How Many Rich Fit Through a Needle Eye?

While it seems that religion is once again about to play a role in the upcoming US election, little is being said on left or right about the rich. While it's no doubt true that little headway will be made by politicians attacking the very notion of wealth, you'd think the religious voices on either side might at least raise the question about how wealth and its pursuit play a role in creating and sustaining injustice. But is wealth itself a sin? That's a question that historian James Crossley says Jesus understood by his notion of the law. ...

Writing about his recent book at his blog, Crossley sums up:

The parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus also stands firmly in the tradition of re-interpreting reward theology and as ever it is done in terms of law observance. The rich man does NOT go to fire because he has mistreated the poor; no, he goes because he is rich. That simple. So Lazarus has a happy ending because he is poor. The conclusion to the parable is not added in light of Christian preaching on the resurrection, as is often argued, for the simple reason that Lazarus is the one who is to be sent back and is better read in the tradition of sending someone back from the afterlife to warn the living. And note the reference to Moses and repentance.

What these and other traditions show is that the repentance of the rich is a theme of Jesus’ teaching. They must repent, give up their wealth (or part of it) or else suffer. When Jesus criticizes those who worry about food and clothes, he is following a tradition of criticizing the behavior of the rich.

This line of thought is also a part of Jesus’ actions in the Temple. The economic element in Jesus protest is well established (as I’ve argued elsewhere) but I now add another element, namely the idea that idolatry is a part of Jesus’ polemic. In other words, there is a tradition, I think, that remembers Jesus as one who accused the Temple authorities of idolatry. Of course they would have disagreed but in many ways that is irrelevant. Jesus may have been arguing that wealth led to what he regarded as the sin of idolatry.

Don't hold your breath for politicians of either party, or their religious apologists, to undertake to ask this question soon. Indeed, it's doubtful that a mainstream church of either denomination will take up this view of sin soon.

Indeed, the sociologist and priest Andrew Greeley, while pinpointing the issue as one of paramount importance, appears to believe that the American religion must find an adequate ethic that speaks to the great prosperity in the US. Now Greeley is no mealy-mouthed gospel of wealth promoter. His own sympathies lie with creating an environment in which a balance is maintained between addressing social inequality and the ability to give the movers and shakers in society an incentive to continue to not only generate wealth but to do so within an ethical framework. yet, the Thomist background of his education shows through in his desire to maintain that Aristotelian balance that always seems to tilt in favor of those with power.

In my own work, I have increasingly become aware that there's much to the notion that capitalism breeds a world view that is inherently and ineradicably disposed to creating injustice and social inequality. These are of such a nature that they threaten the very possibility of an ethics, not to mention, a spiritual awareness of anything above and beyond wealth. Read more!

How Political Is Political for a Believer...?

The following comments contained in a posting on American Christianity and politics by "pastordan" has some decent remarks on the subject of Christianity and its interaction with politics. ...

pastordan reports that Cary McMullen replied pastordan's comments:

One of my professors at Duke, Stanley Hauerwas, contended that the church IS a political organization in the sense that if the church is properly exhibiting the gospel in the world, there will be political repercussions. For example -- the Confessing Church in 1930s Germany. The Barmen Declaration could be the manifesto for this view that the church, by being the church, is a political organization. To take a smaller example, suppose a local church -- maybe even a Baptist church -- has a prison ministry, and they learn that the local sheriff has policies that restrict prisoners' religious activities. How then should the church behave? I leave that question open.

That's a fair statement as far as it goes. I wonder though how much the churches in Germany should've done before Hitler came to power? Of course, the German people people may have been involved in their own totentanz with the Nazis in such a way that Hitler's rise was inevitable.

Is it then and only then that a sacrifice such as Bonhoeffer's martyrdom of his pacifist principles in order to assassinate Hitler was made possible? Read more!

Manufactured Chaos or Simple Ineptitude?

I've argued several times in this blog that I believe the US military has tried to create chaos in Iraq to thereby enhance its military position in the mideast as a whole. I have linked this idea to comments made over a year ago by former Pentagon alumna Karen Kwiatkowski as well as the neocon theory of creative destruction. John Robb almost has me convinced that the present chaos in Iraq is the result of simple mismanagement by the Rumsfeld Defense Department. ...

At Global Guerillas, Robb writes:

The result is that over the last two years the US military has actually created an environment that is conducive to a bloody and chaotic civil war. By partnering with paramilitaries, we accelerated the development of those forces that would take the war to the Sunnis.

What can we do? Nothing but leave. We can neither expect the leadership of US military to develop sound strategies for mitigating the damage done, nor can we reverse drivers of chaos that have been initiated over the last three years. This chaotic system is now running smoothly under the power of its own internal dynamics and continued intervention will only continue to worsen it. Withdrawal is the only option. The faster the better.

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Dawkins Under the Gun

Richard Dawkins' book The God Delusion has stirred much controversey. While the leftist atheists have jumped on Dawkins' bandwagon such heavy hitters as philosopher Thomas Nagel and Terry Eagleton attack Dawkins' incereasingly shrill attack on the god-fearers. ...

Bill Benzon at The Valve has been tracking the debate:

Let us assume that Nagel is correct, that not only is Dawkins a committed reductionist, but that Dawkins cannot see any alternative to reductionism other than religion. Why not? And just why does this situation force Dawkins to take a militant stance as an atheist? How is it that an attack on religion is also a defense, not of science, but of a reductionist view of science? Why doesn’t Dawkins attack non-reductionist views of, say, biology or psychology, in addition to attacking religion? Does he think such views are unworthy of attack, or that they are, for all practical purposes, essentially religious? If so, why?

It’s not at all clear to me just what kind of questions those are. But they aren’t about personal motivation in any simple sense. They are also about modes of thought and argument, and in a fairly open-ended sense. It is not at all clear to me that we know, anymore, just how to think about ultimate issues. While I am reasonably convinced that Dawkins does not know, I am not convinced that anyone does. Thought, like time, goes on.

Update 1 Dawkins Shoots Back

We explain our existence by a combination of the anthropic principle and Darwin's principle of natural selection. That combination provides a complete and deeply satisfying explanation for everything that we see and know. Not only is the god hypothesis unnecessary. It is spectacularly unparsimonious. Not only do we need no God to explain the universe and life. God stands out in the universe as the most glaring of all superfluous sore thumbs. We cannot, of course, disprove God, just as we can't disprove Thor, fairies, leprechauns and the Flying Spaghetti Monster. But, like those other fantasies that we can't disprove, we can say that God is very very improbable.

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Historical Criticism and the Koran

Some opponents of Islam have pointed to the fact that while the Jewish and Christian testaments have been studied for 200 years for their historical content, the Koran has received little or no such analysis. In the following comments I address very superficially some of these issues, noting in particular the idea that the Koran is just a selection of saying that every generation of Moslems has added context to. I argue that this notion of contextualization is in fact what many modern biblical scholars--especially those using the redaction method--say has occurred with the Christian texts.

What is meant when critics of Islam use the notion of creating a context for the Koranic surahs? Those who aim this accusation at the Koran attempt to judge the historicity of the surahs by using the historical-critical results of studies of the Jewish and Christian testaments. I think that this is somewhat questionable, but in the following I will accept this approach by showing that--at least in the remarks that many critics use--the contextual critique of the Koran is something of a red herring. ...

Contextualization has been done in Christianity since the times that Jesus spoke. Indeed, the significant differences between the synoptic and Johannine gospels is a first indicator that creation of context was important to the gospel writers. If you expand the genre to include the so-called Gnostic gospels, the notion of "creating" context becomes even more pronounced.

