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A chronicle of high-level USA government
actions in September 2001, at two websites:
Ten
Days in September (WP)
“This series is based on interviews with President Bush, Vice President
Cheney and many other key officials inside the administration and out.
The interviews were supplemented by notes of National Security Council
meetings made available to The Washington Post, along with notes taken
by several participants.”
Response
to Terror (Austin American Stateman)
“This is an eight-part series by The Washington Post describing the
response to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks at the highest levels of government.”
Coverage of September 11 and
the aftermath:
Fighting
Terrorism: America Retaliates (BG)
“Archive stories from the Boston Globe: Tuesday Sept. 11 – Sunday
Sept. 16”
Attack
on America (Guardian Unlimited)
Special Report with continuing coverage
new Skepticism
Toward The Skeptical Environmentalist
The Great Debate between Lomborg and Anti-Lomborgs @ Scientific American
A four-part series “Profiles in Discourage”
by “Media Minded” on his experiences in a mid-sized city at
a mid-sized newspaper taken over by a gigantic media conglomerate:
new Part
I
“In the mid-1990s, my small Southern city was struck by a series
of newsworthy deaths. Within the space of a year, three or four black
men had been killed trying to dash across a freeway that ran beside their
public housing project. The reason? A pedestrian bridge over the freeway
was locked. Why had it been locked? The residents of the housing project
requested that the city lock it to prevent drug dealers and other scum
from invading their neighborhood. You’re probably thinking, ‘Well,
you write one longish story explaining all this, then move on to the next
day’s news.’ Oh no. This was a springboard for a weeklong series
on the terrible plight of poor black people who were ‘isolated’
(false) and ‘forced’ to dash across a freeway so they could
take part in the life of the community (again, false). It was ready-made
melodrama about the terrible effects of ‘institutional racism’
that fell apart under ordinary scrutiny.... The entire series was apparently
designed to garner some journalism awards (it didn’t) and win the
paper’s new managers approval among the city’s minorities (it
did). The net result was that the city added a few more bus lines into
the project. But the series did cause a stir in the community. When spot-on
criticism was presented in letters to the editor, the series was defended
(internally) as casting light on a long-overlooked part of the community.
But this light illuminated nothing. In the end, it was a celebration of
black victimhood and the never-ending white racism (overt, subtle and
institutional) that forced poor black men to run for their lives across
a busy freeway. And it just might have been the last nail in the coffin
of my liberalism.”
new Part
II
“In 1997, we received word that the Ku Klux Klan was going to march
in our fair city in the fall. Many of us who had worked at the paper before
it was swallowed up by that huge media corporation were like, ‘Eh,
OK. Put the story low on the local front, because hate-group monitors
such as the Southern Poverty Law Center and others go out of their way
to emphasize that these nuts are craving publicity and confrontation.’
We’d followed the same strategy at a much smaller paper I had worked
at when the Klan came to town. The result was that about a dozen people
came out to watch about a dozen Klansmen march around and holler for about
a half-hour. That was it. But in the budget meeting that day, it became
obvious that we were not going to have anything like that. Our new, ambitious
executive editor was adamant that this was a major story that needed to
be the lead story on the front page.... The march itself was unbelieveable.
I don’t think the city had seen anything quite like it since the
Civil Rights era. Something like 2,000 people showed up to scream and
jeer at about two dozen KKK a**holes. There were several scuffles and
a dozen or so arrests. Klansmen were pelted with rocks and eggs, and some
of them had their hoods pulled off. Now that all sounds well and good,
and I certainly feel no sympathy for these racist monsters, but this was
exactly what the Klan wanted! They got to portray themselves
as brave defenders of the white race to their ‘target audience.’
They were videotaping the whole spectacle to use in recruiting. And we’d
set the table for them!”
new Part
III
“We got our first taste of corporate-mandated ‘diversity’
not long after the media behemoth swallowed up our daily paper. It came
in the form of... diversity training! Argh! If you’ve ever worked
for a big corporation, you probably know the drill. Everybody files into
a conference room. The lights dim. A PowerPoint presentation is made about
the different communication techniques of different ethnic groups (‘Hispanic
people tend to use more hand gestures... Black people tend to speak loudly...
