, Jamal Khalifa, to Yosri Fouda, a reporter for Al Jazeera, to Richard A. Clarke, the former White House counterterrorism chief — gives the reader a searing view of the tragic events of Sept. 11, 2001, a view that is at once wrenchingly intimate and boldly sweeping in its historical perspective.
Though the broad outlines of his story have been recounted many, many times before, Mr. Wright fleshes out the narrative with myriad new details and a keen ability to situate the events he describes in a larger cultural and political context. And by focusing on the lives and careers of several key players on the “road to 9/11” — namely, Mr. bin Laden; his deputy, Ayman al-Zawahri; the former head of Saudi intelligence, Prince Turki al-Faisal; and the F.B.I.’s former counterterrorism chief, John O’Neill — he has succeeded in writing a narrative history that possesses all the immediacy and emotional power of a novel, an account that indelibly illustrates how the political and the personal, the public and the private were often inextricably intertwined.
Mr. Wright’s book suggests that “the charisma and vision of a few individuals shaped the nature” of the contest between Islam and the West. While “the tectonic plates of history were certainly shifting,” promoting a period of conflict between those two cultures, he contends, the emergence of Al Qaeda “depended on a unique conjunction of personalities” — most notably, Mr. Zawahri, who promoted the apocalyptic notion that only violence could change history, and Mr. bin Laden, whose global vision and leadership “held together an organization that had been bankrupted and thrown into exile.”
The book also suggests that the events of Sept. 11 were not inevitable. Rather, bad luck, the confluence of particular decisions and chance encounters, dithering on the part of United States officials and a series of absurd turf wars between the C.I.A. and F.B.I. all contributed to Al Qaeda’s success in pulling off its nefarious plans that sunny September day.
Compared with the authors Peter L. Bergen (“Holy War: Inside the Secret World of Osama bin Laden”) and Jonathan Randal (“Osama: the Making of a Terrorist”), Mr. Wright spends less time on the crucial role that the anti-Soviet jihad in Afghanistan played in shaping the jihadist cause. Instead, he has drawn upon many documents in Arabic and a host of interviews with jihadis to provide an arresting chronicle of the many formative events that shaped Al Qaeda over the years and Mr. bin Laden’s long, winding road to war against America. His book provides an amazingly detailed look at daily life inside Al Qaeda, and the motivations, misgivings and political goals of individual members.
Mr. Wright begins his story with an account of the life of Sayyid Qutb, the intellectual father of the Islamist movement: he recounts how a sojourn in America in the late 1940’s radicalized the Egyptian educator, how he was later thrown in prison by the regime of Gamal Abdel Nasser, and how his writings and eventual execution in 1966 made him a martyr and hero to a fledgling revolutionary movement. Mr. Wright then goes on to describe the radicalization of Mr. bin Laden, the heir to one of Saudi Arabia’s great fortunes, who grows from a shy boy who loved the American television series “Bonanza” into a solemn, religious adolescent influenced, some say, by a charismatic Syrian gym teacher who was a member of the Muslim Brothers organization.
Mr. Zawahri, an Egyptian doctor whom Mr. bin Laden got to know in Peshawar in the 1980’s, would have an even more formative impact. Indeed Mr. Zawahri emerges from this volume as an evil mentor, drawing ever “tighter the noose of influence he was casting around” the young Saudi by surrounding him with handpicked bodyguards and presiding over his medical treatment (possibly for Addison’s disease). Mr. Wright argues that before meeting Mr. Zawahri, Mr. bin Laden was “not much of a political thinker,” and he quotes the Saudi’s first biographer, Essam Deraz, saying he thought Mr. bin Laden had the potential to become “another Eisenhower,” turning the celebrity status he had achieved fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan into a peaceful political life. But that wasn’t Mr. Zawahri’s plan.
It was Mr. Zawahri, whose adamantine resolve was hardened by the torture he endured in Egyptian prisons as a young man, Mr. Wright notes, who introduced the use of suicide bombers. And it was Mr. Zawahri who was keen from the start on using biological and chemical weapons. As for Mr. bin Laden, it apparently took a long time, after his stint in Afghanistan, for him to settle on a subsequent plan of action.
During his exile from Saudi Arabia in the Sudan, Mr. Wright says, Mr. bin Laden “was wavering — the lure of peace being as strong as the battle cry of jihad.” Agriculture “captivated his imagination,” and he reportedly told various friends that he was thinking of quitting Al Qaeda and becoming a farmer.
Yet as Mr. Wright tells it, the continuing presence of American troops in Saudi Arabia (after the first gulf war) continued to gnaw at Mr. bin Laden, and the movement of American troops into Somalia in 1992 (on a humanitarian relief mission) made Al Qaeda feel increasingly encircled. In meetings held at the end of 1992, the group “turned from being the anti-communist Islamic army that bin Laden originally envisioned into a terrorist organization bent on attacking the United States.”
Mr. Wright not only traces how Al Qaeda evolved — from an opponent of two of America’s enemies (the Soviet Union and Saddam Hussein) to America’s sworn foe — but he also gives the reader a visceral sense of day-to-day life at its training camps. His descriptions echo the observation made by other experts like the former C.I.A. officer Michael Scheuer that Mr. bin Laden is not opposed to the United States because of its culture or ideas but because of its political and military actions in the Islamic world. Mr. Wright observes that Mr. bin Laden allowed his younger sons to play Nintendo and that Al Qaeda’s trainees often watched Hollywood thrillers at night (Arnold Schwarzenegger movies were particular favorites) in an effort to gather tips. One of Mr. bin Laden’s wives favored “brand-name cosmetics and lingerie, preferring American products”; another held a doctorate in child psychology.
Intercut with the portraits of Mr. bin Laden and Mr. Zawahri are equally compelling ones of the flamboyant F.B.I. counterterrorism chief John O’Neill (who died on 9/11, having left the bureau to become chief of security for the World Trade Center) and a small band of C.I.A. and F.B.I. operatives, who for years had worried about Al Qaeda and who, in the months before Sept. 11, worked furiously, in the face of bureaucratic complacency and in-fighting, to head off a probable attack.
The failures of the C.I.A., F.B.I. and N.S.A. to share information — and their failure to stop the 9/11 hijackers — have been voluminously documented before, but Mr. Wright’s narrative is so lucid and unnerving that it drives home the stupidity, hubris and dereliction of duty that occurred within the United States government with unusual power and resonance.
Mr. Wright is equally scathing about the Bush and Clinton administrations. He notes that terrorism was a low priority for the Bush White House when it took over in January 2001. And like Mr. Bergen and Mr. Randal, he argues that the Clinton administration’s reaction to the 1998 embassy bombings in Africa — launching cruise missiles at an Al Qaeda training camp in Afghanistan in a failed effort to kill Mr. bin Laden — helped turn the terrorist into a global celebrity and enabled him to mythologize himself further.
Mr. bin Laden’s goal in striking the American embassies and bombing the American destroyer Cole in 2000, says Mr. Wright, was to “lure America into the same trap the Soviets had fallen into: Afghanistan”: “His strategy was to continually attack until the U.S. forces invaded; then the mujahideen would swarm upon them and bleed them until the entire American empire fell from its wounds. It had happened to Great Britain and to the Soviet Union. He was certain it would happen to America.” When neither the embassy bombings nor the Cole bombing was enough to “provoke a massive retaliation,” Mr. Wright suggests, Mr. bin Laden decided “he would have to create an irresistible outrage.”
That outrage, of course, was 9/11. Though American forces would not become bogged down in Afghanistan — at least not immediately in the fall of 2001 — another, longer war was on the horizon. On March 19, 2003, President George W. Bush ordered the start of the war against Iraq; more than three years and more than 2,500 American deaths later, the United States is still there, fighting just the sort of asymmetrical war Mr. bin Laden so fervently desired.
The Evolution of Al Qaeda and the Intertwining Paths Leading to 9/11
Review by MICHIKO KAKUTANI
“The Looming Tower,” the title of Lawrence Wright’s remarkable new book about Al Qaeda and 9/11, refers not only to the doomed towers of the World Trade Center, but also to a passage in the Koran, which Osama bin Laden quoted several times in a speech exhorting the 19 hijackers to become martyrs to their cause: “Wherever you are, death will find you/even in the looming tower.”
Mr. Wright’s book, based on more than 500 interviews — ranging from Mr. bin Laden’s best friend in college, Jamal Khalifa, to Yosri Fouda, a reporter for Al Jazeera, to Richard A. Clarke, the former White House counterterrorism chief — gives the reader a searing view of the tragic events of Sept. 11, 2001, a view that is at once wrenchingly intimate and boldly sweeping in its historical perspective.