If Crossan et al and others are correct, the source for many of the Gospels--called Q by historians--was without context and the gospel writers came later to provide it. Indeed, if you look at the Gospel According to Thomas, you'll find simply a list of sayings. Many scholars think this was the original "text" of the Gospel. What we have passed down to us is part of the redactive effort of the early Christian communities.

As many of these scholars make clear, the issue of context is indeed important to the gospel writers. One of the more important historical-critical methods is redaction criticism, which identifies the various contextual interests of the communities who took the original Q material and set it into appropriate narratives that served their contemporary faith needs.

Using the Gospels to judge the historicity of the Surahs is therefore a somewhat thorny issue. At least within the context of contemporary historical-critical efforts with regard to the Gospels, the result shows that the Gospels are just as much the effect of "fabrication" as critics of the Koran say the Surahs are. While I look forward to seeing the results of applying the historical-critical tools to the Surahs, this by no means delegitimates their meaning than do the various searches for the historical Jesus.

That the Surahs provide no historical context, as some put it, places them somewhat closer to the set of sayings that many Christian scholars believe comprised Q and which characterizes GoT. The work of contextualization continues inside Christianity as well. Indeed, one could see the various efforts at discovering the so-called historical Jesus as just such an effort.

If redaction criticism is correct, contextualizing remembered sayings of Jesus is exactly what the early Christian communities did, as do the various churches from then to now. The efforts to smooth out the differences in narrative of the Gospels themselves shows how this effort was part of the early church as it moved to religious hegemony in the Roman empire. If the rhetorical critics (eg, Elizabeth Schussler-Fiorenza) of the Gospels are correct, such political and ideological interests have always been part of the contextualization of the gospels as well as inherent to their writing.

One should note, however, that according to Patricia Crone, there are more historical sources for Muhammad than for Jesus:

For all that, we probably know more about Mohammed than we do about Jesus (let alone Moses or the Buddha), and we certainly have the potential to know a great deal more.

Anyone who's read ibn Khaldun should know that historical writing is not simply limited to the western universities. As Fazlur Rahman's work shows, the historical understanding of Islam and the Moslem world is not as foreign to Islamic self-wareness as many critics of Islam uncritically assume.

It took biblical historians over 200 years to get to where they have gotten. Beginning with Reimarus, the work has evolved from quite crude reductionistic methods to very sensitive and refined historical methods. I believe the number of searches for the historical Jesus is now at three. No doubt, we will soon see a fourth search begin. As scholars continue to use these methods on the Koran, we will see something similar.

This will be an unending search. I would hope that these searches learn from the mistakes of historical-critical scholars in the west as they approach the Koran. By this, I see Rudolph Bultmann's approach as perhaps the most impressive achievement, although I find the work of feminist scholars also very important.

In the Wikipedia entry on historical critical approaches to the Koran, the effort at using these methods has continued apace--contrary to what many critics of Islam assert.

Related Links
Koranic Exegesis (tafsir)

• Islamic Awareness
  
• Review: Die syro-aramaeische Lesart des Koran; Ein Beitrag zur Entschlüsselung der Qur’ānsprache
  by Robert R. PHENIX Jr. and Cornelia B. HORN
  
• The Qur'an and Qur'anic Interpretation (tafsir)
  
• Damning History but Saving the Text: Fazlur Rahman between Tradition and Modernism by S Parvez Manzoor
  
• The Place of Tolerance in Islam by Khaled Abou El Fadl On reading the Qur'an—and misreading it.
  
• Disclosing the Ambiguous Text By: Sumanto al Qurtuby
  The prime theological challenge in the recent religious life is: How does someone religious define himself surrounded by another religions. Or in its contemporary theological terms: How to theologize in the religious context.
  
• The Message of Fazlur Rahman by M Yahya Birt
  
• Observing the Contemporary Model of Ijma’ By: Taufik Adnan Amal
  The ijma‘ mechanism also open to the possibility of public deliberation and debate, so that various developing point of views individually as well as collectively get the opportunity to be heard by people who eventually will achieve consensus. When the majority decision is achieved, all the member of society – Muslim and non Muslim- must attempt to implement it. The initiator, adherent or whoever agrees with the minority view must accept the majority’s decision and try to implement it as a consensus.
  
• The Koran was not Revealed in an Empty Space By: M. Hilaly Basya
  It is obvious that the Koran was not revealed in an empty space. And it is obvious that the Koran is culturally constructed and historically structured. Hence, if the Koran reading is detached of the cultural element constructing it, it will be alienated and irrelevant. Therefore, we may say that Koranic textual content is not valid in every time and place. The Koran is confined within space and time.
  
• Factors behind the Stagnancy of Fikh By: Fajar Kurnianto
  Fikh is understood as knowledge about sharia and both are not identical. There is a significant difference between knowledge about sharia and the law of sharia. Fikh eventually has a different domain to sharia. Sharia is a divine universal teaching for human benefit. Sharia in that meaning is non-discriminative upon certain groups or individual.
  
• Religious Figures and Political Choice By: Saiful Amien Sholihin
  Approaching the 2004 elections, many articles have criticized the validity of ulema’s (Muslim scholar) and kiai’s involvement in political practices within political parties. Some have argued that kiai (religious leaders) should concentrate only on religious and social fields.
  
• The What is the Koran by Toby Lester
  Discusses the controversial attempts to use the methods of historical criticism in the context of the Koran.
  
• The ‘Ulama’: status and function by Zouhair Ghazzal
  
• Surat al-Ma'un [Tafsir of al-Ma'un taken from a number of traditional sources]
  
• Changes in Islamic Hermeneutics and Social Evolution: A Comparative Study of Turkey and Algeria by Sadik Kirazli
  
• Early Differences and Sects in Islam Adapted largely from Al-Farq bayn al-Firaq (The Difference between the Sects) by Abu Tahir `Abd al-Qahir al-Baghdadi
  
• The Sinlessness of the Prophets in Light of the Qur'an by R. Azzam
  
• Transformed Politics By Ahmed E. Souaiaia
  
• The Book of Commentary (Kitab Al-Tafsir)
  
• Al-Qaida and al-Qur’an: The “Tafsir” of Usamah bin Ladin by © Rosalind Gwynne
  
• Avoiding Imitation of the Kuffar Based largely on Shaykh Ahmad al-Ghumari's "al-Istinfar li-ghazw al-tashabbuh bi l-kuffaar"
  
• A Translation of Extracts from the Kitab al-Jihad of 'Ali ibn Tahir Al-Sulami (d. 1106) by Niall Christie
  
• Resisting Modernity The Backlash Against Secularism By Karen Armstrong
  
• Addressing Fundamentalism by Legal and Spiritual Means By Dan Wessner
  
• Islam: “Authentic” or “Fanatical” by Joseph Kenny, O.P.

Feminine Voices

• ISLAMIC LAW, SECULARISM AND FEMINISM: A NEW RELATIONSHIP Reviwed by Ziba Mir-Hosseini
  
• Feminism and Islamic Fundamentalism: the Limits of Postmodern Analysis, by Haideh Moghissi Reviwed by Asma Barlas
  
• Iran Bulletin: Links to Articles on Women in Islam
  
• Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA) links to other sites
  
• Post-revolutionary Iran: Islamic Feminism and the crisis of civil society by Elham Gheytanchi
  
• ISLAMIC TRADITIONS AND THE FEMINIST MOVEMENT: CONFRONTATION OR COOPERATION? by Dr. Lois Lamya' al Faruqi
  
• Feminism and Islam: Legal and Literary Perspectives -- Introduction by Mai Yamani
  
• At the Crossroads of Islamic Feminism: Negotiating the gender politics of identity By Maliha Masood
  
• WEB RESOURCES ON WOMEN IN ISLAM COMPILED BY JANET FRENCH
  
• Women in Islam: Muslim Women links to other sites
  
• Islamic Feminism vs. Western Feminism: Analyzing a Conceptual Conflict by Jennifer S. Kingan
  
• Islam and feminism: Problems with Ahmed an email exchange
  
• Comment on Barbara Bergmann's and Katha Pollitt's attack on Leila Ahmed (post 1) an email exchange
  
• Nobel Choice Sends Message to American Feminists Commentary, Fadwa El Guindi, Pacific News Service, Oct 22, 2003
  
• Islam and Feminism: Bibliography
  
• Bibliography: Women and Islam
  
• Women in Islam
  
• Resources for and about Muslim Women
  
• Islam and Gender in the Malay World compiled by Julie Shackford-Bradley
  
• Annotating Islam by Douglas McCollam

Read more!