Asians tend to be more deferential’) that only seemed to reinforce
stereotypes. Also, there was a short video. The only part that stuck in
my mind was the segment where the white actor complained to another white
actor about a black co-worker getting a promotion solely because of his
skin color. The video warned against the dangers of making broad assumptions
about people or situations without complete information, but the real
message was clear: Do not question the company’s affirmative-action
policies! Ever! Or you’ll look like the bigot in the video!”
new Part
IV
“A couple of years later, we were looking to fill a fairly important
position. Our assistant managing editor (AME) was steered to a candidate
named ‘Lamont Washington’ (not his real name) by our new executive
editor (the same minority mentioned above), who sent our AME an e-mail
that said something along the lines of this: ‘Here’s
a resume from Lamont Washington. Let’s get him in here for an interview
as soon as possible. He sounds like he’d be a good, solid minority
candidate.’ Well, ‘Lamont’ showed up a couple of days later
for his interview, and he turned out to be a big old country-fried white
boy! Surprise, surprise, surprise! Years of newspaper experience,
but pale as a ghost. Needless to say, he didn’t get a marathon two-day
interview (more like a half-day) and he didn’t get hired. Amazingly,
neither did a Ivy-League-educated white guy who applied for the job, a
copy editor who was working on the international edition of a world-famous
newspaper. (His wife was about to have a child, and they were looking
for a change of pace from the big city.) Who did we hire? A young, minority
copy editor from a paper that was about the same size as ours. He ended
up getting fired several months later when it became obvious he couldn’t
handle the responsibilities thrust upon him.”
A two-part article on the USA and Iraq by Jonah
Goldberg @ National Review Online:
Baghdad
Delenda Est (Part I)
“Anyway, there are any number of excellent reasons to topple Saddam
Hussein: We should have done it the first time; he tried to murder the
first President Bush; he’s developing weapons of mass destruction;
he gassed the Kurds; he’s got that pickle-sniffer mustache; whatever.
I don’t care. All of that is a conversation for another day. The
point for now is that Iraq shouldn’t have existed in the first place.
It’s lasted this long thanks to the Stalinist repression of the Baath
regime. And the only reason we didn’t get rid of it last time was
that the Saudis despise the idea of toppling Hussein because they don’t
want us to establish an attractive alternative to the nasty form of government
they profit from. Well, boohoo for the Saudis. If they hadn’t found
oil on their land they’d be a trivia question for students of comparative
government today. Wouldn’t such a huge move inflame the Middle East?
Sure. Wouldn’t such a humiliating effort give Osama bin Laden exactly
what he wants? Yes. Wouldn’t this cause the European diplomats to
drop their egg spoons in disgust over such barbarism? Most definitely.
Wouldn’t the civilized world — with the notable exception of
the British — turn its collective back on us? I guess so. All that
would in all likelihood be true. Until we win.”
Baghdad
Delenda Est (Part Two): Get on with it.
“I know — from painful experience — that there are lots
of people out there who subscribe to the bumper-sticker slogan ‘peace
through strength is like virginity through f**king.’ I had to argue
with such folks through all of college (and much of high school). Such
statements are black holes of stupidity — idiocy is crammed into
such a small space that it folds upon itself and bends all reason and
logic in its proximity. If peace cannot be attained through strength,
I invite one of these bespectacled, purse-carrying, rice-paper-skinned,
sandalistas to walk out into a prison yard. Let’s see how receptive
Tiny and Mad Dog are to entreaties over the futility of violence. ‘Sir,
there’s no need for fisticuffs, I would be glad to share
my Snapple with you. Can’t you see this sort of conflict is precisely
what the multinational corporations want?’ International relations
is much more like a prison yard than like a college seminar at Brown.
