The Dish

The Times of London points out something that strikes me as important about the Pope’s remarks about Islam:

His address is undermined further by a serious error in regards to the Koran. "Sura 2,256 . . . is one of the suras of the early period, when Muhammad was still powerless and under threat." In fact, this sura [Koranic chapter] is held by Muslim scholars to be from the middle period, around the 24th year of Muhammad’s prophethood in 624 or 625, when he was in Medina and in control of a state. Contrary to what the Pope said, this was written when Muhammad was in a position of strength, not weakness.

This undermines the one passage where the Pope clearly speaks in his own words, as I explain below. And it undercuts his point almost completely.

"Anyone who describes Islam as a religion as intolerant encourages violence," – Pakistan Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Tasnim Aslam. Somehow, I don’t think he quite grasped the irony.

That’s the ineluctable conclusion from the president’s speech yesterday. Marty Lederman sees through the usual lies and obfuscation:

In a story today, Jeff Smith of the Washington Post quotes one "well-informed source" as saying that the techniques [the president is asking to authorize] "include prolonged sleep deprivation and forced standing or other stress positions," and that the techniques "match the techniques used by the agency in the past," which I describe here.

Smith identifies "a notable exception: The CIA no longer seeks to use a notorious technique called ‘waterboarding,’ which is meant to simulate drowning." Note the phrasing: Merely that the CIA no longer "seeks to use" waterboarding. Not that waterboarding would be unlawful under the Administration bill. To the contrary, "[p]rivately, the administration has concluded that [enactment of the Bush proposal] would allow the CIA to keep using virtually all the interrogation methods it has employed for the past five years, the officials said." So perhaps, if Congress were to enact the Administration bill, even waterboarding would be back on the table, should the CIA once again "seek to use it."

This is why McCain, Warner, Graham, Powell and every decent, sane conservative with military experience refuse to give in. There is already clarity in the law, the Geneva Convention, and the McCain Amendment. What the Bush administration wants is to introduce vagueness to get away with exactly the same barabarism they have deploying illegally for the past five years. They must be stopped. And eventually, they must be prosecuted for war crimes.

(Photo: David Y. Lee/Time.)

Oxford, Ohio, 10.30 am.

A reader writes:

I’m sorry your soldier is a moron.

Iraqis had a choice, surrender and receive fair and humane treatment. Fight us?  Cross us?  Hide behind civilians?  You will receive no quarter, no kindness, you will forfeit your life and your humanity.

It’s imbecilic to think that they surrendered because they knew our kindness.  They surrendered because of the hellatious ass-whomping they would receive.  Prostrate yourself and be treated kindly.

Fight us and die. Those we detain and torture are those that chose the second path. This makes them a good lesson for those contemplating the first.

Well, some Cheney-supporters read this site, don’t they? Here’s another reader’s observations:

I hear the most dreadful things from Americans I’d thought had decency. These are women, mind you, middle aged women who’ve never known anything but comfort and privilege. They’re women who have raised children and done a good job of it, women who do charity work and who go all out to help dogs and cats and any other animal in need.  But they don’t see this issue as you and I see it. They talk about the people tortured as if they’re not human beings.  They see every Muslim, every Arab, as another species. Their usual term is "scum" but "murdering bastards" is also a favorite. Yes, all of them are guilty, all terrorists. These are women who’ve traveled extensively, some who were even born in other countries. Thus it’s not all foreigners who come under this sub-species heading, only the people they’ve labeled terrorists without knowing what they’re talking about. It’s racism at its worst and that, sadly, is what Bush and his cronies are playing to.

None of the people I know who think torture appropriate would admit to being racists, of course. High IQs, high incomes, no brains at all — or is it no hearts? Perhaps no empathy is the key. To one of them, I said, "This sort of thing can escalate and next they’ll be coming for us." She replied, "Oh, for God’s sake!" with disgust, the implication being that such methods would never, ever be used for us fair white middle class people.

As I wrote yesterday, I wrote extensively about the Pope’s remarkable recent address on reason and faith and Islam as soon as the text was released. You can read my analysis here and here. I do not believe that the issue is an inflammatory quote or some unfortunate misunderstanding. Benedict said something in his own words that are at the center of the controversy:

In the seventh conversation ("di√°lesis" – controversy) edited by professor Khoury, the emperor touches on the theme of the jihad (holy war). The emperor must have known that sura 2:256 reads: "There is no compulsion in religion." It is one of the suras of the early period, when Mohammed was still powerless and under [threat]. But naturally the emperor also knew the instructions, developed later and recorded in the Koran, concerning holy war.

The obvious inference from the pope is that the Koran does indeed sanction violence, i.e. "holy war," in the cause of its own religion; and that the passages about peace can be explained in part by the fact that they belong to the early days of Islam, when Muhammed had no other practical option. Subsequently, Muhammed endorsed and practised war. One thing you can say about Jesus: he didn’t kill anyone, however bloodthirsty his subsequent followers might have been. Today, in many Muslim countries, apostasy remains subject to the death penalty. That in itself is the use of murderous violence to impose faith. Christianity has, of course, been just as bad in the past. But it has reformed itself. Moreover, the nature of the Muslim revelation, according to Benedict, is that it was God’s word channeled unmediated through the Prophet. The Christian tradition of logos or reason does not therefore have the same salience in Islam, according to the Pope. A Muslim reformation, Benedict seems to say, is very unlikely because of the intrinsic irrationality of Islam.