Segal on Immortality and Social Aspects

Steven Segal provides some background on the different understandings of immortaltiy that appear in the Jewish and Christian testaments, as well as the present understanding of the immortal soul which derives from Platonic philosophy. ...

In the academic circles that Segal inhabits, these are not new ideas and derive perhaps from the 1960s, especially an influential essay by the German biblical historian Oscar Cullmann.

As Segal notes, when people think of the soul in the present day they often have the Platonic concept in mind:

To return to the contemporary world for a moment: Fundamentalist and evangelical varieties of Jews, Christians, and Muslims (I’m restricting myself to those who have a developed biblical notion of resurrection) are knowledgeable about their scriptural tradition and affirm resurrection. They also know that martyrdom is a cost which may be asked of them personally. The majority of Americans however are the equivalent of mainline and normative. Whether Jew Christian Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu or nothing at all, most Americans affirm a form of immortality of the soul, though some call that immortality of the soul resurrection because they know that is the core of Christianity. In fact, more Americans believe in an afterlife than actually believe in God. And when they do believe, they believe in a form of immortality that is consonant with immortality of the soul. So the same social and ideological connection that was established in the Hellenistic world is influencing our religious lives today, though there is no theoretical reason why we could not have changed metaphors completely. The differences between immortality of the soul and resurrection are still informing our religious life today.

Read more!

Reality of Attack on Iran Sinking in for Bush?

This analysis of thinking inside the White House about war with Iran says that Bush seems to be getting the notion that war over Iran's nuclear aspirations is unrealistic.

According to Richard Sele (posted at Sic Semper Tyrannis):

But they did say that Bush is also becoming "increasingly pessimistic" about any military action against Iran. According to one, "Bush really wanted to mount an attack on Iran earlier this year -- he was really hot to trot," but military briefings brought home to him that attacking Iran did not mean eliminating its suspected nuclear sites but also having to destroy "Iran's entire retaliatory capability," in the words of one. This capability is formidable; U.S. intelligence sources say Iran has underground missile batteries southwest of Abu Musa with the HY-2 advanced version of the Silkworm anti-ship missile. There are also Scud-Cs which could hit any UAE ports, including those to the south and west of Abu Dhabi and they could also strike Dubai where U.S. naval sources currently dock at the port of Jebel Ali. [my emphasis]

Read more!

Israel Using Experimental Explosvie in Gaza?

This story suggests that Israeli military operations have used a previously unknown explosive in Gaza.

According to The Guardian:

Photographs of some of the dead from Shifa hospital showed bodies that had been melted and blackened beyond recognition. In several cases doctors amputated badly burnt limbs.

At least 250 Palestinians have died in Gaza since the latest military operations began and hundreds more have been injured.

Neither of the doctors could give exact figures for the numbers of patients suffering the new injuries, although both said that most of those brought in during July showed signs of these injuries.

Dr Saqa'a said the injuries occurred over six weeks beginning in late June, while Dr Jouda said he believed patients admitted even in recent days still showed signs of unusual injuries.

The health ministry in Gaza reported that these injuries came from an "unprecedented type of projectile," and also noted severe burning and badly damaged internal organs. It called for an investigation into the cause of the wounds.

Read more!

Who You Gonna Believe? 500,000 Dead in Iraq

A new Lancet Report is out. Its stark figures not only give the lie to the Bush admin's own "30,00 or so" Iraqi deaths but provides surely one of the darkest and increasingly obscene lies and deception ever perpetrated by an American administration. ...

According to the NYTimes (h/t Daily Kos):

A team of American and Iraqi public health researchers has estimated that 600,000 civilians have died in violence across Iraq since the 2003 American invasion, the highest estimate ever for the toll of the war here.

The figure breaks down to about 15,000 violent deaths a month, a number that is quadruple the one for July given by Iraqi government hospitals and the morgue in Baghdad and published last month in a United Nations report in Iraq. That month was the highest for Iraqi civilian deaths since the American invasion.

But it is an estimate and not a precise count, and researchers acknowledged a margin of error that ranged from 426,369 to 793,663 deaths.

It is the second study by researchers from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. It uses samples of casualties from Iraqi households to extrapolate an overall figure of 601,027 Iraqis dead from violence between March 2003 and July 2006.

Juan Cole has a posting on why there are no "mass graves"? Muslims bury their dead wuickly and cheaply out of religious piety. There will be no mass graves to be found; instead there are hundreds of thousands of freshly and not so freshly dug graves--many times with entire families interred.

Comments attacking this study remind me of the soldier with whom I argued concerning the reasons for this "war." I maintained then and do now that the war is about oil, plain and simple. This soldier said that couldn't be the cause. It just can't be--because if it were, the immorality of the war would overwhlem him with despair.

These comments came alive again in another context where I suggested that oil is indeed the motivating factor behind this effort. The notion that innocent civilians and US soldiers have been maimed, injured, and killed for oil shrieks to the heavens with spiritual and ethical desolation.

The same is true, I believe, with the figures of how many people potentially died in this war for "democracy" (aka oil). It just can't be true, because if it is the brutal facticity of the undertaking will overwhelm people with its spiritual depravity.

I might mention that the only way to debunk this report is for the US government to perform its own study. My question is why they haven't kept track of these things from the beginning. Beyond what I take to be an ethically bankrupt notion that civilains are just collateral damage, I believe the other reason for why they don't is because they, first, don't want the US public to ever get a gauge by which to measure the toll of this war and, second, don't wish to have their soldiers experience the horror of the desolation that they have brought upon a once living and viable society.

With over 600,000 people killed, aren't we entering the territory of mass murder on the scale of the 20th century's worst crimes against humanity? Of course, for the President, for "those people," "you know, that there’s a level of violence that they tolerate." Why tolerate? Because they're those people, you know the ones who are animals anyway? Read more!

One More Reason to Attack Iran... !?

The following article by Louis J. Cantori, reprinted by Pat Lang at his blog, has to be the best three-page analysis of the present foreign policy situation of the US that's received dissemination in the blogosphere.

Finally, at least, someone puts the pretensions of the US in Imperial terms, thereby drawing the correct framework within which the US foreign policy debacle in the Mideast unfolds. If anything, should Bush et al. invade Iran, it will be to stem the flow of air from the imperial dirigible that the Bush-neocon cabal have floated over the present and near future.

According to Louis J. Cantori:

This brings us to the present day and the significance of the recent war in Lebanon. There Israel was diplomatically shielded at the UN by the US in order to give Israel as the sixth most powerful army in the world thirty days to accomplish its war aims . Israel, however, failed in near militarily humiliating terms to subjugate Hezbollah, an at most 6000 man guerilla force. Israel’s failure as an American proxy was also America’s failure. In Iraq, the coming to power of a Shiite coalition by democratic means, subtlety confirmed Iran’s ability to dominate Iraq. It has occurred with little notice except for close observers noting the presence of Iranian intelligence “station chiefs” around the country. Iran has thus peacefully imposed itself politically upon Iraq and the proxy victory of Hezbollah in Lebanon means that Iran is the big winner in the Middle East, including the achievement as a Shiite nation in garnering both Shiite and Sunni Islamic support.