Yes, relations between democracies may be cordial — but
that is an argument for turning Iraq into one, not for leaving it alone.
It’s ironic: All of these people who think it imperative that the
United States broker peace in the Middle East seem to think it’s
a coincidence that the United States is the dominant military power in
the world. If military might means nothing, why aren’t the Arabs
and Israelis bending to the will and rhetoric of the Belgians or the Swiss?”
A two-part article “An American
Catholic” by Diane Alden @ NewsMax:
An
American Catholic at Easter
“Many in the Church grasped Vatican II (1962) as an opportunity to
turn the church into a trendy adjunct of the ’60s counterculture
revolution. At that time serious sin went out the window. Thus, after
a few short years, trendy clerics and theologians and administrators distanced
themselves from notions of what traditional Catholics call ‘mortal
sin.’ At least in the minds of the liberal theologians and politicizers
of Catholic doctrine, there was almost no accountability for one’s
actions, as everything seemed to have a psychological rather than a spiritual
aspect. No sin, no consequences. Everything, all our actions, were not
of our doing. Indeed, at that time much of Catholicism was dumped in favor
of the social gospel. The hard stuff the Founder demands was out or ignored.
Selective interpretation of Christ’s words erred in favor of His
forgiving and loving side. Meanwhile, many Catholics and hierarchy, along
with progressive theologians, forgot the more difficult and uncompromising
demands He made on humanity. They wanted to ignore His recognition of
evil, punishment, justice and sin as well as the eventual sorting out
of evil from good. In the ’60s and ’70s, the American Catholic
Church tended toward the idea that Christ was all about ‘love’
and nothing about casting into the darkness those who do not obey God’s
laws. It was okay to sin as long as you ‘loved’ everyone and
meant well. The road to hell was no longer paved with good intentions,
because no one was sure hell really existed. God help anyone who made
value judgments on moral issues or called certain behaviors sinful or
evil. Total tolerance of all kinds of things became more important than
not sinning, even though many of these attitudes and behaviors were in
defiance of what the Catholic Church officially taught. In the ’60s
especially, the Catholic Church began to accept as priests and nuns many
men and women who were not so much the followers of Christ as they were
the likely intellectual descendants and proponents of Hegel, Marx, Freud,
Jung, Maslow, Rogers and Antonio Gramsci. It is because of that fact that
the Catholic hierarchy in the U.S. could justify sending pedophile priests
to the shrink as they attempted to find out ‘why’ those men
did foul deeds to young boys.”
Catholics
in Name Only
“In any event, intellectuals inside and outside the Church felt permission
to make use of their radicalism. Most American institutions were not spared
the Hegelian and Marxist orientation. Radicalism became acceptable; meanwhile,
authority and discernment went to hell in a handbasket. In order to accomplish
utopian collectivist ends, Western civilization and its authority in general
were attacked at all levels. In America the excuse may have been the Vietnam
War, civil rights, helping the poor with the disastrous ‘War on Poverty,’
or modernizing the Catholic Church. However, what occurred was the destruction
of positive and constructive avenues enhancing individual freedom, increasing
prosperity and faith, and the healthy observation of the laws of God and
man. Self-discipline and self-control and faith were deep-sixed, replaced
by the acceptance of our victim status as we waited for fulfillment from
government programs, materialism, psychology and pop culture. The all-out
assault on authority of the Church and Western civilization in this era,
along with the loss of self-discipline and self-control, led to the subsequent
increase in the power of the state. After the ’60s, when authority
in America and in Europe caved to the new intellectual barbarians, the
proponents of the philosophy of collectivism and Marxism filled the gap.
The Catholic Church in America and Europe did not escape that destiny.