Though the broad outlines of his story have been recounted many, many times before, Mr. Wright fleshes out the narrative with myriad new details and a keen ability to situate the events he describes in a larger cultural and political context. And by focusing on the lives and careers of several key players on the “road to 9/11” — namely, Mr. bin Laden; his deputy, Ayman al-Zawahri; the former head of Saudi intelligence, Prince Turki al-Faisal; and the F.B.I.’s former counterterrorism chief, John O’Neill — he has succeeded in writing a narrative history that possesses all the immediacy and emotional power of a novel, an account that indelibly illustrates how the political and the personal, the public and the private were often inextricably intertwined.
Mr. Wright’s book suggests that “the charisma and vision of a few individuals shaped the nature” of the contest between Islam and the West. While “the tectonic plates of history were certainly shifting,” promoting a period of conflict between those two cultures, he contends, the emergence of Al Qaeda “depended on a unique conjunction of personalities” — most notably, Mr. Zawahri, who promoted the apocalyptic notion that only violence could change history, and Mr. bin Laden, whose global vision and leadership “held together an organization that had been bankrupted and thrown into exile.”
The book also suggests that the events of Sept. 11 were not inevitable. Rather, bad luck, the confluence of particular decisions and chance encounters, dithering on the part of United States officials and a series of absurd turf wars between the C.I.A. and F.B.I. all contributed to Al Qaeda’s success in pulling off its nefarious plans that sunny September day.
Compared with the authors Peter L. Bergen (“Holy War: Inside the Secret World of Osama bin Laden”) and Jonathan Randal (“Osama: the Making of a Terrorist”), Mr. Wright spends less time on the crucial role that the anti-Soviet jihad in Afghanistan played in shaping the jihadist cause. Instead, he has drawn upon many documents in Arabic and a host of interviews with jihadis to provide an arresting chronicle of the many formative events that shaped Al Qaeda over the years and Mr. bin Laden’s long, winding road to war against America. His book provides an amazingly detailed look at daily life inside Al Qaeda, and the motivations, misgivings and political goals of individual members.
Mr. Wright begins his story with an account of the life of Sayyid Qutb, the intellectual father of the Islamist movement: he recounts how a sojourn in America in the late 1940’s radicalized the Egyptian educator, how he was later thrown in prison by the regime of Gamal Abdel Nasser, and how his writings and eventual execution in 1966 made him a martyr and hero to a fledgling revolutionary movement. Mr. Wright then goes on to describe the radicalization of Mr. bin Laden, the heir to one of Saudi Arabia’s great fortunes, who grows from a shy boy who loved the American television series “Bonanza” into a solemn, religious adolescent influenced, some say, by a charismatic Syrian gym teacher who was a member of the Muslim Brothers organization.
Mr. Zawahri, an Egyptian doctor whom Mr. bin Laden got to know in Peshawar in the 1980’s, would have an even more formative impact. Indeed Mr. Zawahri emerges from this volume as an evil mentor, drawing ever “tighter the noose of influence he was casting around” the young Saudi by surrounding him with handpicked bodyguards and presiding over his medical treatment (possibly for Addison’s disease). Mr. Wright argues that before meeting Mr. Zawahri, Mr. bin Laden was “not much of a political thinker,” and he quotes the Saudi’s first biographer, Essam Deraz, saying he thought Mr. bin Laden had the potential to become “another Eisenhower,” turning the celebrity status he had achieved fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan into a peaceful political life. But that wasn’t Mr. Zawahri’s plan.
It was Mr. Zawahri, whose adamantine resolve was hardened by the torture he endured in Egyptian prisons as a young man, Mr. Wright notes, who introduced the use of suicide bombers. And it was Mr. Zawahri who was keen from the start on using biological and chemical weapons. As for Mr. bin Laden, it apparently took a long time, after his stint in Afghanistan, for him to settle on a subsequent plan of action.
During his exile from Saudi Arabia in the Sudan, Mr. Wright says, Mr. bin Laden “was wavering — the lure of peace being as strong as the battle cry of jihad.” Agriculture “captivated his imagination,” and he reportedly told various friends that he was thinking of quitting Al Qaeda and becoming a farmer.
Yet as Mr. Wright tells it, the continuing presence of American troops in Saudi Arabia (after the first gulf war) continued to gnaw at Mr. bin Laden, and the movement of American troops into Somalia in 1992 (on a humanitarian relief mission) made Al Qaeda feel increasingly encircled. In meetings held at the end of 1992, the group “turned from being the anti-communist Islamic army that bin Laden originally envisioned into a terrorist organization bent on attacking the United States.”
Mr. Wright not only traces how Al Qaeda evolved — from an opponent of two of America’s enemies (the Soviet Union and Saddam Hussein) to America’s sworn foe — but he also gives the reader a visceral sense of day-to-day life at its training camps. His descriptions echo the observation made by other experts like the former C.I.A. officer Michael Scheuer that Mr. bin Laden is not opposed to the United States because of its culture or ideas but because of its political and military actions in the Islamic world. Mr. Wright observes that Mr. bin Laden allowed his younger sons to play Nintendo and that Al Qaeda’s trainees often watched Hollywood thrillers at night (Arnold Schwarzenegger movies were particular favorites) in an effort to gather tips. One of Mr. bin Laden’s wives favored “brand-name cosmetics and lingerie, preferring American products”; another held a doctorate in child psychology.
Intercut with the portraits of Mr. bin Laden and Mr. Zawahri are equally compelling ones of the flamboyant F.B.I. counterterrorism chief John O’Neill (who died on 9/11, having left the bureau to become chief of security for the World Trade Center) and a small band of C.I.A. and F.B.I. operatives, who for years had worried about Al Qaeda and who, in the months before Sept. 11, worked furiously, in the face of bureaucratic complacency and in-fighting, to head off a probable attack.
The failures of the C.I.A., F.B.I. and N.S.A. to share information — and their failure to stop the 9/11 hijackers — have been voluminously documented before, but Mr. Wright’s narrative is so lucid and unnerving that it drives home the stupidity, hubris and dereliction of duty that occurred within the United States government with unusual power and resonance.
Mr. Wright is equally scathing about the Bush and Clinton administrations. He notes that terrorism was a low priority for the Bush White House when it took over in January 2001. And like Mr. Bergen and Mr. Randal, he argues that the Clinton administration’s reaction to the 1998 embassy bombings in Africa — launching cruise missiles at an Al Qaeda training camp in Afghanistan in a failed effort to kill Mr. bin Laden — helped turn the terrorist into a global celebrity and enabled him to mythologize himself further.
Mr. bin Laden’s goal in striking the American embassies and bombing the American destroyer Cole in 2000, says Mr. Wright, was to “lure America into the same trap the Soviets had fallen into: Afghanistan”: “His strategy was to continually attack until the U.S. forces invaded; then the mujahideen would swarm upon them and bleed them until the entire American empire fell from its wounds. It had happened to Great Britain and to the Soviet Union. He was certain it would happen to America.” When neither the embassy bombings nor the Cole bombing was enough to “provoke a massive retaliation,” Mr. Wright suggests, Mr. bin Laden decided “he would have to create an irresistible outrage.”
That outrage, of course, was 9/11. Though American forces would not become bogged down in Afghanistan — at least not immediately in the fall of 2001 — another, longer war was on the horizon. On March 19, 2003, President George W. Bush ordered the start of the war against Iraq; more than three years and more than 2,500 American deaths later, the United States is still there, fighting just the sort of asymmetrical war Mr. bin Laden so fervently desired.
From USA Today:
Gore isn't quite as green as he's led the world to believe
By Peter Schweizer
Al Gore has spoken: The world must embrace a "carbon-neutral lifestyle." To do otherwise, he says, will result in a cataclysmic catastrophe. "Humanity is sitting on a ticking time bomb," warns the website for his film, An Inconvenient Truth. "We have just 10 years to avert a major catastrophe that could send our entire planet into a tailspin."
Graciously, Gore tells consumers how to change their lives to curb their carbon-gobbling ways: Switch to compact fluorescent light bulbs, use a clothesline, drive a hybrid, use renewable energy, dramatically cut back on consumption. Better still, responsible global citizens can follow Gore's example, because, as he readily points out in his speeches, he lives a "carbon-neutral lifestyle." But if Al Gore is the world's role model for ecology, the planet is doomed.
For someone who says the sky is falling, he does very little. He says he recycles and drives a hybrid. And he claims he uses renewable energy credits to offset the pollution he produces when using a private jet to promote his film. (In reality, Paramount Classics, the film's distributor, pays this.)
Public records reveal that as Gore lectures Americans on excessive consumption, he and his wife Tipper live in two properties: a 10,000-square-foot, 20-room, eight-bathroom home in Nashville, and a 4,000-square-foot home in Arlington, Va. (He also has a third home in Carthage, Tenn.) For someone rallying the planet to pursue a path of extreme personal sacrifice, Gore requires little from himself.
Then there is the troubling matter of his energy use. In the Washington, D.C., area, utility companies offer wind energy as an alternative to traditional energy. In Nashville, similar programs exist. Utility customers must simply pay a few extra pennies per kilowatt hour, and they can continue living their carbon-neutral lifestyles knowing that they are supporting wind energy. Plenty of businesses and institutions have signed up. Even the Bush administration is using green energy for some federal office buildings, as are thousands of area residents.