As a result, the international relations of the Middle East are now being transformed from the recent one power, United States dominant system backwards to the preexisting one of a regional bipolar system of pre-1990. The regional system is now one where Iran and Syria are joined by Hezbollah and Hamas and possibly Lebanon, Yemen and Sudan plus the great powers of Russia and China arrayed against Israel and the US, plus in a more tenuous fashion, the GCC countries ,Jordan, Egypt, Tunisia, Morocco and Turkey. The US is thus now not only relatively diplomatically isolated in the Middle East, but it is now perhaps momentarily in policy terms immobilized between the inability to exercise an overstretched military power that is strained to its outmost limits and the Bush administration’s functional incapacity for diplomacy. America can neither fight nor does it have the predisposition to negotiate.

This is a profoundly important essay that needs to make the rounds of Congress quickly, not to mention the media--if they could be trusted to read it over their lattes and sushi.

The article gives the depth to a comment made by military historian Martin Creveld that appeared briefly in the media about 8 months ago. Many of your readers will remember Creveld writing that the invasion of Iraq was "the most foolish war since Emperor Augustus in 9 B.C sent his legions into Germany and lost them."

The problem now is that the debacle will perhaps make the Bush admin. crazy and out for blood, hoping via an invasion of Iran to destabilize that country in such a way that any advantage that it's gained from the US failure in Iraq will be ameliorated.

Such an invasion would be devastating to not only the Mideast but perhaps the world economy, as former New York Times war correspondent Chris Hedges has recently written. According to Hedges, a war with Iran:

[W]ill ignite the Middle East. The loss of Iranian oil, coupled with Silkworm missile attacks by Iran on oil tankers in the Persian Gulf, could send oil soaring to well over $110 a barrel. The effect on the domestic and world economy will be devastating, very possibly triggering a huge, global depression. The 2 million Shiites in Saudi Arabia, the Shiite majority in Iraq and the Shiite communities in Bahrain, Pakistan and Turkey will turn in rage on us and our dwindling allies. We will see a combination of increased terrorist attacks, including on American soil, and the widespread sabotage of oil production in the Gulf. Iraq, as bad as it looks now, will become a death pit for American troops as Shiites and Sunnis, for the first time, unite against their foreign occupiers.

Hedges, of course, is echoing similar comments by others (like Ray McGovern) inside and outside the intelligence community.

Given these circumstances, the obly solution left to the Bush admin may be the one cited by Scott Burchill, senior lecturer in international relations at Deakin University in Australia, in 2005:

And yet the likely policy choices of a sovereign, minimally democratic Iraqi government would not be favourable to Washington. Closer political ties with Tehran, continuing hostility to Israel, oil contracts for US competitors such as France, Russia and China, and the political emancipation of Shiites across the region are not what the Bush Administration wants.

The only solution for Bush in Iraq is the traditional imperial one, as applied in the region earlier by the British, the French in North Africa, the Russians in Eastern Europe, the US in Central America, and so on: leave a client regime and a brutal army in place, with big muscle only a phone call away when the natives get too restless. This will be called "the democratisation of Iraq" and victory will be declared again, but few locals will be fooled.

Washington isn't building the world's largest embassy in Baghdad and a series of permanent military bases across the country just to abandon its most valuable strategic prize.

Many are hoping that the upcoming election will somehow forestall any such attack on Iran. That's doubtful, given the Bush admin's interpretation of the Authroization to Use Military Force passed to invade Afghanistan. In addition, Bush's imperial presidential pretensions discount the idea that he will backtrack now, given his propensity for Texan bluster and blue-blooded sense of entitltement--not to mention apocalyptic notion of destiny.

Should the Democrats win majorities in either house of Congress, the only option left would be for Congress to refuse to appropriate monies for the war effort. That indeed would bring on a constitutional crisis, one that might indeed spell the death of the republic as Bush goes further than any American president ever has in unilaterally appropriating funds for his suicidal war.

Related Links

• Iraq Death Toll Estimate Jumps

[xposted at Pat Lang's blog] Read more!

War with Iran as October Surprise?

The Atimes.com writer Spengler went on record several months ago with a prediction that the Bush admin. had an October surprise in store for the November mid-term elections. The "surprise" would be a war with Iran, something I have written about for many months now. In terms of the elections, I do not htink that the effect will be what the Bush admin. believes it will be: a rallying around the flag and overwhelming support for the Republican ticket. Instead, I think that such a war could solidify the growing diassatisfaction with this admin's foreign policy and war-making stance. ...

Several authors of renown have cast supsicion on any such war by the Bush admin. They note the fact that the US Army is stretched thin in Iraq. This situation would forestall any invasion of Iran by land forces. Yet, I think that these writers focus too much on land invasion. The Navy and Air Force have significant assets and resources available to undertake some form of attack on Iran. Such an attack would simply be undertaken to destroy supposed Iranian nuclear facilities and disruption of Iranian social and political institutions. I think that the Bush admin. believes here that an attack of this kind would undermine the Iranian government to such an extent that indigenous opposition groups would try to foment a coup.

Two reports highlight the reasons for heightened speculation about an imminent US attack on Iran. Mother Jones, for example, writes the following:

A strike force led by the aircraft carrier Eisenhower is currently making its way to the entrance of the Persian Gulf, with a predicted arrival date of October 21. The Navy officially claims that the Eisenhower’s deployment is part of a normal rotation of ships in and out of the Gulf. But The Nation reports that the carrier’s deployment date was pushed up significantly. Both Time and MSNBC say the move was accompanied by a request from the Chief of Naval Operations to revamp a plan to blockade Iran from the Persian Gulf.

The Nation got its story from an anti-war retired Air Force Colonel, Sam Gardiner, who claims that officers of the deploying ships contacted him and "complained that they were being sent to attack Iran without any order from the Congress." But the president might see it differently. When Bush addressed the U.N. in mid-September, he claimed that Iran's leaders were "fund[ing] terrorism and fuel[ing] extremism." And President Bush has made a point of broadly interpreting the post-9/11 congressional vote authorizing him to combat terrorism (including as authority to conduct warrantless surveillance on American citizens). He could potentially initiate conflict with Iran with no further congressional approval.

In another posting, Steven Soldz at Psyche, Science, and Society writes:

Hedges may be wrong. In fact, we must hope he is. But I will no longer place bets on it. In fact, one factor he doesn’t mention that may increase the impulse to launch war is the free-fall the Republicans are experiencing in the polls, and in their hopes of maintaining control of Congress. Those who so confidently expected to dominate and remake the entire world in their image may, upon seeing their hold on power shatter, decide to launch the dice and see what comes up. The lure of the excitement may be too great for them to resist. Those who have had such apparent success at transforming their fantasies into reality may not gracefully accept their failure. After all, more than one despot in history has gone down in a blaze of glory. If our leaders decide to follow such a path, it may depend upon the rest of us to stop them so that we do not follow them along the path to destruction.

Soldz quotes Time's Chris Hedges' apprehensions extensively. Most notably, Soldz pinpoints Hedges' depiction of the chaos such an attack will ignite in the Mideast and the world economy:

An attack on Iran will ignite the Middle East. The loss of Iranian oil, coupled with Silkworm missile attacks by Iran on oil tankers in the Persian Gulf, could send oil soaring to well over $110 a barrel. The effect on the domestic and world economy will be devastating, very possibly triggering a huge, global depression. The 2 million Shiites in Saudi Arabia, the Shiite majority in Iraq and the Shiite communities in Bahrain, Pakistan and Turkey will turn in rage on us and our dwindling allies. We will see a combination of increased terrorist attacks, including on American soil, and the widespread sabotage of oil production in the Gulf. Iraq, as bad as it looks now, will become a death pit for American troops as Shiites and Sunnis, for the first time, unite against their foreign occupiers.