Religion, environmentalism, feminism, the civil rights movement, Vatican
II were all overwhelmed as the barbarians crossed the Tiber and no one
was there to stop them. What could have been positive trends in religion
and society, trends which created more freedom and good living, instead
became a cacophony of dissipation and dissolution and collectivism. We
gave up Mozart, Cole Porter, Aaron Copeland, and Rodgers and Hammerstein
for moral chaos, societal dissonance, Britney Spears, Snoop Doggy Dogg,
human rights for animals and trees, and sex with anything that moves,
whether it be animal, vegetable or mineral. Ever on the defensive, the
American Catholic Church just gave in and called absolutely every goofy
unworkable collectivist and leftist idea the social gospel in action.
Meanwhile, many trends destructive to the family and civilization were
now called diversity or inclusivity. No one seems to notice how diversity
and inclusivity are always carried to their most outrageous extremes.
Dung-covered depictions of the Virgin Mary are acceptable, but a religious
masterpiece like the Ten Commandments is not welcome anywhere. In-your-face
sexuality replaced modesty and ended the sensible idea to keep private
things private. From the ’60s onward, rather than seeking the stars,
Americans and the West chose to wander in an intellectual and philosophical
garbage-filled desert. That particular wandering in the landfill wilderness
has just about destroyed Western civilization, not to mention the American
Catholic Church.”
A three-part essay “How Contemporary
American Poets are Denaturing the Poem” by Joan Houlihan
@ Web Del Sol:
On
the Prosing of Poetry
“Before writing was invented, poetry was used to mark special occasions
and strong emotions and to burn the necessary stories — the myths
and truths of a culture — into the memories of the people. Mnemonic
devices such as sound, rhythm, and heightened, pictorial language, economy
of expression (‘epigrammatic’ speech that encodes many meanings
in as few words as possible) and assonance, consonance, alliteration,
parallelism, were the branding irons used for the task. As well, these
devices were incantatory, stirring primal responses to their sound and
rhythm, and creating an atmosphere for the sacred and magical. Although
spoken, poetry was not common; it was instead, a singular kind of speech,
reserved for relaying important or sacred events, ensuring that such events
would be remembered almost in a physical way, in the body’s deep
response to sound, rhythm and imagery. Speaking poetically served a purpose.
Speaking prosaically also served a purpose — to negotiate everyday
reality, to speak of those things which were common to all and not worthy
of long remembrance — to speak of the world in transit. Our ability
to write did not erase the distinction. It took contemporary American
poets, writing in deliberately flat prose about insignificant personal
events and feelings; and editors, publishers and critics dubbing such
anecdotes and everyday journal entries ‘poems,’ to erase the
distinction. We have reached the point we are being asked to believe that
a text block, chopped randomly into flat, declarative lines, is a poem.
We are told to kneel and stare at this specimen of dead lines laid out
in its little coffin on the page, and declare it alive. What do we say?”
I=N=C=O=H=
E=R=E=N=T
“The need for coherence appears to be basic, perhaps even neurological.
Science has proved the human brain strives to find a pattern, an order,
a meaning in chaos. What isn’t coherent, we strive to make so. It
satisfies us. Thus, before settling for separate, unconnected pieces,
beautiful as they may be, we will look hard for connections. While shapes
and colors can become untethered from their representation, or meaning,
a poem can only become fully untethered from meaning if it is without
words. This is because the smallest irreducible piece — the word
— retains meaning, in and out of context. A totally meaningless poem
would logically consist of a blank page. In spite of this difficulty,
some poets do manage to make extremely close approaches to the state of
meaninglessness while still using words.... In order to save us from the
Western capitalist construction called a poem, the Language Poets had
to destroy it. But two other possible reasons for writing Language Poetry
come to mind: [1] The poet cannot succesfully create a coherent poem and
so makes a virtue of his failure. [2] The poet cannot successfully create
a coherent poem and so uses poem-as-pretext for expounding critical theories
— something he or she can do, and that, happy coincidence, ensures
an academic career.”