But according to public records, there is no evidence that Gore has signed up to use green energy in either of his large residences. When contacted Wednesday, Gore's office confirmed as much but said the Gores were looking into making the switch at both homes. Talk about inconvenient truths.
Gore is not alone. Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean has said, "Global warming is happening, and it threatens our very existence." The DNC website applauds the fact that Gore has "tried to move people to act." Yet, astoundingly, Gore's persuasive powers have failed to convince his own party: The DNC has not signed up to pay an additional two pennies a kilowatt hour to go green. For that matter, neither has the Republican National Committee.
Maybe our very existence isn't threatened.
Gore has held these apocalyptic views about the environment for some time. So why, then, didn't Gore dump his family's large stock holdings in Occidental (Oxy) Petroleum? As executor of his family's trust, over the years Gore has controlled hundreds of thousands of dollars in Oxy stock. Oxy has been mired in controversy over oil drilling in ecologically sensitive areas.
Living carbon-neutral apparently doesn't mean living oil-stock free. Nor does it necessarily mean giving up a mining royalty either.
Humanity might be "sitting on a ticking time bomb," but Gore's home in Carthage is sitting on a zinc mine. Gore receives $20,000 a year in royalties from Pasminco Zinc, which operates a zinc concession on his property. Tennessee has cited the company for adding large quantities of barium, iron and zinc to the nearby Caney Fork River.
The issue here is not simply Gore's hypocrisy; it's a question of credibility. If he genuinely believes the apocalyptic vision he has put forth and calls for radical changes in the way other people live, why hasn't he made any radical change in his life? Giving up the zinc mine or one of his homes is not asking much, given that he wants the rest of us to radically change our lives.
Peter Schweizer is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution and author of Do As I Say (Not As I Do): Profiles in Liberal Hypocrisy.
Gore isn't quite as green as he's led the world to believe
By Peter Schweizer
Al Gore has spoken: The world must embrace a "carbon-neutral lifestyle." To do otherwise, he says, will result in a cataclysmic catastrophe. "Humanity is sitting on a ticking time bomb," warns the website for his film, An Inconvenient Truth. "We have just 10 years to avert a major catastrophe that could send our entire planet into a tailspin."
Graciously, Gore tells consumers how to change their lives to curb their carbon-gobbling ways: Switch to compact fluorescent light bulbs, use a clothesline, drive a hybrid, use renewable energy, dramatically cut back on consumption. Better still, responsible global citizens can follow Gore's example, because, as he readily points out in his speeches, he lives a "carbon-neutral lifestyle." But if Al Gore is the world's role model for ecology, the planet is doomed.
For someone who says the sky is falling, he does very little. He says he recycles and drives a hybrid. And he claims he uses renewable energy credits to offset the pollution he produces when using a private jet to promote his film. (In reality, Paramount Classics, the film's distributor, pays this.)
Public records reveal that as Gore lectures Americans on excessive consumption, he and his wife Tipper live in two properties: a 10,000-square-foot, 20-room, eight-bathroom home in Nashville, and a 4,000-square-foot home in Arlington, Va. (He also has a third home in Carthage, Tenn.) For someone rallying the planet to pursue a path of extreme personal sacrifice, Gore requires little from himself.
Then there is the troubling matter of his energy use. In the Washington, D.C., area, utility companies offer wind energy as an alternative to traditional energy. In Nashville, similar programs exist. Utility customers must simply pay a few extra pennies per kilowatt hour, and they can continue living their carbon-neutral lifestyles knowing that they are supporting wind energy. Plenty of businesses and institutions have signed up. Even the Bush administration is using green energy for some federal office buildings, as are thousands of area residents.
But according to public records, there is no evidence that Gore has signed up to use green energy in either of his large residences. When contacted Wednesday, Gore's office confirmed as much but said the Gores were looking into making the switch at both homes. Talk about inconvenient truths.
Gore is not alone. Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean has said, "Global warming is happening, and it threatens our very existence." The DNC website applauds the fact that Gore has "tried to move people to act." Yet, astoundingly, Gore's persuasive powers have failed to convince his own party: The DNC has not signed up to pay an additional two pennies a kilowatt hour to go green. For that matter, neither has the Republican National Committee.
Maybe our very existence isn't threatened.
Gore has held these apocalyptic views about the environment for some time. So why, then, didn't Gore dump his family's large stock holdings in Occidental (Oxy) Petroleum? As executor of his family's trust, over the years Gore has controlled hundreds of thousands of dollars in Oxy stock. Oxy has been mired in controversy over oil drilling in ecologically sensitive areas.
Living carbon-neutral apparently doesn't mean living oil-stock free. Nor does it necessarily mean giving up a mining royalty either.
Humanity might be "sitting on a ticking time bomb," but Gore's home in Carthage is sitting on a zinc mine. Gore receives $20,000 a year in royalties from Pasminco Zinc, which operates a zinc concession on his property. Tennessee has cited the company for adding large quantities of barium, iron and zinc to the nearby Caney Fork River.
The issue here is not simply Gore's hypocrisy; it's a question of credibility. If he genuinely believes the apocalyptic vision he has put forth and calls for radical changes in the way other people live, why hasn't he made any radical change in his life? Giving up the zinc mine or one of his homes is not asking much, given that he wants the rest of us to radically change our lives.
Peter Schweizer is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution and author of Do As I Say (Not As I Do): Profiles in Liberal Hypocrisy.
Worry About the West -- Not Israel
By Victor Davis Hanson
The reactions and media coverage coming out of the West regarding this latest war in the Middle East are as bewildering as they are instructive.
Rep. John Dingell, D-Mich., for example, recently said, "I don't take sides for or against Hezbollah or for or against Israel."
Meanwhile, the Western news agency Reuters, responding to scrutiny by bloggers, withdrew wire photos taken by a freelance photographer of a smoky and burning Beirut. Reuters had failed to catch the freelancer's doctoring of the photos to emphasize unduly the damage from Israeli bombs.
And the Associated Press notes that initially reported Lebanese claims of 40 "civilians" killed by Israeli air strikes at Houla, Lebanon, in fact, were mistaken -- and that the latest reports have lowered the death toll to one.
In Qana, where the Israeli military had hit an apartment building (and were quickly censured by European statesmen), the number of civilian fatalities reported also kept decreasing as reports were scrutinized. Plus, we have learned that several hours lapsed between the dropping of the bombs and the fatal collapse of the building, raising further questions about the relationship between the bombing and the fatalities that followed. Finally, based on photographs from the scene, the onsite rescue appeared staged for reporters.
These discrepancies suggest we have little idea what actually happened on the ground there -- other than that Qana has been a favored missile-launching site against Israel, as a recent deadly aerial assault from there on Haifa attests.
There is a depressing pattern here. The sources for Western erroneous reports and faked pictures always seem to exaggerate the damage to Lebanon -- but never to Israel.
Likewise, Western news agencies rarely list a precise number of Hezbollah losses, instead lumping them in with civilian fatalities. Does that mean that someone who launches a missile in Levis and sneakers is not a combatant?
In addition, the history and nature of Hezbollah do not matter to many in the West.
Knowingly or not, news outlets continue to spread Hezbollah's propaganda. One wonders if Westerners remember or know that, until Sept. 11, Hezbollah had killed more Americans than had any other terrorist organization.
Most ignore as well that Hezbollah precipitated the present crisis by kidnapping and killing Israeli soldiers, and launching missiles against Israel's cities.
In retaliation, the Israeli Defense Forces use precision bombs to target combatants and try to avoid civilian casualties (though the latter is nearly impossible against an enemy who doesn't wear uniforms and uses non-combatants as "human shields"). In contrast, every random missile launched by Hezbollah is intended to hit a civilian target.
On one side of this conflict is a true democracy that was attacked. On the other are terrorists who hijacked the sovereign government of Lebanon, instituted theocratic rule over a third of the country -- and started a war.
Hezbollah, of course, has been enabled in large part thanks to Iranian petro-dollars and intimidation. But the nature of Hezbollah's patrons doesn't seem to matter to many Westerners, either.
Those now calling for "dialogue" with the "major players" ignore that Iran promises to wipe out Israel. The French foreign minister was quick to praise the regional role of theocratic Iran as "stabilizing."
Then there's Hezbollah's other patron, Syria, a country that brutally occupied Lebanon, harbors terrorists and is suspected of being behind the assassination of Lebanese reformist Prime Minister Rafik Hariri.
So, what then does matter to so many Westerners about this war?
Our fear, of course. We want to avoid messy complications like stirring up another 9/11 or Madrid bombing, spiking oil prices to over $80 a barrel, or treading on politically incorrect ground by criticizing the "other" of the former Third World.
The Western press -- usually so careful to condemn hate speech -- is utterly silent about Arab racism. But a European paper recently published a cartoon portraying Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert as a Nazi, secure that no rabbi would issue threats that could cost the editors their heads.