Read more!

Chaucer Does "Serpents on Planes"

Well, you always knew this was a keene desyr of the bard: serpentes ona shippe. ...

Geoffrey Chaucer Hath a Blog channels the poet (h/t Austro-Athenian Empire):

‘What haue ye seyde?’ askede the PRIORESSE then. ‘I did curse the snakes,’ seyde Sir Neville, ‘and therwith the shippe, in the name of Seynt George who ys a patron of valour and chivalrie.’ ‘Ywis,’ seyde the PRIORESSE, ‘yower cursinge hath borne good fruyt, for methinkede whan I herde ye speke thus that the arme of man, eek even of a mighti man swich as yowerself, is but a litel thinge compared to the grete power of God the which is dispensed thorow the mediacioun of the seyntez. And thes serpentes the which do make werre ayeinst us aren figuraciouns of the sinne of ower firste parentes who weren by a serpent deceyved, and thus thei signifien that we sholde seke nat strengthe in knighthede but in prayere and devocioun. For syn we face thes foule serpentes, mesemeth we must seeke succour and aide from the gret seynt who is the enemy ysworn of al maner of serpentes.’

Read more!

What Would a Post-Hegemony Religious Experience Look Like

In an excellent essay on Christian writers and other religions (h/t Eteraz), G. Willow Wilson nips the issue in the bud. How should people of different faiths relate to each other? ...

In an essay critical of authors like Tolkien and Waugh,Wilson writes the following about CS Lewis:

Lewis makes this same link—that people of deep, non-propagandist faith have more in common with each other than they do with secularized or patriotically indoctrinated members of their own religions—in a letter he wrote in 1952 to an American friend who had just converted from Anglicanism (Lewis’s creed) to Catholicism. He congratulates her “though you have taken a way which is not for me…because your faith and joy are so obviously increased.”[viii] He goes on to make a rather astonishing statement: “I believe that, in the present divided state of Christendom, those who are at the heart of each division are all closer to one another than to those who are at the fringes. I would even carry this beyond the borders of Christianity: how much more one has in common with a real Jew or Muslim than a wretched, occidentalised [member] of the same categories.”[ix] Here, Lewis is conscious that the Raj has dealt a serious blow to the dignity of its colonized subjects by trivializing their faiths, and imparting in their place an ‘occidentalism’ that makes the colonized ‘wretched’. He does not raise Muslims or Jews to the venerate status of Christians—he is still, at the end of the day, an early-twentieth-century Englishman—but he takes the first and most vital step. What truly connects two individuals is not origin or creed, but the honest desire for truth.

Read more!

Arendt on Totalitarianism

In a time when people throw big terms, and perhaps meaningless terms, like fascism and authoritarianism around, it's often important to be reminded of the work by important researchers about what these words and concepts mean. One of the more prescient thinkers of the 40s, 50s and 60s, was Hannah Arendt. Her work in political philosophy can still be read today and not sound hollow. ...

A piece in Forward magazine provides some perspective on Arendt's writing on authoritarianism and how it fills in some of the misconceptions informing the current debate about Islamic extremists and their so-called authoritarian proclivities.Benjamin Balint writes:

Still, Arendt predicted that totalitarian tendencies will survive the death of the era of totalitarian states. Arendt’s lens thus helps us see more clearly how the new jihadism bears the mark of those tendencies by bringing some of the telltale signs into sharper focus: the totalistic Islamic worldview that reaches into every facet of life, demanding from the individual total loyalty and achieving over him total domination; the retreat from the anxieties of modernity into an idealized, heroic past; the masses who feel themselves the outcasts of globalization; the contempt for the “decadence” of the West; the obsessive antisemitism that was also intrinsic to both Nazism and communism (hence the widespread dissemination in the Arab world of “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion”); the fetishized violence spread by the shahids; the pan-Arabist echoes of the pan-German and pan-Slav movements that Arendt saw as preludes to full-blown totalitarianism; the antidemocratic denial of human plurality; the desire for limitless expansion and global domination; and the notion of a united, supranational umma where once there was a racial volk or worldwide proletariat. Each of these is what Arendt called a “catalytic agent” for totalitarianism. Yet the most important element of the totalitarian impulse past and present is the will to annihilate human freedom, to surrender it to the march of historically irresistible forces. This takes us to perhaps the deepest lesson to be gleaned from the investigations that Arendt conducted into “the grammar of political action.” She insisted that the possibility of political freedom — not the same thing as an individual’s freedom from politics — is universal. Quoting Sophocles’s suggestion that freedom can “endow life with splendor,” Arendt called freedom the raison d’être of politics. The highest political action, she thought, is free speech in public about public affairs.

While the emphasis here is on jihadism, the author of this article ends with some important remarks about Arednt's other work, On Revoltion, where she investigates the meanings of the American and French revolutions.

Balint writes:

Hence Arendt’s lofty regard for the wisdom of the American Revolution — and her fear that contemporary Americans are in danger of forgetting it. For such people as Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, she wrote, “life in Congress, the joys of discourse, of legislation, of transacting business, of persuading and being persuaded, were… a foretaste of eternal bliss.” A sophisticated indulgence of those joys and freedoms — together with an awareness of the urgent necessity to protect them where they are threatened — may be just the thing to counter the bleak vision of eternal bliss that animates today’s would-be totalitarians.

While this sounds as though Arendt was a sentimental idealizer of the American Revolution in much of her analysis of revolution, she notes the American revolution's disregard for the larger perspective of human inequality and injustice. Read more!

Religious Right Gears Up to Elect Repubs, Skirts Voting Laws

With the stink of a sex scandal scandal emanating from the Republican head, the Religious Right is touting the Republicans as the party of social virtue. While the following article may reflect views of the Religious Right's leadership before the Foley scandal, I think they will continue to stick behind the Republicans. No doubt, they will buy into one of the moral rationalization described in my previous posting. ...

According to the LATimes (h/t Evangelical Right):

With a pivotal election five weeks away, leaders on the religious right have launched an all-out drive to get Christians from pew to voting booth. Their target: the nearly 30 million Americans who attend church at least once a week but did not vote in 2004.

Their efforts at times push legal limits on church involvement in partisan campaigns. That is by design. With control of Congress at stake Nov. 7, those guiding the movement say they owe it to God and to their own moral principles to do everything they can to keep social conservatives in power.

Preachers "ought to put their toe right on the line," said Mathew D. Staver, founder of Liberty Counsel, a nonprofit law firm that supports conservative Christian causes.

The Rev. Rick Scarborough, a leading evangelical in Texas, has recruited 5,000 "patriot pastors" nationwide to promote an agenda that aligns neatly with Republican platforms. "We urge them to avoid legal entanglement, but there are times in a pastor's life when he needs to take a biblical stand," Scarborough said. "Our higher calling is to Christ." [my emphasis]

Related Articles

GOP's Hold on Evangelicals Weakening

• New generation of evangelicals embraces a more moderate focus

Read more!

Iran Ready To Stone Seven Women

This crime against the basic humanity of who each of us is needs to be addressed on all fronts. As Eteraz reports, the Iranian government is set to stone seven women for crimes against chastity. Read Eteraz on some things you can do to help register outrage at the Iranian government's inhumanity. ...

In relationship to the Quran and its statements on this sruel punishment, Eteraz writes:

Over time I will show all the numerous jurists who historically did not consider the hadith a primary source of law that could therefore veto the Quran. I will also show that if you look just at contemporary Islamic Jurisprudence the ‘minority’ is at least about 40% (and rapidly growing and soon to become the majority). Since some of you will one day become Muslim Jurists (note that non-Muslims can be Islamic Jurists too) these lessons will be instructive. I will also set forth a number of different methodological tools that jurists today are using in the area of hadith (some will be completely challenge Islamic legal history; some, however, emerge right from it).