The
Argument for Silence: Defining the Poet Peter Principle
“The tension between ‘career’ and ‘vocation’
in poetry is nowhere more obvious than in academia where poets take a
sabbatical in order to write poetry, but never take a sabbatical
from writing poetry. I believe that a certain variety of established
poet, perhaps those with a substantial number of books, would benefit
greatly from a poetry sabbatical. There is evidence of a need for poetic
silence all around us. We see it every time we read a denatured poem by
a renowned poet, usually in a renowned publication; evidence that the
enabling editors of such publications have failed in their duty to enforce
last call. For example, poets James Tate, Philip Levine and Mary Oliver
have each produced more than 16 books of poetry. Whatever has driven this
production, it is clear from the trajectory of all three poets that something
must stop it. In all three cases, a windiness, a wordiness, a kind of
poetic logorrhea can be found in their latest work in contrast to the
fire and compression in their early work. Flatlined, barely pulsing, their
latest work is being kept alive by extraordinary means: the artificial
resuscitation of continuous publication.”
A two-part article on Economists
& Ecologists by Arnold Kling @ Tech Central Station:
Common
Sense and Sensibility
“Economists are not well thought of these days by environmentalists.
Or so it seems from accounts such as a recent Scientific American excerpt
of Edward O. Wilson’s book, The Future of Life. He characterizes
economists as narrow, myopic environmental ignoramuses.... It’s true
that economists have trouble with the views of many environmentalists.
But this just reflects our frustration with the ecologists’ use of
the most naive and inappropriate economic models and assumptions in their
forecasts and policy prescriptions. That’s why Bjorn Lomborg’s
new book The Skeptical Environmentalist is such a distinctive,
rare, and important work. In addition to sharing the ecologist’s
concerns about aquifers, sustainability, and global warming, Lomborg accepts
the economist’s paradigm. By combining economics with ecology, he
comes up with a rational, balanced analysis. Unfortunately, environmentalists’
denial of the validity of economic analysis runs through much of their
criticism of Lomborg’s work.... Environmentalists tend to assume
a constant relationship between inputs and outputs. If you are going to
produce X tons of grain, then the acreage of land required will be X/y,
where y is the average yield of an acre of land. Economists call this
the ‘fixed-coefficients’ model, because the relationship between
acreage and grain is governed by the coefficient y. Simply put, this is
not a realistic model. In practice there are always a variety of production
techniques that use different combinations of inputs to produce the same
output. The fixed-coefficients model applies, if at all, only in the very
short run. In the long run, there is substitution and technical change.
Substitution means that producers will vary the inputs used in production,
depending on changes in the cost of various inputs. For example, if land
becomes more expensive, producers will substitute capital, labor, fertilizer,
or other resources in order to utilize the most efficient combination.
The other long-run factor is technical change. As we accumulate knowledge,
we come up with ways to produce more output with fewer resources.”
Lomborg’s
Lessons
“Economists use interest rates to discount future benefits and costs.
Because of discounting, environmental costs that are out in the future
are given less weight than today’s economic goods, including today’s
environment. Ecologists suspect that economists are being short-sighted,
when in fact we are being rational. The interest rate represents the price
at which the economy can trade off future output for present output. What
discounting says is that tomorrow’s output is ‘cheap’ in
today’s terms. Undertaking a large expense today to avoid the same
expense tomorrow is inefficient. Ecologists worry that we are consuming
too much now, while depriving future generations of resources and leaving
them with large unpaid environmental bills. Economists, on the other hand,
argue that by investing in science and research we are providing a legacy
of wealth to future generations. The assets that they inherit in the form
of capital and know-how will be much greater than any environmental liabilities.
In The Skeptical Environmentalist, Bjorn Lomborg makes a
strong case against the Kyoto Protocol, which attempts to restrict carbon
dioxide emissions in order to forestall global warming. Even as one who
accepts the thesis of global warming, Lomborg suggests that the Kyoto
Protocol is a bad idea. Lomborg estimates a finite (albeit large) cost
to global warming. Also, because this cost will be borne in the future,
he applies a discount rate. If the present value of the cost of global
warming is finite, then it becomes possible to estimate the benefits of
policies to forestall global warming. Next, it follows that we can compare
benefits to costs. It is on the basis of these cost-benefit comparisons
that Lomborg is able to show that the Kyoto Protocol approach is unwise.”