Still, when this is all over, we should not worry about the survival of Israel. For weeks, pundits have been lecturing how canny and adept Hezbollah has proved -- and how a clumsy Israel could only respond by destroying Lebanon's infrastructure. Yet, when the dust settles, the world will learn that Lebanon outside Hezbollah's domain is not destroyed. And, one hopes, those who have suffered in the Hezbollah-controlled south will reexamine their support for a terrorist organization that has brought them -- and itself -- to near ruin.
Instead far more worrisome is the moral crisis in the West itself. If so many of its politicians, intellectuals and media will not or cannot fathom moral differences in this war, they will hardly be able to see them anywhere else.
Victor Davis Hanson is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and author, most recently, of "A War Like No Other: How the Athenians and Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian War." You can reach him by e-mailing author@victorhanson.com.
By Victor Davis Hanson
The reactions and media coverage coming out of the West regarding this latest war in the Middle East are as bewildering as they are instructive.
Rep. John Dingell, D-Mich., for example, recently said, "I don't take sides for or against Hezbollah or for or against Israel."
Meanwhile, the Western news agency Reuters, responding to scrutiny by bloggers, withdrew wire photos taken by a freelance photographer of a smoky and burning Beirut. Reuters had failed to catch the freelancer's doctoring of the photos to emphasize unduly the damage from Israeli bombs.
And the Associated Press notes that initially reported Lebanese claims of 40 "civilians" killed by Israeli air strikes at Houla, Lebanon, in fact, were mistaken -- and that the latest reports have lowered the death toll to one.
In Qana, where the Israeli military had hit an apartment building (and were quickly censured by European statesmen), the number of civilian fatalities reported also kept decreasing as reports were scrutinized. Plus, we have learned that several hours lapsed between the dropping of the bombs and the fatal collapse of the building, raising further questions about the relationship between the bombing and the fatalities that followed. Finally, based on photographs from the scene, the onsite rescue appeared staged for reporters.
These discrepancies suggest we have little idea what actually happened on the ground there -- other than that Qana has been a favored missile-launching site against Israel, as a recent deadly aerial assault from there on Haifa attests.
There is a depressing pattern here. The sources for Western erroneous reports and faked pictures always seem to exaggerate the damage to Lebanon -- but never to Israel.
Likewise, Western news agencies rarely list a precise number of Hezbollah losses, instead lumping them in with civilian fatalities. Does that mean that someone who launches a missile in Levis and sneakers is not a combatant?
In addition, the history and nature of Hezbollah do not matter to many in the West.
Knowingly or not, news outlets continue to spread Hezbollah's propaganda. One wonders if Westerners remember or know that, until Sept. 11, Hezbollah had killed more Americans than had any other terrorist organization.
Most ignore as well that Hezbollah precipitated the present crisis by kidnapping and killing Israeli soldiers, and launching missiles against Israel's cities.
In retaliation, the Israeli Defense Forces use precision bombs to target combatants and try to avoid civilian casualties (though the latter is nearly impossible against an enemy who doesn't wear uniforms and uses non-combatants as "human shields"). In contrast, every random missile launched by Hezbollah is intended to hit a civilian target.
On one side of this conflict is a true democracy that was attacked. On the other are terrorists who hijacked the sovereign government of Lebanon, instituted theocratic rule over a third of the country -- and started a war.
Hezbollah, of course, has been enabled in large part thanks to Iranian petro-dollars and intimidation. But the nature of Hezbollah's patrons doesn't seem to matter to many Westerners, either.
Those now calling for "dialogue" with the "major players" ignore that Iran promises to wipe out Israel. The French foreign minister was quick to praise the regional role of theocratic Iran as "stabilizing."
Then there's Hezbollah's other patron, Syria, a country that brutally occupied Lebanon, harbors terrorists and is suspected of being behind the assassination of Lebanese reformist Prime Minister Rafik Hariri.
So, what then does matter to so many Westerners about this war?
Our fear, of course. We want to avoid messy complications like stirring up another 9/11 or Madrid bombing, spiking oil prices to over $80 a barrel, or treading on politically incorrect ground by criticizing the "other" of the former Third World.
The Western press -- usually so careful to condemn hate speech -- is utterly silent about Arab racism. But a European paper recently published a cartoon portraying Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert as a Nazi, secure that no rabbi would issue threats that could cost the editors their heads.
Still, when this is all over, we should not worry about the survival of Israel. For weeks, pundits have been lecturing how canny and adept Hezbollah has proved -- and how a clumsy Israel could only respond by destroying Lebanon's infrastructure. Yet, when the dust settles, the world will learn that Lebanon outside Hezbollah's domain is not destroyed. And, one hopes, those who have suffered in the Hezbollah-controlled south will reexamine their support for a terrorist organization that has brought them -- and itself -- to near ruin.
Instead far more worrisome is the moral crisis in the West itself. If so many of its politicians, intellectuals and media will not or cannot fathom moral differences in this war, they will hardly be able to see them anywhere else.
Victor Davis Hanson is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and author, most recently, of "A War Like No Other: How the Athenians and Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian War." You can reach him by e-mailing author@victorhanson.com.
From The Washington Post:
The Guns Of August
By Richard Holbrooke
Thursday, August 10, 2006
Two full-blown crises, in Lebanon and Iraq, are merging into a single emergency. A chain reaction could spread quickly almost anywhere between Cairo and Bombay. Turkey is talking openly of invading northern Iraq to deal with Kurdish terrorists based there. Syria could easily get pulled into the war in southern Lebanon. Egypt and Saudi Arabia are under pressure from jihadists to support Hezbollah, even though the governments in Cairo and Riyadh hate that organization. Afghanistan accuses Pakistan of giving shelter to al-Qaeda and the Taliban; there is constant fighting on both sides of that border. NATO's own war in Afghanistan is not going well. India talks of taking punitive action against Pakistan for allegedly being behind the Bombay bombings. Uzbekistan is a repressive dictatorship with a growing Islamic resistance.
The only beneficiaries of this chaos are Iran, Hezbollah, al-Qaeda and the Iraqi Shiite leader Moqtada al-Sadr, who last week held the largest anti-American, anti-Israel demonstration in the world in the very heart of Baghdad, even as 6,000 additional U.S. troops were rushing into the city to "prevent" a civil war that has already begun.
This combination of combustible elements poses the greatest threat to global stability since the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, history's only nuclear superpower confrontation. The Cuba crisis, although immensely dangerous, was comparatively simple: It came down to two leaders and no war. In 13 days of brilliant diplomacy, John F. Kennedy induced Nikita Khrushchev to remove Soviet missiles from Cuba.
Kennedy was deeply influenced by Barbara Tuchman's classic, "The Guns of August," which recounted how a seemingly isolated event 92 summers ago -- an assassination in Sarajevo by a Serb terrorist -- set off a chain reaction that led in just a few weeks to World War I. There are vast differences between that August and this one. But Tuchman ended her book with a sentence that resonates in this summer of crisis: "The nations were caught in a trap, a trap made during the first thirty days out of battles that failed to be decisive, a trap from which there was, and has been, no exit."
Preventing just such a trap must be the highest priority of American policy. Unfortunately, there is little public sign that the president and his top advisers recognize how close we are to a chain reaction, or that they have any larger strategy beyond tactical actions.
Under the universally accepted doctrine of self-defense, which is embodied in Article 51 of the U.N. Charter, there is no question that Israel has a legitimate right to take action against a group that has sworn to destroy it and had hidden some 13,000 missiles in southern Lebanon. In these circumstances, American support for Israel is essential, as it has been since the time of Truman; if Washington abandoned Jerusalem, the very existence of the Jewish state could be jeopardized, and the world crisis whose early phase we are now in would quickly get far worse. The United States must continue to make clear that it is ready to come to Israel's defense, both with American diplomacy and, as necessary, with military equipment.
But the United States must also understand, and deal with, the wider consequences of its own actions and public statements, which have caused an unprecedented decline in America's position in much of the world and are provoking dangerous new anti-American coalitions and encouraging a new generation of terrorists. American disengagement from active Middle East diplomacy since 2001 has led to greater violence and a decline in U.S. influence. Others have been eager to fill the vacuum. (Note the sudden emergence of France as a key player in the current burst of diplomacy.)
American policy has had the unintended, but entirely predictable, effect of pushing our enemies closer together. Throughout the region, Sunnis and Shiites have put aside their hatred of each other just long enough to join in shaking their fists -- or doing worse -- at the United States and Israel. Meanwhile, in Baghdad, our troops are coming under attack by both sides -- Shiite militias and Sunni insurgents. If this continues, the U.S. presence in Baghdad has no future.
