Sunni Side Up

If we’re being honest, Iraq is currently a complete mystery. We have only a handful of signs to measure what is really going on in that country as the Bush administration continues its public relations exercize called "Plus Up." But since the initiative has gotten under way, we can see that the Shiite militias, the ones controlling the U.S.-backed "government", have backed off. Al Sadr is probably in Iran; Shiite violence appears to have ebbed. In contrast, Sunni violence seems to have reached new levels of sophistication and ambition. They may be getting far better at targeting helicopters and yesterday conducted a brazen al Qaeda-style atttack on a U.S. base in Tarmiya.

What can this tell us? I don’t know, but I can guess. It makes sense if you see the "surge" as essentially a breathing space for the Shia to regroup before the U.S. withdraws. They are the majority; and they will probably win the larger civil war that will follow this minor one when the U.S. quits. Sunni insurgents are therefore attacking the Shiites’ U.S. protectors (we may not be officially siding with the Shia but in practice, because we do not have the forces to shift the power-balance decisively, we are). The rape of a woman by Shiite forces – I mean the national government forces – can only intensify the distrust. It’s rare that a raped woman goes public in Muslim countries. All in all, a phony calm underpinned by a small notch upward in sectarian hatred and tension, driven by Sunni fear of the genocide ahead. At least, that’s my best distant assessment on the evidence before us. I hope I’m proven wrong.

Quote For The Day II

"Call Tim. He hates Chris," – Mary Matalin’s advice on how to release classified information to protect her boss, Dick Cheney.

Tim is Tim Russert; Chris is Chris Matthews. Good to see high affairs of state being conducted in the White House at a time of war. What’s revealing to me is what the administration was so focused on while the Sunni insurgency was in its initial stages: not the enemy abroad, but the enemy at home. We are discovering that Rove and Cheney were just as concerned with the latter as the former. They were D’Souza-ites before D’Souza.

Quotes For The Day

"Should any American soldier be so base and infamous as to injure any [prisoner] … I do most earnestly enjoin you to bring him to such severe and exemplary punishment as the enormity of the crime may require. Should it extend to death itself, it will not be disproportional to its guilt at such a time and in such a cause… for by such conduct they bring shame, disgrace and ruin to themselves and their country," – George Washington, charge to the Northern Expeditionary Force, Sept. 14, 1775.

"We do not torture," – George W. Bush, lying through his teeth.

Scott Horton explores the true America this president has violated here.

Faith, Science, Franklin

Benfranklin_1

Hitch turned me on to the work of Jerry Weinberger and his ravishingly subversive book on Ben Franklin. If you have a few minutes this holiday Monday, take a look at this essay on Franklin that Weinberger wrote for The New Atlantis. It’s on the very subject that Sam Harris and I have been discussing: whether science can or should supplant religious faith in the conversation of mankind. Weinberger suggests that Franklin was both an unabashed technophile and scientist who yet believed that science would never – and should never – replace the mystery that is at the core of religion. Money quote:

Ultimately, Franklin concluded that rationalistic science could never prove the believers wrong. He also concluded that the rationalists were unlikely to admit to this fact. They turned out to believe in their rationalism as fervently as the believers believed in their miracles, especially the miracle of conscience, or of the voice and spirit of God moving within. Moreover, if one were to push this fact in the rationalists’ faces, they could get just as angry as believers about challenges to their faith. Franklin, it turns out, was a freethinking critic of Enlightenment freethinking.

The conventional and current take on Franklin—that he was a pragmatic moralist and serious Enlightenment Deist and eventually an American patriot—is flat wrong. The recent chorus of Franklin biographers, including academic historians such as Gordon Wood, H. W. Brands, and Edmund Morgan, has been bamboozled by Franklin’s ironic literary style, and tone-deaf to Franklin’s radical, philosophical, deadpan sense of humor.

Franklin was no Deist. He was no pragmatic moralist. And he wasn’t really “The First American.” Franklin was, rather, the first American Baconian. He was also a profound philosopher, deeply skeptical of religion (especially the metaphysical conceits of Deists) and of our everyday moral intuitions. He was also profoundly skeptical of the intellectual foundations of rationalism and the Enlightenment. And he was, to put his politics in a nutshell, a political constructivist and libertarian. Franklin was not as American as apple pie, but he was as American as the corndog.

My kind of guy. Read the whole thing, including an elaborate fart joke from one of America’s founding fathers.