A two-part article @ Salon, by Andrew
O’Hehir, on J. R. R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings:
The
book of the century
“It’s unwise to read The Lord of the Rings as allegory
in any strict sense, but this commonplace personal odyssey, one shared
by millions in the modern age, is strikingly echoed in its plot. Frodo,
the child-size hero, must leave his beloved Shire and travel into Sauron’s
domain of Mordor, with its slag heaps, its permanent pall of smoke, its
slave-driven industries. When he returns after much danger and difficulty,
he discovers that the malicious wizard Saruman — as Shippey points
out, a techno-Utopian who began with good intentions — has industrialized
the Shire itself, cutting down its trees, replacing its hobbit-holes with
brick slums and factories and poisoning its rivers. In this regard, then,
The Lord of the Rings belongs to the literature of the Industrial
Revolution, a lament for the destruction of England’s ‘green
and pleasant land’ that belongs somewhere on the same shelf with
Thomas Hardy, D.H. Lawrence and William Blake. But Tolkien saw something
wilder and stranger in the Sarehole of his childhood, and in himself:
a fading but still tangible connection to the distant, mythic past. If
his Shire hobbits are the West Midlands rural bourgeoisie of 1895 or so,
they have been catapulted backward into a world where they themselves
are the anachronisms, a realm of elves, dwarves (Tolkien insisted on this
nonstandard but ancient plural, although he would have preferred ‘dwarrows’),
wizards, dragons, goblins and black sorcerers.”
A
curiously very great book
“It is not merely the scale of mythic invention or the grand storytelling
that distinguishes it but also its tragic vision, the profound melancholy
mentioned by Lewis. Few if any heroic quests have ever had such a sense
of human frailty and weakness; although Frodo brings the Ring all the
way to the Cracks of Doom where Sauron forged it, in the end he is overcome
by temptation and claims it for his own. He is redeemed only by chance,
or by divine grace, which in Tolkien’s world comes to the same thing.
He has shown mercy to the treacherous and miserable Gollum, who becomes
the accidental agent of Frodo’s and the world’s salvation. But
Frodo, the book’s ostensible hero, fails in his quest and is left,
like the knight who guards the Holy Grail, with a grievous wound that
can never heal (an Arthurian parallel Shippey has not noticed). Even the
victory wrought by the Ring’s destruction is a sad affair, in many
respects closer to defeat. Much of the magic and mystery drains out of
Middle-earth after Sauron’s fall, leaving behind an ordinary, only
slightly prehistoric realm dominated by human beings. Tolkien’s most
beloved characters — Gandalf, the High-Elves Elrond and Galadriel
and the hobbits Bilbo and Frodo, both of them indelibly marked by the
Ring — depart over the western seas to a paradisiacal nowhere that
none of us on this shore will ever see. Tolkien liked to present himself
to friends and readers as a contented fireside hobbit, fond of tobacco,
simple food and late mornings in bed, and there can be no doubt, reading
his letters, that he was immensely gratified by the outpouring of love
and enthusiasm his work engendered. (And immensely irritated by some of
it; when a woman wanted to name her Siamese cats after his characters,
he replied that they were “the fauna of Mordor.”) But in reality
he was a strange and complicated man who wrote a strange and sad book,
whose complex of meanings we will likely never determine.”
A “classic” two-part article,
by Bernard Lewis, with a recent related essay, in The Atlantic:
The
Roots of Muslim Rage (Part One)
“Like every other civilization known to human history, the Muslim
world in its heyday saw itself as the center of truth and enlightenment,
surrounded by infidel barbarians whom it would in due course enlighten
and civilize. But between the different groups of barbarians there was
a crucial difference. The barbarians to the east and the south were polytheists
and idolaters, offering no serious threat and no competition at all to
Islam. In the north and west, in contrast, Muslims from an early date
recognized a genuine rival — a competing world religion, a distinctive
civilization inspired by that religion, and an empire that, though much
smaller than theirs, was no less ambitious in its claims and aspirations.