President Bush owes it to the nation, and especially the troops who risk their lives every day, to reexamine his policies. For starters, he should redeploy some U.S. troops into the safer northern areas of Iraq to serve as a buffer between the increasingly agitated Turks and the restive, independence-minded Kurds. Given the new situation, such a redeployment to Kurdish areas and a phased drawdown elsewhere -- with no final decision yet as to a full withdrawal from Iraq -- is fully justified. At the same time, we should send more troops to Afghanistan, where the situation has deteriorated even as the Pentagon is reducing U.S. troop levels -- which is read in the region as a sign of declining U.S. interest in Afghanistan.
On the diplomatic front, the United States cannot abandon the field to other nations (not even France!) or the United Nations. Every secretary of state from Henry Kissinger to Warren Christopher and Madeleine Albright negotiated with Syria, including those Republican icons George Shultz and James Baker. Why won't this administration follow suit, in full consultation with Israel at every step? This would clearly be in Israel's interest. Instead, administration officials refuse direct talks and say publicly, "Syria knows what it must do" -- a statement that denies the very point of diplomacy.
The same is true of talks with Iran, although these would be more difficult. Why has the world's leading nation stood aside for over five years and allowed the international dialogue with Tehran to be conducted by Europeans, the Chinese and the United Nations? And why has that dialogue been restricted to the nuclear issue -- vitally important, to be sure, but not as urgent at this moment as Iran's sponsorship and arming of Hezbollah and its support of actions against U.S. forces in Iraq?
Containing the violence must be Washington's first priority. Finding a stable and secure solution that protects Israel must follow. Then must come the unwinding of America's disastrous entanglement in Iraq in a manner that is not a complete humiliation and does not lead to even greater turmoil. All of this will take sustained high-level diplomacy -- precisely what the American administration has avoided in the Middle East. Washington has, or at least used to have, leverage over the more moderate Arab states; it should use it again, in the closest consultation with and on behalf of Israel.
And we must be ready for unexpected problems that will test us; they could come in Turkey, Pakistan, Egypt, Syria, Jordan or even Somalia -- but one thing seems sure: They will come. Without a new, comprehensive strategy based on our most urgent national security needs -- as opposed to a muddled version of Wilsonianism -- this crisis is almost certain to worsen and spread.
Richard Holbrooke, a former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, writes a monthly column for The Post
The Guns Of August
By Richard Holbrooke
Thursday, August 10, 2006
Two full-blown crises, in Lebanon and Iraq, are merging into a single emergency. A chain reaction could spread quickly almost anywhere between Cairo and Bombay. Turkey is talking openly of invading northern Iraq to deal with Kurdish terrorists based there. Syria could easily get pulled into the war in southern Lebanon. Egypt and Saudi Arabia are under pressure from jihadists to support Hezbollah, even though the governments in Cairo and Riyadh hate that organization. Afghanistan accuses Pakistan of giving shelter to al-Qaeda and the Taliban; there is constant fighting on both sides of that border. NATO's own war in Afghanistan is not going well. India talks of taking punitive action against Pakistan for allegedly being behind the Bombay bombings. Uzbekistan is a repressive dictatorship with a growing Islamic resistance.
The only beneficiaries of this chaos are Iran, Hezbollah, al-Qaeda and the Iraqi Shiite leader Moqtada al-Sadr, who last week held the largest anti-American, anti-Israel demonstration in the world in the very heart of Baghdad, even as 6,000 additional U.S. troops were rushing into the city to "prevent" a civil war that has already begun.
This combination of combustible elements poses the greatest threat to global stability since the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, history's only nuclear superpower confrontation. The Cuba crisis, although immensely dangerous, was comparatively simple: It came down to two leaders and no war. In 13 days of brilliant diplomacy, John F. Kennedy induced Nikita Khrushchev to remove Soviet missiles from Cuba.
Kennedy was deeply influenced by Barbara Tuchman's classic, "The Guns of August," which recounted how a seemingly isolated event 92 summers ago -- an assassination in Sarajevo by a Serb terrorist -- set off a chain reaction that led in just a few weeks to World War I. There are vast differences between that August and this one. But Tuchman ended her book with a sentence that resonates in this summer of crisis: "The nations were caught in a trap, a trap made during the first thirty days out of battles that failed to be decisive, a trap from which there was, and has been, no exit."
Preventing just such a trap must be the highest priority of American policy. Unfortunately, there is little public sign that the president and his top advisers recognize how close we are to a chain reaction, or that they have any larger strategy beyond tactical actions.
Under the universally accepted doctrine of self-defense, which is embodied in Article 51 of the U.N. Charter, there is no question that Israel has a legitimate right to take action against a group that has sworn to destroy it and had hidden some 13,000 missiles in southern Lebanon. In these circumstances, American support for Israel is essential, as it has been since the time of Truman; if Washington abandoned Jerusalem, the very existence of the Jewish state could be jeopardized, and the world crisis whose early phase we are now in would quickly get far worse. The United States must continue to make clear that it is ready to come to Israel's defense, both with American diplomacy and, as necessary, with military equipment.
But the United States must also understand, and deal with, the wider consequences of its own actions and public statements, which have caused an unprecedented decline in America's position in much of the world and are provoking dangerous new anti-American coalitions and encouraging a new generation of terrorists. American disengagement from active Middle East diplomacy since 2001 has led to greater violence and a decline in U.S. influence. Others have been eager to fill the vacuum. (Note the sudden emergence of France as a key player in the current burst of diplomacy.)
American policy has had the unintended, but entirely predictable, effect of pushing our enemies closer together. Throughout the region, Sunnis and Shiites have put aside their hatred of each other just long enough to join in shaking their fists -- or doing worse -- at the United States and Israel. Meanwhile, in Baghdad, our troops are coming under attack by both sides -- Shiite militias and Sunni insurgents. If this continues, the U.S. presence in Baghdad has no future.
President Bush owes it to the nation, and especially the troops who risk their lives every day, to reexamine his policies. For starters, he should redeploy some U.S. troops into the safer northern areas of Iraq to serve as a buffer between the increasingly agitated Turks and the restive, independence-minded Kurds. Given the new situation, such a redeployment to Kurdish areas and a phased drawdown elsewhere -- with no final decision yet as to a full withdrawal from Iraq -- is fully justified. At the same time, we should send more troops to Afghanistan, where the situation has deteriorated even as the Pentagon is reducing U.S. troop levels -- which is read in the region as a sign of declining U.S. interest in Afghanistan.
On the diplomatic front, the United States cannot abandon the field to other nations (not even France!) or the United Nations. Every secretary of state from Henry Kissinger to Warren Christopher and Madeleine Albright negotiated with Syria, including those Republican icons George Shultz and James Baker. Why won't this administration follow suit, in full consultation with Israel at every step? This would clearly be in Israel's interest. Instead, administration officials refuse direct talks and say publicly, "Syria knows what it must do" -- a statement that denies the very point of diplomacy.
The same is true of talks with Iran, although these would be more difficult. Why has the world's leading nation stood aside for over five years and allowed the international dialogue with Tehran to be conducted by Europeans, the Chinese and the United Nations? And why has that dialogue been restricted to the nuclear issue -- vitally important, to be sure, but not as urgent at this moment as Iran's sponsorship and arming of Hezbollah and its support of actions against U.S. forces in Iraq?
Containing the violence must be Washington's first priority. Finding a stable and secure solution that protects Israel must follow. Then must come the unwinding of America's disastrous entanglement in Iraq in a manner that is not a complete humiliation and does not lead to even greater turmoil. All of this will take sustained high-level diplomacy -- precisely what the American administration has avoided in the Middle East. Washington has, or at least used to have, leverage over the more moderate Arab states; it should use it again, in the closest consultation with and on behalf of Israel.
And we must be ready for unexpected problems that will test us; they could come in Turkey, Pakistan, Egypt, Syria, Jordan or even Somalia -- but one thing seems sure: They will come. Without a new, comprehensive strategy based on our most urgent national security needs -- as opposed to a muddled version of Wilsonianism -- this crisis is almost certain to worsen and spread.
Richard Holbrooke, a former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, writes a monthly column for The Post
The Meaning of Connecticut
By Patrick Buchanan
"Joe, why are you doing this?"
That is a question Joe Lieberman will hear again and again from old friends, as he mounts his "independent" campaign for the Senate seat his own party voted on Tuesday to take away from him.
And there is no compelling answer Joe can give.
Joe insists he's a progressive Democrat in the mainstream of the party and has a voting record to prove it. But Ned Lamont is a progressive (i.e., liberal) Democrat, and the Connecticut party chose him as its Senate nominee, not Joe.
Joe could say Iraq is the dividing line and the critical issue facing America. But Tuesday's primary was a referendum on Iraq, and the Connecticut Democratic Party voted to declare itself antiwar. And Joe does not even intend to run as a war Democrat in November. For he knows it would drive away an even larger share of the Democratic and independent vote than he lost on Tuesday.
But if he will not run as a principled pro-war senator, what, then, is the argument for re-electing Joe? For the transparent conclusion is that his independent campaign is simply about Joe's unwillingness to accept the verdict of his party and give up his cherished Senate seat.
Thus we find Joe declaring, in his concession speech where he announced his independent candidacy, that the true great divide between him and Ned Lamont is on the burning issue of -- civility in politics.
