Category: The Dish

It’s still nascent, but has a foothold. Could it help foster cultural change to make democratic life more imaginable? We can sure hope so. It could also give Jihadists new tools for organization. Here’s an interesting review of the possibilities for new media in the Arab world. Money quote:

Those bloggers are people like Roba Al-Assi, a twenty-one-year-old design student in Amman, Jordan, who recently wrote about her opposition to the death penalty for Saddam Hussein:

"It is the premeditated and cold-blooded killing of a human being by the state in the name of justice (I know he killed thousands, but it is in my moral fabric to be better than others. Throw him in jail for the rest of his life, that’s a lot worse than death)."

Or the Egyptian blogger who calls himself Big Pharaoh, a twenty-seven-year-old graduate of the American University in Cairo, who expressed his support for the Egyptian culture minister who was criticized for stating that he thought the hijab, the traditional woman’s head covering worn by some Muslim women, was “regressive”:

"There are numerous things that make me proud of this country. How the country descended into such stupidity, ignorance, and darkness is definitely not among them. I feel like vomiting every time I think about how this man was virulently attacked for merely stating his opinion on a thing as stupid as the hair cover."

Norm Geras notes this priceless interview with Martin Amis in the Guardian:

What is the most depressing thing about Britain you have observed since your return? And the best?…

Martin Amis: The most depressing thing was the sight of middle-class white demonstrators, last August, waddling around under placards saying, We Are All Hizbollah Now. Well, make the most of being Hizbollah while you can. As its leader, Hasan Nasrallah, famously advised the West: "We don’t want anything from you. We just want to eliminate you."

Similarly, when I went on Question Time the other week, a woman in the audience, her voice quavering with self-righteousness, presented the following argument: since it was America that supported Osama bin Laden when he was fighting the Russians, the US armed forces, in response to September 11, "should be dropping bombs on themselves!" And the audience applauded. It is quite an achievement. People of liberal sympathies, stupefied by relativism, have become the apologists for a creedal wave that is racist, misogynist, homophobic, imperialist, and genocidal. To put it another way, they are up the arse of those that want them dead.

The best thing has been to find myself living in what, despite its faults (despite a million ills), is an extraordinarily successful multi-racial society. This is a beautiful idea, with a good chance of becoming a beautiful reality, too.

It is this peaceful, tolerant, multicultural achievement that the Islamists and Christianists both hate. The Islamists are by far the greater danger. But it’s important to know how similar the loathing of diverse modernity is on both the Christianist and the Islamist right.

"Let me add, that the great inlet by which a color for oppression has entered into the world is by one man pretending to determine concerning the happiness of another, and by claiming a right to use what means he thinks proper in order to bring him to a sense of it. It is the ordinary and trite sophism of oppression," – Edmund Burke, "Tract on the Popery Laws," published posthumously.

Here’s a recent report from the Sunni insurgency in the Guardian:

Like Abu Omar before him, Abu Aisha, a mid-level Sunni commander, had come to understand that the threat from the Shia was perhaps greater than his need to fight the occupying Americans. Abu Aisha fought in Baghdad’s western Sunni suburbs, he was a former NCO in the Iraqi army and followed an extreme form of Islam known as Salafism …

On his mobile phone he proudly showed me grainy images of dead bodies lying in the street, their hands tied behind their backs . He claimed they were Shia agents and that he had killed them. "There is a new jihad now," he said, echoing Abu Omar’s warning. "The jihad now is against the Shia, not the Americans."

Jeff Weintraub comments here.

(Photo of detained Sunni man by Chris Hondros/Getty.)

Read the case for it here.

He’s not buying it:

The critical thing about the much-bruited surge is that it, too, belongs in the all-important realm of the symbolic. A few thousand extra troops in Baghdad and in Anbar are of scant use in themselves, unless they in some way represent a commitment to stick to Iraq no matter what. And if the Iraq to which they stick is in fact symbolized by Maliki’s surly confessional regime, then the United States is not baby-sitting a civil war so much as deciding to take part in it.

That’s the conclusion of the government’s own study into "coercive interrogation techniques" deployed by the Bush administration, and approved by president Bush and defense secretary Rumsfeld. There’s no evidence it works, and considerable evidence that it is actually helping us lose the war on terror. Read the full Intelligence Science Board report (PDF) here. Money quote:

"There is little systematic knowledge available to tell us ‘what works’ in interrogation," wrote Robert Coulam, a research professor at the Simmons School for Health Studies in Boston. Coulam also wrote that interrogation practices that offend ethical concerns and "skirt the rule of law" may be narrowly useful, if at all, because such practices could undermine the legitimacy of government action and support for the fight against terrorism…

The new study finds that there may be no value to coercive techniques.

"The scientific community has never established that coercive interrogation methods are an effective means of obtaining reliable intelligence information," wrote Col. Steven M. Kleinman, who has served as the Pentagon’s senior intelligence officer for special survival training.

Kleinman wrote that intelligence gathered with coercion is sometimes inaccurate or false, noting that isolation, a tactic U.S. officials have used regularly, causes "profound emotional, psychological, and physical discomfort" and can "significantly and negatively impact the ability of the source to recall information accurately."

But the point of torture is torture. Ask the president who authorized it.

Eau Claire, Wisconsin, 11 am.

Here’s my take on how a civil war in Iraq need not be the end of the world, if we handle it right. Money quote:

Wars are not just about guns and military action. They are also about ideas and ideology. Long wars, especially, are won by those who gain control of the narrative. The West won the cold war when it became understood globally as a battle between totalitarianism and freedom. Defining the conflict that way helped a great deal towards winning it, and in retrospect the Helsinki accords which publicly endorsed that narrative were the beginning of the end for the Soviet Union.

Similarly, redefining the war on terror as essentially the product of ancient feuds within Islam immediately shifts the argument onto terrain favorable to the West. For the first time in five years, it takes the narrative out of Bin Laden’s hands.

With Greg’s latest update (scroll down to the end), you realize that the 17,500 troop Baghdad surge advocates are much less interested in whether this can work – even on their own terms – than in political positioning in America.