In the long term, there is no reason to say that when it comes to stoning Islamic Law cannot be changed. It can be. The tools are there. Only the knowledge is lacking. We will remedy that over time.

Read more!

The Quran is a Supermarket

As the wise and wonderfully rational Eteraz reports, you can get yourself killed--or at least divorced by fiat--for criticing those who cherry-pick verses from the Quran for their own lees-than-pure ends. Much like a bible-thumping preacher who smells only fire-and-brimstone emanating from the Bible, forgetting the Roses of Sharon ,
islamic fundamentalists are fond of finding their own neuroses and phobias in scripture. ...

Eteraz writes:

Hasan Hanafi, a Philosopher Professor in Cairo, is in trouble for comparing the Quran to a supermarket where you can find whatever you are looking for (i.e. selective reading). He is being labeled and an apostate (and a Marxist, which is interesting because the epithet “Zionist” and “CIA agent” were still available).

A few years ago, his colleague Nasr Abu Zeid wrote a book and was also accused of apostasy, and since non-Muslim men cannot be married to Muslim women, people attempted to get Abu Zeid’s marriage to his wife nullified. Abu Zeid fled to Europe. I wonder where Hasan Hanafi is headed. If you read the article, you’ll note that some Ikhwani (Salafi) scholars have defended Hanafi. People often equate Salafis with Wahhabism, which is not accurate, because Salafism, in its original form, was actually an attempt to inject rationalism back into Islamic Law (instead it ended up injecting ideology).

Read more!

Call for Kierkegaard Carnival Submissions

I am hosting the Kierkegaard Carnival, which I set up at Blog Carnival. If you have an online posting about any aspect of Kierkegaard's philosophy, religious writing, politics or anything else, please consider submitting it to the Kierkegaard Carnival. ...

To submit your posting for consideration, see the Kierkegaard Carnival page at Blog Carnival. Read more!

Moral Hypocrisy in The Foley Case

The Republican Congressman from Fla. was on a committee that oversaw legislation dealing with the Internet and child predators. He solicited sex from congressional interns. The IMs that Foley sent the young man contain unsavory suggestions. In the 1990s Foley attacked Clinton for his "sex addiction."

Republican leaders hid the facts for a year.

I wonder how many other skeletons will fall out of the oh-so-pure Republican party closets? ...

According to SFGATE.com:

ABC News reported Friday that Foley also engaged in a series of sexually explicit instant messages with current and former pages, all male. In one message, ABC said, Foley wrote to one page, "Do I make you a little horny?"

In another message, Foley wrote, "You in your boxers, too? ... Well, strip down and get relaxed."

Foley, as chairman of the Missing and Exploited Children's Caucus, had introduced legislation in July to protect children from exploitation by adults over the Internet. He also sponsored other legislation designed to protect minors from abuse and neglect.

"We track library books better than we do sexual predators," Foley has said.

The political implications of the Foley scandal have some more import than those reported in the press as of yet. These political consequences will go far beyond consensuality and age. I believe that in many a republican and religious right heart there's the suspicion that liberals and democrats actually secretly condone pedophilia. Explicated in rational terms, this innate "sense" of these people is voiced as a war against cultural values that they believe the liberal or democratic policies promote, i.e., sexual promiscuity and aberrant sexuality such as pedophilia.

The "family values" aspects of the republican and religious right political agenda are an attempt to attack this supposed liberal ideology. What this scandal is 1) espousing family values and fighting a culture war does not make you any more righteous than anyone else; 2) the hypocrisy of the rightists when it comes to policing their own when they commit these acts; and 3) the possibility that the republicans are simply mouthing family value platitudes to gain power.

I think this story is going to turn off many moderate Republicans to their party candidates. I wouldn't be surprised if we see a massive reluctance on Republican voters' part to vote, simply out of disgust at the shortcomings of the current Republican platform. Yes, the hardcore Bushistas will continue to vote for the authoritarian policies of this administration, but they may be the only ones. Even the religious right voters may find it hard to stomach the growing perception that they've been used by the neocons and Republican leadership.

There are further implications of this scandal that I don't have time to go into now. These include the notion that any attempt at cultural reform based on religious teachings is impossibility. In the first place, as Socrates used to say, you can't teach virtue, whether it's by culture or otherwise. Second, the prevalence of original sin makes any socio-cultural programme bent on inspiring or inculcating faith is impossible.

Update 1 October 4 -- Several days out, Media Matters for America documents the various dodges taken by the Bushistas and conservatives to deflect focus on the underlying scandal in this affair.

Update 2 -- Media Matters documents attempts by Republican apologists to link the Foley scandal to the supposed issue of homosexuality and pedophilia:

On October 2, Perkins issued a statement on what he claimed was "the real issue" in the Foley scandal -- the purported "link between homosexuality and child sexual abuse"; the statement was uncritically reported by the San Francisco Chronicle in an October 3 report on the scandal. Similarly, on the October 3 edition of MSNBC's Hardball, host Chris Matthews failed to challenge the claim by Perkins that "there's clear research that shows that homosexual men are more likely to abuse children than straight men." Perkins's claim appears to be based on an article on the Family Research Council's website by Timothy J. Dailey, a senior research fellow at the FRC's Center for Marriage and Family Studies, which asserts that there is a "disturbing connection" between homosexuality and pedophilia because "homosexual pedophiles commit about one-third of the total number of child sex offenses" whereas homosexuals make up only "1 to 3 percent of the population."

Read more!

Shake-and-Bake Christianity

I haven't been to a megachurch, so I have to take the following description at its word. Once a longtime ago, I did visit some of the prototypes for the megachurch back on the late 80s when the evangelicals were first making their move out of a long isolation. (Back then, these churches were sometimes called warehouse churches; this was before the Jimmy Swaggart/Jim Baker/Tammy Faye scandals.) I saw then what this guy's describing now is happening within Christianity. ...

Whats strikes me most about the following piece is the attempt to found a community within the secular world that is not of the secular world. I imagine that many of these folks believe that they are existing in smething like a Christianized environment--a bubble world--that will perhaps serve as the model for the rest of how America might evolve into.

Second, there's that sense of bubbleness--it's reminiscent of the artifical and ersatz reality created by the Bush administration re: the War in Iraq. That is, as Zizek notes, we are at war but it feels like we are not at war. We are isolated from the terrible sufferings of those in Iraq and those who soldiers who are fighting there, who die (no news coverage), or who end up in a corner of a VA hospital ward. The sense of irreality is what is so striking about the megachurch phenomenon--at least if this description is to be believed. It's almost like a Disneyland of the New Jerusalem, but without the rides (or are those only a few years away?).

Born at the Crest of the Empire writes:

First, they represent an effort to build cultural gated communities within the larger city of Houston. Second Baptist, the local mega with the probably most enveloping "community" has within itself itself a complete social structure carrying its members from cradle to grave. They have daycare, a school, mixers, singles functions/matchmaking, exercise facilities, job assistance, social functions, counselling, right up to senior care.

Effectively, a church member can live their life totally within that "Christian" context. It does have a lure primarily among families with children in that it allows those kids a "safe place." But, interestingly to me, that "safe place" isn't only objects in the real world; the megachurch culture also works to construct a safe virtual world, movies, TV, music etc. An entire industry has grown up to serve Christian rock, literature, and Veggie Tales to this "safe community."

The megachurch fully engaged has the effect of segregating church members in a self reinforcing belief system that extends well beyond Christian tenets. So, when you hear wacky polling or absurdist comments around the "culture war" understand that there are people who live within this self reinforcing reality.