"I am, of course, disappointed by the results," said Joe. "I'm disappointed not just because I lost, but because the old politics of partisan polarization won today. For the sake of our state, our country and my party, I cannot and will not let that result stand."
Joe is running to save Connecticut and America from the savage politics of Ned Lamont?
Joe is a nice and decent man, with many friends across this town, but this is just not sustainable.
First, it is a slur on the Democratic Party of Joe's home state, which bought into Lamont's supposedly low-road tactics. Second, to strip votes from Lamont on the issue of his "politics of partisan polarization," Joe will have to rip into the Democratic nominee for running a dirty and divisive campaign, which is certain to enrage all the Democrats working to elect Lamont.
Third, Lamont is a "Pepperidge Farm" candidate, in the witty phrase of columnist Mike Barnacle. He did not call Joe a warmonger or a fascist, or run Willie Horton ads against him.
Fourth, if Lamont won only by McCarthyite tactics, how does Joe explain why every national and state Democrat -- including Bill and Hillary Clinton and Al Gore -- is hastening to endorse Lamont?
What are the real reasons behind Joe's defeat? Like J. William Fulbright of Arkansas, dumped in a 1974 primary, a senator must beware of becoming so taken with his stature as a statesmen that he loses touch with the home folks. Second, pro-war and pro-Bush Democrats are an endangered species in deep blue states.
This is good news for Gore, an authentic antiwar Democrat and Mr. Global Warming, who will open with a pair of aces, if he enters the primaries. John Kerry and John Edwards have already defected to the antiwar camp. And Hillary's scourging of Don Rumsfeld and call for his resignation suggest the Clintons are not missing any signals.
But this week has also provided a glimpse into the character and convictions of our neo-conservatives, who claim direct descent from Ronald Reagan. In a lead editorial, The Weekly Standard called on Bush to fire Rumsfeld and make Joe Lieberman secretary of defense. And the Pentagon is only to be a stepping stone.
Rhapsodizes editor William Kristol, "Is it too fanciful to speculate about a 2008 ticket of McCain-Lieberman, or Guiliani-Lieberman ... ?"
In short, The Weekly Standard wishes to see, on a Republican ticket and a heartbeat away from the presidency, a proud liberal Democrat who supports partial-birth abortion, embryonic stem-cell research, gay rights, affirmative action, reparations for slavery, gun control, higher taxes on the top 2 percent, distribution of condoms in public schools and driver's licenses for illegal aliens.
What does Joe oppose? School prayer, the American Legion's flag amendment, Sam Alito, drilling in the ANWAR and any phase-out of death taxes.
Last year, Joe's rating by Americans for Democratic Action was 80. The ACLU gave him an 83, the NAACP an 85, the AFL-CIO a 92, LULAC a perfect 100. In 2004, Joe got a 100 rating from the National Abortion Rights Action League and a zero from National Right to Life. His American Conservative Union rating was zero. His Christian Coalition rating was zero. The National Rifle Association, which grades by letters, gave Joe a big, fat "F."
But as long as you support war in Lebanon, war in Iraq and a "war-fighting Republican Party," in The Weekly Standard's phrase, you get a pass on everything else. Beat the drum for permanent war for global democracy and against Islamo-fascism, and all other sins are forgiven you.
Such is the state of conservatism, 2006
By Patrick Buchanan
"Joe, why are you doing this?"
That is a question Joe Lieberman will hear again and again from old friends, as he mounts his "independent" campaign for the Senate seat his own party voted on Tuesday to take away from him.
And there is no compelling answer Joe can give.
Joe insists he's a progressive Democrat in the mainstream of the party and has a voting record to prove it. But Ned Lamont is a progressive (i.e., liberal) Democrat, and the Connecticut party chose him as its Senate nominee, not Joe.
Joe could say Iraq is the dividing line and the critical issue facing America. But Tuesday's primary was a referendum on Iraq, and the Connecticut Democratic Party voted to declare itself antiwar. And Joe does not even intend to run as a war Democrat in November. For he knows it would drive away an even larger share of the Democratic and independent vote than he lost on Tuesday.
But if he will not run as a principled pro-war senator, what, then, is the argument for re-electing Joe? For the transparent conclusion is that his independent campaign is simply about Joe's unwillingness to accept the verdict of his party and give up his cherished Senate seat.
Thus we find Joe declaring, in his concession speech where he announced his independent candidacy, that the true great divide between him and Ned Lamont is on the burning issue of -- civility in politics.
"I am, of course, disappointed by the results," said Joe. "I'm disappointed not just because I lost, but because the old politics of partisan polarization won today. For the sake of our state, our country and my party, I cannot and will not let that result stand."
Joe is running to save Connecticut and America from the savage politics of Ned Lamont?
Joe is a nice and decent man, with many friends across this town, but this is just not sustainable.
First, it is a slur on the Democratic Party of Joe's home state, which bought into Lamont's supposedly low-road tactics. Second, to strip votes from Lamont on the issue of his "politics of partisan polarization," Joe will have to rip into the Democratic nominee for running a dirty and divisive campaign, which is certain to enrage all the Democrats working to elect Lamont.
Third, Lamont is a "Pepperidge Farm" candidate, in the witty phrase of columnist Mike Barnacle. He did not call Joe a warmonger or a fascist, or run Willie Horton ads against him.
Fourth, if Lamont won only by McCarthyite tactics, how does Joe explain why every national and state Democrat -- including Bill and Hillary Clinton and Al Gore -- is hastening to endorse Lamont?
What are the real reasons behind Joe's defeat? Like J. William Fulbright of Arkansas, dumped in a 1974 primary, a senator must beware of becoming so taken with his stature as a statesmen that he loses touch with the home folks. Second, pro-war and pro-Bush Democrats are an endangered species in deep blue states.
This is good news for Gore, an authentic antiwar Democrat and Mr. Global Warming, who will open with a pair of aces, if he enters the primaries. John Kerry and John Edwards have already defected to the antiwar camp. And Hillary's scourging of Don Rumsfeld and call for his resignation suggest the Clintons are not missing any signals.
But this week has also provided a glimpse into the character and convictions of our neo-conservatives, who claim direct descent from Ronald Reagan. In a lead editorial, The Weekly Standard called on Bush to fire Rumsfeld and make Joe Lieberman secretary of defense. And the Pentagon is only to be a stepping stone.
Rhapsodizes editor William Kristol, "Is it too fanciful to speculate about a 2008 ticket of McCain-Lieberman, or Guiliani-Lieberman ... ?"
In short, The Weekly Standard wishes to see, on a Republican ticket and a heartbeat away from the presidency, a proud liberal Democrat who supports partial-birth abortion, embryonic stem-cell research, gay rights, affirmative action, reparations for slavery, gun control, higher taxes on the top 2 percent, distribution of condoms in public schools and driver's licenses for illegal aliens.
What does Joe oppose? School prayer, the American Legion's flag amendment, Sam Alito, drilling in the ANWAR and any phase-out of death taxes.
Last year, Joe's rating by Americans for Democratic Action was 80. The ACLU gave him an 83, the NAACP an 85, the AFL-CIO a 92, LULAC a perfect 100. In 2004, Joe got a 100 rating from the National Abortion Rights Action League and a zero from National Right to Life. His American Conservative Union rating was zero. His Christian Coalition rating was zero. The National Rifle Association, which grades by letters, gave Joe a big, fat "F."
But as long as you support war in Lebanon, war in Iraq and a "war-fighting Republican Party," in The Weekly Standard's phrase, you get a pass on everything else. Beat the drum for permanent war for global democracy and against Islamo-fascism, and all other sins are forgiven you.
Such is the state of conservatism, 2006
Wednesday, August 09, 2006
From The New York Times: a review of The Looming Tower: Al Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 by Lawrence Wright
The Plot Against America
Review by DEXTER FILKINS
August 6, 2006
When Mohamed Atta and his four Saudi confederates commandeered a Boeing 767 and steered it into the north tower of the World Trade Center, they began a story that still consumes us nearly five years on, and one that seems, on bad days, to promise war without end.
But the events of Sept. 11, 2001, were in many ways less the start of a tale than the end of one, or at least the climax of one, begun many years before in many different precincts: in the middle-class suburbs of Cairo, in the mosques of Hamburg, in Jidda, in Islamabad, in the quiet university town of Greeley, Colo.
In its simplest terms, this is the story of how a small group of men, with a frightening mix of delusion and calculation, rose from a tormented civilization to mount a catastrophic assault on the world’s mightiest power, and how another group of men and women, convinced that such an attack was on the way, tried desperately to stop it.