This was the entity known to itself and others as Christendom, a term
that was long almost identical with Europe. The struggle between these
rival systems has now lasted for some fourteen centuries. It began with
the advent of Islam, in the seventh century, and has continued virtually
to the present day. It has consisted of a long series of attacks and counterattacks,
jihads and crusades, conquests and reconquests.... For the past three
hundred years, since the failure of the second Turkish siege of Vienna
in 1683 and the rise of the European colonial empires in Asia and Africa,
Islam has been on the defensive, and the Christian and post-Christian
civilization of Europe and her daughters has brought the whole world,
including Islam, within its orbit.”
The
Roots of Muslim Rage (Part Two)
“The accusations are familiar. We of the West are accused of sexism,
racism, and imperialism, institutionalized in patriarchy and slavery,
tyranny and exploitation. To these charges, and to others as heinous,
we have no option but to plead guilty — not as Americans, nor yet
as Westerners, but simply as human beings, as members of the human race.
In none of these sins are we the only sinners, and in some of them we
are very far from being the worst. The treatment of women in the Western
world, and more generally in Christendom, has always been unequal and
often oppressive, but even at its worst it was rather better than the
rule of polygamy and concubinage that has otherwise been the almost universal
lot of womankind on this planet.... Slavery is today universally denounced
as an offense against humanity, but within living memory it has been practiced
and even defended as a necessary institution, established and regulated
by divine law. The peculiarity of the peculiar institution, as Americans
once called it, lay not in its existence but in its abolition. Westerners
were the first to break the consensus of acceptance and to outlaw slavery,
first at home, then in the other territories they controlled, and finally
wherever in the world they were able to exercise power or influence —
in a word, by means of imperialism.”
What
Went Wrong?
“Muslim modernizers — by reform or revolution — concentrated
their efforts in three main areas: military, economic, and political.
The results achieved were, to say the least, disappointing. The quest
for victory by updated armies brought a series of humiliating defeats.
The quest for prosperity through development brought in some countries
impoverished and corrupt economies in recurring need of external aid,
in others an unhealthy dependence on a single resource — oil. And
even this was discovered, extracted, and put to use by Western ingenuity
and industry, and is doomed, sooner or later, to be exhausted, or, more
probably, superseded, as the international community grows weary of a
fuel that pollutes the land, the sea, and the air wherever it is used
or transported, and that puts the world economy at the mercy of a clique
of capricious autocrats. Worst of all are the political results: the long
quest for freedom has left a string of shabby tyrannies, ranging from
traditional autocracies to dictatorships that are modern only in their
apparatus of repression and indoctrination.... It was bad enough for Muslims
to feel poor and weak after centuries of being rich and strong, to lose
the position of leadership that they had come to regard as their right,
and to be reduced to the role of followers of the West. But the twentieth
century, particularly the second half, brought further humiliation —
the awareness that they were no longer even the first among followers
but were falling back in a lengthening line of eager and more successful
Westernizers, notably in East Asia. The rise of Japan had been an encouragement
but also a reproach. The later rise of other Asian economic powers brought
only reproach. The proud heirs of ancient civilizations had gotten used
to hiring Western firms to carry out tasks of which their own contractors
and technicians were apparently incapable. Now Middle Eastern rulers and
businessmen found themselves inviting contractors and technicians from
Korea — only recently emerged from Japanese colonial rule —
to perform these tasks. Following is bad enough; limping in the rear is
far worse. By all the standards that matter in the modern world —
economic development and job creation, literacy, educational and scientific
achievement, political freedom and respect for human rights — what
was once a mighty civilization has indeed fallen low.”