Second: The other major shift that has taken place within the structure of the Megachurch is the actual deemphasis of traditional Christianity. The "traditional" Christian virtures, mercy, charity, humility, and love, have been replaced with a narcissistic philosophy of Christian self improvement.

The whole thing is underpinned by a Christian backbone, but if you look at the sermons and products of Joel Osteen as example (the main guy at Lakewood,) they actually have very little to do with Christianity.

This, I think, is one of the reasons for the growing popularity of the megachurch. Listening to bible verse is boring, but "Living at my Full Potential," that has zazz.

I would argue that this populist new Christianity represents a fundamental shift in values from "what would Jesus do?" to "What can Jesus do for me?"

That's not an absolute shift by any means, but I do think it's big and historic change in the interpretation of Christianity and the relationship of God to the individual. I'm not yet sure what the long term implications of this are.

Related Articles

• GOP's Hold on Evangelicals Weakening
  
• Evangelicals Fear the Loss of Their Teenagers
  
• New generation of evangelicals embraces a more moderate focus

Read more!

More on Privatizing Terror as a Service Sector

Harper's continues its investigation into the privatization of the counter-terrorism effort.

Harper's writes:

One former senior CIA official told me that the implications of the “enhanced revolving door” are being felt in a broad variety of ways. “There are many people inside who aspire to work for a private contractor because—overnight—they can at least double their earnings,” he said. “It undermines morale and doesn't build a competent system. But the bigger story is that this is symptomatic of a new ‘counterterrorism-industrial complex’ that's popping up and that is starting to look a lot like Eisenhower's military-industrial complex. It's a multibillion dollar industry and it's beginning to drive policy.”

Read more!

Could This be the Problem in Iraq?

In my continuing effort to explore threats to the republic, I have mentioned the dangers posed by private security firms that provide military services to the US government. The following information shows not only the level of activity underway by these firms inside Iraq and its consequences but also has wider ramifications, which I have written about in other postings.

Specifically, the question is what danger do these military entities purely under the control of the executive branch and with minimal congressional oversight have with regard to executing the will of the people? ...

Global Guerillas reports:

PSCAI (Private Security Company Association of Iraq) estimates that there are 35,000 private military contractors (those who are using lethal force) in Iraq. Note that the vast bulk of these contractors are operating outside the realm of any counter-insurgency strategy (and by their actions, defined by their missions, typically undermine it).

Read more!

Assessing the Successes of the Neocon Putsch

We'll all remember Orwell's 1984 descriptions of Winston Smith's manipulating the news, ostensibly history. The current 911 movie that ABC is showing only extends the effort by the neocons to neutralize the massive organs of cultural reproduction that are the MSM and Hollywood. Perhaps more ominously, it is the shadow of things to come as the Pentagon's efforts to "influence" the news stream becomes more integrated with the Internet. ...

It's not news that those who control the telling of history hold the reins of power. That crudely conceived cliché has been a commonplace among deconstructionists for some time. As much as the neocons and other Rightist culture warriors have castigated the Left's attachment to this deconstructionist insight, they put its truth into practice every day. I imagine the neocons and rightists believe that because they practice a historiography that espouses absolute values--versus the relativist ones of the left--their version of history is the most correct one.

It’s been said by some that the modus operandi of the neocon propaganda machine is to take the strengths of the Left and turn them against them. I think the brilliance of this propaganda machine is to take Leftist clichés and turn them on their head by filling them with neocon content. This no doubt reflects the Trotskyist background of many of these same neocons. Concepts such as fascism and international democracy take on a seemingly new and vibrant life when they find a new enemy and a new threat. Such concepts account, no doubt, for how formerly ultra-leftists like Christopher Hitchens joined the neocon cause after 911.

Americans have never liked intellectuals. The "smart-allecky" eggheads make a nuisance of asking too many questions when there's always a healthy need to see things closer to the bone. But the intelligentsia has always played a key role in asking the hard questions, keeping the corporate memory free of errors, and formulating the big issues which then get disseminated to the masses by lesser minds.

The neocons have been very effective, I think, at decapitating the US intelligentsia. This effort began directly after 911 when teachers and professors were scared into silence by threats of losing tenure if they taught a different line or interpretation from the one espoused by the neocon white house. In effect, what the neocons have accomplished is a bloodless version of what the Soviets did in 1940at Katyn to the Polish intelligentsia after it invaded Poland.

Of course, the ivory tower types often only have themselves to blame for this, since their abstruse interests rarely intersect with the reality of the masses. Still, that they would rather engage in their vicious internecine department wars than deal with the freedoms that underpin the republic will only make them less and less relevant.

The neocons have filled the ensuing vacuum left by the decapitation of the intelligentsia with their think tank luminaries like Kristol, Brooks, Perle, et al. Backed by infusions of millions of dollars from conservative backers, they’ve taken over the cultural apparatus that has solidified the basics of the republic’s intellectual heritage for 200 years. Now we face the prospect not of free and open dialog and discussion about the republic’s fate, but an ideologically based regime with effective means of disseminating that ideology.

In a speech before the Nazi Party at Nuremberg, Hitler defined what it meant to be a Nazi. What distinguished the Nazi party from every other political party, he said, was that it was a party of ideology. It would be ruled by ideology and assessed by how well and comprehensively that ideology was put into practice. Obviously, anything or anyone that questioned, opposed, or undermined this ideology was to be exterminated.

While the atmosphere of ideological intimidation that came after 911 has seemingly dissipated, there are warning signs indicating that there’s more ideologically based efforts afoot by the neocon Bush white house. Infusing the reified term fascist with the blood and skin of Islamic jihadists is one such effort. The new 911 film is another. Just as an iceberg is unseen, it seems well to determine how much the ideologically based programme of the neocons has adapted to twist the facts of history to their advantage.

In a little noticed article on the web, sociologist Richard Sennett noted that there are two types of fascism—hard and soft. The hard type is the jack boot in the face and the iron fist. The soft type is an environment of intimidation and fear that squashes all dissent, internal or external. Orwell called it thoughtcrime. We haven’t reached that nadir in ideological austerity. As the disinformation of the Pentagon-based propaganda machine ratchets up its efforts, we will face further confusion and further displays historigraphical fascism. Read more!

Counterpoint: Oil Industry Bets On No War in Iran

The oil industry seems to be betting on the idea that Iran will eventually negotiate its position on nuclear power/weapons, and thereby forestall any porjected US invasion/attack. ...

It's a good point. If you accept the idea that the military invasion of Iraq by the US was in part motivated by a desire to secure Iraqi oilfields, then what the oil industry says might lead you to believe that it does not see an invasion of Iran in the same light as it saw the Iraq invasion.

According to Reuters (via Nergol @ Spengler's Forum:

Oil fell more than a dollar to less than $68 a barrel on Monday, pulled lower by expectations that any sanctions against oil producer Iran were some way off and would not necessarily disrupt export flows.
....
U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan on Monday stressed the need to avoid a confrontation with Iran.

He was speaking after a visit to the OPEC oil producer, during which he said Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad had reaffirmed Iran's willingness to negotiate a solution to the nuclear dispute, although he said it would not suspend uranium enrichment.

Iran failed to meet an August 31 deadline to halt its enrichment program or run the risk of U.N. sanctions.

"All along the nuclear issue has been a lengthy play of many acts. Probably, we're coming up to another act, which is sanctions, but there are likely going to be negotiations of what these sanctions are," said Mike Wittner of Calyon bank.

Read more!

Congress Okays Cluster Bombs in Iraqi Civilian Areas

Why not? We were going to send Israel more--or did they ship anyway--cluster bombs to use against the Lebanese. ...