What a story it is. And what a riveting tale Lawrence Wright fashions in this marvelous book. “The Looming Tower” is not just a detailed, heart-stopping account of the events leading up to 9/11, written with style and verve, and carried along by villains and heroes that only a crime novelist could dream up. It’s an education, too — though you’d never know it — a thoughtful examination of the world that produced the men who brought us 9/11, and of their progeny who bedevil us today. The portrait of John O’Neill, the driven, demon-ridden F.B.I. agent who worked so frantically to stop Osama bin Laden, only to perish in the attack on the World Trade Center, is worth the price of the book alone. “The Looming Tower” is a thriller. And it’s a tragedy, too.
In the nearly five years since the attacks, we’ve heard oceans of commentary on the whys and how-comes and what-it-means and what’s nexts. Wright, a staff writer for The New Yorker — where portions of this book have appeared — has put his boots on the ground in the hard places, conducted the interviews and done the sleuthing. Others talked, he listened. And so he has unearthed an astonishing amount of detail about Osama bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri, Mullah Muhammad Omar and all the rest of them. They come alive.
Who knew, for instance, that bin Laden, far from being a warrior-stoic fighting against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, was actually a pathetic stick-in-the-mud who would fall ill before battle? That the combat-hardened Afghans, so tired of bin Laden’s behavior, declared him and his Arab associates “useless”? Or that he was a permissive father and indulgent husband? Or that he is only six feet tall?
More important, who knew — I sure didn’t — that bin Laden had left behind such a long trail of words? Wright has found them in books, on film, in audio recordings, in people’s notebooks and memories. This has allowed him to draw an in-depth portrait of bin Laden, and to chart his evolution from a self-conscious step-child growing up in Jidda, Saudi Arabia, to the visionary cave-dwelling madman who mimics the Holy Prophet in his most humdrum daily habits.
Wright takes the title of his book from the fourth sura of the Koran, which bin Laden repeated three times in a speech videotaped just as the hijackers were preparing to fly. The video was found later, on a computer in Hamburg.
“Wherever you are, death will find you, Even in the looming tower.”
There is poetry, too. Here is a particularly chilling bit, found on another videotape, which bin Laden had read aloud at the wedding of his 17-year-old son, Mohammed. The celebration took place not long after a pair of Qaeda suicide bombers, riding in a tiny boat filled with explosives, nearly sank the billion-dollar guided missile destroyer Cole. At least with regard to his abilities as an author, bin Laden was unusually modest: he let someone else write the words. “I am not, as most of our brothers know, a warrior of the word,” he said.
A destroyer, even the brave might fear,
She inspires horror in the harbor and the open sea,
She goes into the waves flanked by arrogance, haughtiness and fake might,
To her doom she progresses slowly, clothed in a huge illusion,
Awaiting her is a dinghy, bobbing in the waves.
“The Looming Tower” is full of such surprising detail. Al Qaeda’s leaders had all but shelved the 9/11 plot when they realized they lacked foot soldiers who could pass convincingly as westernized Muslims in the United States. At just the right moment Atta appeared in Afghanistan, along with Ramzi bin al-Shibh, Ziad al-Jarrah and Marwan al-Shehhi, all Western-educated transplants, offering themselves up for slaughter. The game was on.
Just as dramatic as the portraits of bin Laden and Zawahiri is Wright’s account of the roots of Islamic militancy — the intellectual, spiritual and material world from which the plotters came. Wright draws a fascinating picture of Sayyid Qutb, the font of modern Islamic fundamentalism, a frail, middle-aged writer who found himself, as a visitor to the United States and a student at Colorado State College of Education in Greeley in the 1940’s, overwhelmed by the unbridled splendor and godlessness of modern America. And by the sex: like so many others who followed him, Qutb seemed simultaneously drawn to and repelled by American women, so free and unselfconscious in their sexuality. The result is a kind of delirium:
“A girl looks at you, appearing as if she were an enchanting nymph or an escaped mermaid,” Qutb wrote, “but as she approaches, you sense only the screaming instinct inside her, and you can smell her burning body, not the scent of perfume, but flesh, only flesh. Tasty flesh, truly, but flesh nonetheless.”
It wasn’t much later that Qutb began writing elaborate rationalizations for killing non-Muslims and waging war against the West. Years later, Atta expressed a similar mix of obsession and disgust for women. Indeed, anyone who has spent time in the Middle East will recognize such tortured emotions.
WRIGHT shows, correctly, that at the root of Islamic militancy — its anger, its antimodernity, its justifications for murder — lies a feeling of intense humiliation. Islam plays a role in this, with its straitjacketed and all-encompassing worldview. But whether the militant hails from a middle-class family or an impoverished one, is intensely religious or a “theological amateur,” as Wright calls bin Laden and his cohort, he springs almost invariably from an ossified society with an autocratic government that is unable to provide any reason to believe in the future. Islam offers dignity, even in — especially in — death. Living in the West, Atta and the others felt these things more acutely, not less. As Wright notes:
“Their motivations varied, but they had in common a belief that Islam — pure and primitive, unmitigated by modernity and uncompromised by politics — would cure the wounds that socialism or Arab nationalism had failed to heal. They were angry but powerless in their own countries. They did not see themselves as terrorists but as revolutionaries who, like all such men throughout history, had been pushed into action by the simple human need for justice. Some had experienced brutal repression; some were simply drawn to bloody chaos. From the beginning of Al Qaeda, there were reformers and there were nihilists. The dynamic between them was irreconcilable and self-destructive, but events were moving so quickly that it was almost impossible to tell the philosophers from the sociopaths. They were glued together by the charismatic personality of Osama bin Laden, which contained both strands, idealism and nihilism, in a potent mix.”
In John O’Neill, bin Laden almost met his match. The supervisor of the F.B.I.’s New York office and of the team assigned to track Al Qaeda in the United States, O’Neill felt, as strongly as anyone in the government, that Al Qaeda was coming to America. He was a relentless investigator, a volcanic personality and sometimes his own worst enemy. In the end he broke himself on a government bureaucracy that could not — and would not — move as quickly as he did. O’Neill and others like him were in a race with Al Qaeda, and although we know how the race ended, it’s astonishing — and heartbreaking — to learn how close it was.
Some of the F.B.I.’s field agents, as we now know, had premonitions of what was coming. When the supervisor of the Minneapolis field office was admonished, in August 2001, for expressing fears that an Islamic radical attending flight school might be planning a suicide attack, he shot back defiantly that he was “trying to keep someone from taking a plane and crashing into the World Trade Center.” Amazing.
The most gut-wrenching scenes are the ones that show F.B.I. agents trying, as 9/11 approached, to pry information from their rivals inside the United States government. The C.I.A., Wright says, knew that high-level Qaeda operatives had held a meeting in Malaysia in January 2000, and, later, that two of them had entered the United States. Both men turned out to be part of the team that hijacked the planes on Sept. 11. The C.I.A. failed to inform agencies like the F.B.I. — which might have been able to locate the men and break up the plot — until late in the summer of 2001.
The fateful struggle between the C.I.A. and F.B.I. in the months leading up to the attacks has been outlined before, but never in such detail. At meetings, C.I.A. analysts dangled photos of two of the eventual hijackers in front of F.B.I. agents, but wouldn’t tell them who they were. The F.B.I. agents could sense that the C.I.A. possessed crucial pieces of evidence about Islamic radicals they were investigating, but couldn’t tell what they were. The tension came to a head at a meeting in New York on June 11, exactly three months before the catastrophe, which ended with F.B.I. and C.I.A. agents shouting at each other across the room.
In one of the most remarkable scenes in the book, Ali Soufan, an F.B.I. agent assigned to Al Qaeda, was taken aside on Sept. 12 and finally shown the names and photos of the men the C.I.A. had known for more than a year and a half were in America. The planes had already struck. Soufan ran to the bathroom and retched.
Great stuff. I just wish Wright had given us something, even a chapter, on the hijackings themselves; as it is, he takes us right up to the moment, and then straight to the burning towers. Perhaps he felt that ground was too well-trodden. My other complaint is more substantive. Through the enormous amount of legwork he has done, tracking down people who worked with bin Laden and Zawahiri over the years, Wright has drawn up verbatim reconstructions of entire conversations, some of which took place more than a decade ago. Many of these conversations are riveting. Still, in some cases, it’s hard to believe that memories are that good.
“The Looming Tower” ends near the Pakistani border, where Zawahiri, or someone who looked like him, rode through a village on horseback and then disappeared into the mountains. It’s not a definitive ending; there is no closure. And that’s the point. For as amazing as the story of Al Qaeda and the road to 9/11 is, it’s not over yet.
Dexter Filkins is a Baghdad correspondent for The Times.
The Plot Against America
Review by DEXTER FILKINS
August 6, 2006
When Mohamed Atta and his four Saudi confederates commandeered a Boeing 767 and steered it into the north tower of the World Trade Center, they began a story that still consumes us nearly five years on, and one that seems, on bad days, to promise war without end.
But the events of Sept. 11, 2001, were in many ways less the start of a tale than the end of one, or at least the climax of one, begun many years before in many different precincts: in the middle-class suburbs of Cairo, in the mosques of Hamburg, in Jidda, in Islamabad, in the quiet university town of Greeley, Colo.