I will pass on the ironies of this Pope commending reason in faith. He has done a great deal to stifle reason within the Church by policing and suppressing free debate. But his fundamental point about Islam and logos cannot be dismissed as a glitch or merely bad manners. I’m not a scholar of Islam and so I am not prepared to say whether his appraisal of the role of reason and violence in Islam is accurate. But it’s pretty clear that he’s saying something substantive about the core meaning of Islam. And the violent reaction of some Muslims to his address doesn’t exactly prove him wrong, does it?

(Photo: Wolfgang Radke/AP.)

Here’s a great lesson on how to deal with an asshole with a cell-phone. I feel better for having watched this. Maybe the university is still a healthy place, after all.

I already blogged his address on Islam, reason and faith here and, especially, here. More tomorrow.

I didn’t know her, but Michael Ledeen did. Here’s his beautiful tribute. Money quote:

Like all creative persons, she was a bundle of contradictions, for those inner turmoils are what drive such people to create. She reveled in her non-conformism and her independence, but she was also profoundly traditional, both privately and intellectually.  She could not bear to live in Italy. She was repulsed by what had happened to her Florence, but she was also intensely Florentine and I never doubted that she would find the strength to go there to die.  She loved to make trouble, even for her family and closest friends, but her thoughtfulness and humanity required her to be close to the family cemetery when she left. She didn’t want to be a burden.

Yes, she was a little crazy. But good crazy.

A reserve soldier who fought in Iraq writes:

I was deployed in my reserve unit (USMCR) as part of operation Desert Storm and Desert Shield. Marine infantry, and we were on the front lines, supposedly to guard a gunship base, but really, though, the gunships guarded us. 

Not too much later, it was time to take prisoners. One of the platoons went north, and when they came back, there were stories about how Iraqi soldiers lined the roads, trying to surrender. I spent a week guarding Iraqi men in a makeshift prison camp, a way-station really, and more than I could count. They didn’t look like they were starving or dehydrated. Apparently, once the ground war began, they just pitched their weapons and headed south at first opportunity. The more I’ve thought about it, the more I realize that they knew bone deep that they’d get fair treatment. We gave them MREs (with the pork entree’s removed) but almost immediately some Special Forces guys arrived and set up a real chow line for them. We gave each man a blanket, (I kept an extra as a souvie) and I think I saw a Special Forces doc giving some of them a once over.

Once, only once, one of them got all irritated and tried to get in one of the Corporal’s faces, loud. (I was a lance-corporal). He wouldn’t back down, so the Corporal gave him an adjustment, a rifle butt-stroke to his gut, not hard, but he went down.  The Corporal sent me for the medic. The guy was ok, and now calm (or at least understanding the situation), and hand-signed that he was out of smokes and really, really needed one…  Not a bad guy, just stressed-dumb and needing a smoke.  None of the others prisoners in the camp even registered it.

We went north to mop up not long after that. I saw the Iraqi weapons: rocket launchers a little smaller than semi-trailers, hidden in buildings, AKs in piles, big Soviet mortars and anti-tank mines, everywhere but unarmed. They had food too. Pasteurized milk to drink, but most gone bad by then. Some of the mortar rounds were still in crates. They had long trenches that were hard to see in the dunes, bunkers with maps, fire-plans laid out, and blankets, all placed with decent vantage for command and control. They even had wire laid for land-line communications. The point is, they could have fought. Not won, no they couldn’t have won, but they could have fought. Instead, they chose to surrender.

Looking back, I think that one of the main drivers in these men’s heads was that they knew, absolutely, that they’d get fair treatment from us, the Americans.  We were the good guys. The Iraqis on the line knew they had an out, they had hope, so they could just walk away. (A few did piss themselves when someone told them we were Marines. Go figure.) Still, they knew Americans would be fair, and we were. 

Thinking hard on what I now know of history, psychology, and the meanness of politics, that reputation for fairness was damn near unique in world history. Can you tell me of any major military power that had it?  Ever? France? No. Think Algeria. The UK? Sorry, Northern Ireland, the Boxer Rebellion in China…  China or Russia. I don’t think so. But America had it. If those men had even put up token resistance, some of us would not have come back. But they didn’t even bother, and surrendered at least in part because of our reputation. Our two hundred year old reputation for being fair and humane and decent. All the way back to George Washington, and from President George H.W. Bush all the way down to a lance-corporal jarhead at the front.

Its gone now, even from me. I can’t get past that image of the Iraqi, in the hood with the wires and I’m not what you’d call a sensitive type. You know the picture.  And now we have a total bust-out in the White House, and a bunch of rubber-stamps in the House, trying to make it so that half-drowning people isn’t torture.  That hypothermia isn’t torture. That degradation isn’t torture. We don’t have that reputation for fairness anymore. Just the opposite, I think.   And the next real enemy we face will fight like only the cornered and desperate fight. How many Marines’ lives will be lost in the war ahead just because of this asshole who never once risked anything for this country?

This president must never be forgiven for what he has done to the reputation of this country.