A three-part article on some current
thinking on the Koran in The Atlantic:
What
is the Koran? (Part 1)
“Some of the parchment pages in the Yemeni hoard seemed to date back
to the seventh and eighth centuries A.D., or Islam’s first two centuries
— they were fragments, in other words, of perhaps the oldest Korans
in existence. What’s more, some of these fragments revealed small
but intriguing aberrations from the standard Koranic text. Such aberrations,
though not surprising to textual historians, are troublingly at odds with
the orthodox Muslim belief that the Koran as it has reached us today is
quite simply the perfect, timeless, and unchanging Word of God.”
What
is the Koran? (Part 2)
“Deviating from the orthodox interpretation of the Koran, says the
Algerian Mohammed Arkoun, a professor emeritus of Islamic thought at the
University of Paris, is ‘a very sensitive business’
with major implications. ‘Millions and millions of people refer to
the Koran daily to explain their actions and to justify their aspirations,’
Arkoun says. ‘This scale of reference is much larger than it has
ever been before.’”
What
is the Koran? (Part 3)
“Gerd-R. Puin speaks with disdain about the traditional willingness,
on the part of Muslim and Western scholars, to accept the conventional
understanding of the Koran. ‘The Koran claims for itself that it
is “mubeen,” or “clear,” he says. ‘But
if you look at it, you will notice that every fifth sentence or so simply
doesn’t make sense. Many Muslims — and Orientalists — will
tell you otherwise, of course, but the fact is that a fifth of the Koranic
text is just incomprehensible. This is what has caused the traditional
anxiety regarding translation. If the Koran is not comprehensible —
if it can’t even be understood in Arabic — then it’s not
translatable. People fear that. And since the Koran claims repeatedly
to be clear but obviously is not — as even speakers of Arabic will
tell you — there is a contradiction. Something else must be going
on.’”
A three-part series “Driving
a Wedge” in the Boston Globe:
Why
bin Laden plot relied on Saudi hijackers
“Senior US officials and Saudi Interior Ministry officials involved
with the investigation into the involvement of Saudi nationals in the
attacks say they now believe bin Laden’s Al Qaeda actively sought
out young Saudi volunteers from this region for their ‘jihad.’
The investigation is beginning to reveal a picture of how bin Laden, a
native of the Saudi southwest, exploited the young hijackers by playing
off the region's deep tribal affiliations, itseconomic dis-enfranchisement,
anditsown burning brand of Wahhabi fundamentalism which the kingdom's
religious hierarchy fosters in the schools.”
Saudi
schools fuel anti-US anger
“US diplomats and Saudi specialists say Saudi schools are the foundation
of the broader society in which the House of Saud has for decades tolerated
extremists within the religious hierarchy to set a tone — in schools
as well as on national television and radio airways — of open bigotry
toward non-Muslims, contempt even for those non-Sunni Muslims from other
branches of the faith such as the Shiite, and of virulent anti-Americanism.
This, US and Saudi observers here say, has been part of an unofficial
deal: The kingdom gave the religious establishment control of the schools
as long as it didn’t question the legitimacy of the monarchy’s
power. The United States went along with this tacit agreement as long
as the oil kept flowing, its troops stayed in the country, and the House
of Saud remained on the throne.”
Doubts
are cast on the viability of Saudi monarchy for long term
“The House of Saud — the 30,000-member ruling family headed
by 3,000 princes — has long been so riddled with corruption that
even Crown Prince Abdullah has said the culture of royal excess has to
come to an end. It has ruled over the kingdom with documented human rights
abuses and, as one Western diplomat put it, a form of ‘gender apartheid’
for women. Democracy has never been part of the equation. These palace
indulgences have been tolerated by Washington for far too long, critics
say, because of a US policy dependent on Saudi Arabia’s vast oil
reserves, Riyadh’s purchase of an estimated $4 billion a year worth
of US weapons, and its pivotal role as host to 5,000 American troops.
Since Franklin Delano Roosevelt agreed a half century ago to defend the
kingdom in exchange for ready access to oil, the balance between US interests
and US ideals in Saudi Arabia has always tipped in favor of Washington’s
economic and strategic interests.”
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