In its simplest terms, this is the story of how a small group of men, with a frightening mix of delusion and calculation, rose from a tormented civilization to mount a catastrophic assault on the world’s mightiest power, and how another group of men and women, convinced that such an attack was on the way, tried desperately to stop it.
What a story it is. And what a riveting tale Lawrence Wright fashions in this marvelous book. “The Looming Tower” is not just a detailed, heart-stopping account of the events leading up to 9/11, written with style and verve, and carried along by villains and heroes that only a crime novelist could dream up. It’s an education, too — though you’d never know it — a thoughtful examination of the world that produced the men who brought us 9/11, and of their progeny who bedevil us today. The portrait of John O’Neill, the driven, demon-ridden F.B.I. agent who worked so frantically to stop Osama bin Laden, only to perish in the attack on the World Trade Center, is worth the price of the book alone. “The Looming Tower” is a thriller. And it’s a tragedy, too.
In the nearly five years since the attacks, we’ve heard oceans of commentary on the whys and how-comes and what-it-means and what’s nexts. Wright, a staff writer for The New Yorker — where portions of this book have appeared — has put his boots on the ground in the hard places, conducted the interviews and done the sleuthing. Others talked, he listened. And so he has unearthed an astonishing amount of detail about Osama bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri, Mullah Muhammad Omar and all the rest of them. They come alive.
Who knew, for instance, that bin Laden, far from being a warrior-stoic fighting against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, was actually a pathetic stick-in-the-mud who would fall ill before battle? That the combat-hardened Afghans, so tired of bin Laden’s behavior, declared him and his Arab associates “useless”? Or that he was a permissive father and indulgent husband? Or that he is only six feet tall?
More important, who knew — I sure didn’t — that bin Laden had left behind such a long trail of words? Wright has found them in books, on film, in audio recordings, in people’s notebooks and memories. This has allowed him to draw an in-depth portrait of bin Laden, and to chart his evolution from a self-conscious step-child growing up in Jidda, Saudi Arabia, to the visionary cave-dwelling madman who mimics the Holy Prophet in his most humdrum daily habits.
Wright takes the title of his book from the fourth sura of the Koran, which bin Laden repeated three times in a speech videotaped just as the hijackers were preparing to fly. The video was found later, on a computer in Hamburg.
“Wherever you are, death will find you, Even in the looming tower.”
There is poetry, too. Here is a particularly chilling bit, found on another videotape, which bin Laden had read aloud at the wedding of his 17-year-old son, Mohammed. The celebration took place not long after a pair of Qaeda suicide bombers, riding in a tiny boat filled with explosives, nearly sank the billion-dollar guided missile destroyer Cole. At least with regard to his abilities as an author, bin Laden was unusually modest: he let someone else write the words. “I am not, as most of our brothers know, a warrior of the word,” he said.
A destroyer, even the brave might fear,
She inspires horror in the harbor and the open sea,
She goes into the waves flanked by arrogance, haughtiness and fake might,
To her doom she progresses slowly, clothed in a huge illusion,
Awaiting her is a dinghy, bobbing in the waves.
“The Looming Tower” is full of such surprising detail. Al Qaeda’s leaders had all but shelved the 9/11 plot when they realized they lacked foot soldiers who could pass convincingly as westernized Muslims in the United States. At just the right moment Atta appeared in Afghanistan, along with Ramzi bin al-Shibh, Ziad al-Jarrah and Marwan al-Shehhi, all Western-educated transplants, offering themselves up for slaughter. The game was on.
Just as dramatic as the portraits of bin Laden and Zawahiri is Wright’s account of the roots of Islamic militancy — the intellectual, spiritual and material world from which the plotters came. Wright draws a fascinating picture of Sayyid Qutb, the font of modern Islamic fundamentalism, a frail, middle-aged writer who found himself, as a visitor to the United States and a student at Colorado State College of Education in Greeley in the 1940’s, overwhelmed by the unbridled splendor and godlessness of modern America. And by the sex: like so many others who followed him, Qutb seemed simultaneously drawn to and repelled by American women, so free and unselfconscious in their sexuality. The result is a kind of delirium:
“A girl looks at you, appearing as if she were an enchanting nymph or an escaped mermaid,” Qutb wrote, “but as she approaches, you sense only the screaming instinct inside her, and you can smell her burning body, not the scent of perfume, but flesh, only flesh. Tasty flesh, truly, but flesh nonetheless.”
It wasn’t much later that Qutb began writing elaborate rationalizations for killing non-Muslims and waging war against the West. Years later, Atta expressed a similar mix of obsession and disgust for women. Indeed, anyone who has spent time in the Middle East will recognize such tortured emotions.
WRIGHT shows, correctly, that at the root of Islamic militancy — its anger, its antimodernity, its justifications for murder — lies a feeling of intense humiliation. Islam plays a role in this, with its straitjacketed and all-encompassing worldview. But whether the militant hails from a middle-class family or an impoverished one, is intensely religious or a “theological amateur,” as Wright calls bin Laden and his cohort, he springs almost invariably from an ossified society with an autocratic government that is unable to provide any reason to believe in the future. Islam offers dignity, even in — especially in — death. Living in the West, Atta and the others felt these things more acutely, not less. As Wright notes:
“Their motivations varied, but they had in common a belief that Islam — pure and primitive, unmitigated by modernity and uncompromised by politics — would cure the wounds that socialism or Arab nationalism had failed to heal. They were angry but powerless in their own countries. They did not see themselves as terrorists but as revolutionaries who, like all such men throughout history, had been pushed into action by the simple human need for justice. Some had experienced brutal repression; some were simply drawn to bloody chaos. From the beginning of Al Qaeda, there were reformers and there were nihilists. The dynamic between them was irreconcilable and self-destructive, but events were moving so quickly that it was almost impossible to tell the philosophers from the sociopaths. They were glued together by the charismatic personality of Osama bin Laden, which contained both strands, idealism and nihilism, in a potent mix.”
In John O’Neill, bin Laden almost met his match. The supervisor of the F.B.I.’s New York office and of the team assigned to track Al Qaeda in the United States, O’Neill felt, as strongly as anyone in the government, that Al Qaeda was coming to America. He was a relentless investigator, a volcanic personality and sometimes his own worst enemy. In the end he broke himself on a government bureaucracy that could not — and would not — move as quickly as he did. O’Neill and others like him were in a race with Al Qaeda, and although we know how the race ended, it’s astonishing — and heartbreaking — to learn how close it was.
Some of the F.B.I.’s field agents, as we now know, had premonitions of what was coming. When the supervisor of the Minneapolis field office was admonished, in August 2001, for expressing fears that an Islamic radical attending flight school might be planning a suicide attack, he shot back defiantly that he was “trying to keep someone from taking a plane and crashing into the World Trade Center.” Amazing.
The most gut-wrenching scenes are the ones that show F.B.I. agents trying, as 9/11 approached, to pry information from their rivals inside the United States government. The C.I.A., Wright says, knew that high-level Qaeda operatives had held a meeting in Malaysia in January 2000, and, later, that two of them had entered the United States. Both men turned out to be part of the team that hijacked the planes on Sept. 11. The C.I.A. failed to inform agencies like the F.B.I. — which might have been able to locate the men and break up the plot — until late in the summer of 2001.
The fateful struggle between the C.I.A. and F.B.I. in the months leading up to the attacks has been outlined before, but never in such detail. At meetings, C.I.A. analysts dangled photos of two of the eventual hijackers in front of F.B.I. agents, but wouldn’t tell them who they were. The F.B.I. agents could sense that the C.I.A. possessed crucial pieces of evidence about Islamic radicals they were investigating, but couldn’t tell what they were. The tension came to a head at a meeting in New York on June 11, exactly three months before the catastrophe, which ended with F.B.I. and C.I.A. agents shouting at each other across the room.
In one of the most remarkable scenes in the book, Ali Soufan, an F.B.I. agent assigned to Al Qaeda, was taken aside on Sept. 12 and finally shown the names and photos of the men the C.I.A. had known for more than a year and a half were in America. The planes had already struck. Soufan ran to the bathroom and retched.
Great stuff. I just wish Wright had given us something, even a chapter, on the hijackings themselves; as it is, he takes us right up to the moment, and then straight to the burning towers. Perhaps he felt that ground was too well-trodden. My other complaint is more substantive. Through the enormous amount of legwork he has done, tracking down people who worked with bin Laden and Zawahiri over the years, Wright has drawn up verbatim reconstructions of entire conversations, some of which took place more than a decade ago. Many of these conversations are riveting. Still, in some cases, it’s hard to believe that memories are that good.
“The Looming Tower” ends near the Pakistani border, where Zawahiri, or someone who looked like him, rode through a village on horseback and then disappeared into the mountains. It’s not a definitive ending; there is no closure. And that’s the point. For as amazing as the story of Al Qaeda and the road to 9/11 is, it’s not over yet.
Dexter Filkins is a Baghdad correspondent for The Times.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