ThinkProgress reports:

In a 30-70 vote, the Senate defeated an amendment by Sens. Diane Feinstein (D-CA) and Patrick Leahy (D-VT) to ban defense spending “on the purchase or use of cluster munitions near civilian areas.” Cluster bombs are “the type of weapon responsible for the majority of civilian deaths in the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq.”

Read more!

Scenario 1: Provoking Iran for US Invasion

Recent reports in the media are

* Putting Iran behind Hizbullah's attack on Israel,--who Bush says the US promised to defend if attacked--

* Accusing Iran of material and logistic support for Shiite insurgency and militias in Iraq

* Showing provocations along the border of Kurdistan with Iran by Kurdish rebels (and Israeli special ops teams?), which both Turkey and Iran have responded to by bombarding the guerilla camps (according to some reports)

At this point, I am surprised that the Pentagon has not made more these than they have so far. Perhaps they are simply waiting to tighten up supply lines in Iraq, moving US forces into positions of support for an attack/invasion of Iran, or waiting for Israel to attack as it is reported to be preparing to do.

The latter points are highly speculative.

--------------------

Uzi Mahnaimi, Tel Aviv, and Sarah Baxter, New York write

THREATENED by a potentially nuclear-armed Tehran, Israel is preparing for a possible war with both Iran and Syria, according to Israeli political and military sources.

The conflict with Hezbollah has led to a strategic rethink in Israel. A key conclusion is that too much attention has been paid to Palestinian militants in Gaza and the West Bank instead of the two biggest state sponsors of terrorism in the region, who pose a far greater danger to Israel’s existence, defence insiders say.

“The challenge from Iran and Syria is now top of the Israeli defence agenda, higher than the Palestinian one,” said an Israeli defence source. Shortly before the war in Lebanon Major-General Eliezer Shkedi, the commander of the air force, was placed in charge of the “Iranian front”, a new position in the Israeli Defence Forces. His job will be to command any future strikes on Iran and Syria.

Possible scenario for provoking an attack includes the following:

Israel attacks Iranian nuclear sites. Hizbullah launches retaliatory strikes wither in suicide attacks and/or rockets. Or: Iran launches missles into Israel.

Bush declares that Iran is behind these attacks, and that the US is committed to protecting Israel's security. He goes to Congress for an authorization to use military force. Congress supports him because: 1) the Jewish lobby 2) American sentiments supporting Israel.

The chances of the Congress not supporting an AUMF if Israel is attacked are close to nil, I believe. Read more!

In Discussion on What's Wrong w/ Us

At Glenn Greenwald's blog, inconversation I posted the following:

According to JGA Pocock, the reason that the founding fathers wanted to put brakes on commercial interests is that it promotes a form of false consciousness (yes, they were familiar with this concept long before Marx, via the English Machiavellians) that occurs by way of credit and economic speculation. They hoped to counter this with the expansion of the republic westward thereby giving the people a way of holding land, a real value as opposed to the false value created by speculation.

But once the empire reached the western shores of the Pacific and land itself became a means of speculation, the corruption of false consciousness set in among the masses. We see this in the proliferation of diverse ways to create fantasy personalities and living in false worlds that populate the "post modern" world. Much of this would be considered by the founding fathers as a corrupting influence as great as or greater than the abuses of unchecked political or commercial interests.

It is the corruption of the masses that has led the neocons, for example, to promote the military and patriotic ethos--in conjunction with the imperial expansion to overseas markets and oil fields--as a countering impulse to the corruption of the masses. What's odd here is that the liberals have no counter-argument or agenda to this corruption of the masses. In the past, it may have been the populist religious movements that provided that balance but in distancing themselves from the great liberal religious traditions, the liberal left is left swinging any which way hoping that the Right will piss the masses off so much with military and imperial missteps that the masses will simply opt for the Left as a "not-them" choice.

Iraq and perhaps some economic discomfort has disturbed the false consciousness of the masses to the point that they will opt out of the Republican game plan for the short-term. In the meantime, what sort of counter-balance to the corruption of the masses can the Left come up with? All we've had so far is Clintonian neoliberalism, which is the non-militaristic version of imperial republic.

-------------
Everyone wants to get outa here doing well and leave something for the kids. As you note, that's getting harder and harder for those without. What I dislike is the way that those in power and with the cash continue to pass on not only money but power to their progeny. It is this oligarchic principle that spells ruin for the republic.

I also understand the notion of noblesse oblige. While I find it somewhat patronising, I guess it's okay as far as it goes. However, as capital solidifies its hold on the social and cultural infrastructure of the country, those who already have continue to profit and maintain their status quo while those in the middle and at the bottom get squeezed harder and harder.

Perhaps there was a notion that the rich and those in power once thought owed something to society for their success. Even Habermas notes that the founder of IBM back in the early 60s opposed the reduction from 90 percent in income taxes to 50 percent by Kennedy. He did so because he believed that the rich should not tear the social fabric of equitability that mercenary capitalism is prone to destroy.

Perhaps it is this ovearching sense that duty is towards each other and the health of the whole rather than the individual that's been lost by the rich. The founding fathers believed that they could stem the corruption that many of them (except perhaps Hamilton) foresaw would come about by leveling the playing field to include the competition of interests. The balance would be maintained because the various interests would negate each other. I do not think they foresaw the vast influence that capital could play in buying those interests and ultimately by the power of controlling the means of communication that the commercial interests can deploy.

Walter Lippmann long ago understood that the public is a fiction. It is created by and manipulated by the press whose interests ultimately lie with the ruling oligarchy.

The historian Pocock notes--following Hannah Arendt--that the founding fathers opted for the notion of representative democracy as a kind of stop-gap to the inevitable corruption that every republic is heir to. As he has also noted in a recent essay, it is these representatives who form the oligarchy--bought and sold like so many boxes of All-Bran.

You wonder why the president has gotten away with the abuses he has? Look to our representatives and the commercial interests they represent.

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I've always been struck by something that former Russian strongman Boris Yeltsin said. Commenting on his meeting with US govt. officials, he noted how free and independent they seemed in their interaction with each other and their superiors. He admired them for this and said that the Russians lacked that type of freedom but that he felt he must inculcate such an attitude in Russia.

I always thought that that attitude of freedom is what money and status bring you. I certainly don't think that most people in the US exhibit such an attitude of freedom. Tied down by financial concerns, as well as the limitations of social and cultural constraints, I always wondered how many in the US ever attain that type of freedom.

I imagine that Bush feels like those men in superior positions of power and money. My question then becomes: how much does he understand that this position is a product of his own privileged background? How much does he understand that freedom in an imperial republic requires checks and balances, rather than just the exhibition of entrepreneurial initiative and freedom afforded by class?

I personally think that Bush suffers from a case of "false consciousness" that inhibits his ability to understand those varaiables that enable to experience his expanded sense of freedom. Read more!

In Memoriam: Deadwood

And I didn't even know it was over, though seeing Bullock let Hearst leave town alive raised my suspicions. ...

There are so many myths about the old West, that's why this series on HBO was important in many ways. It's probably more realistic than other show about the west has ever been; on the other hand, its very surreality is instructive in showing how much our understanding of our own myths reflects more of who we want to be than what those in the past understood themselves to be.

Consider the following analysis of the American myth from JGA Pocock, writing in The Machiavellian Moment:

A romanticization of popular energies, akin to the romanticism which Wood detects in Madisonian liberalism, makes its appearance in frontier rhetoric; but, following the paradigms laid down by Machiavelli, virtue in this sense must be as dynamic as popular virtù. A dynamism of virtue was being invoked to counter and contain the dynamism of commerce, and must partake of the latter's passionate and fantastic qualities. The primitive and half-comic heroes of frontier legend, however, were insufficiently political to embody virtue in its republican form--Davy Crockett was not imaginable as the congressman he was in real life--and the myth found its personification in Andrew Jackson. Frontier warrior turned patriot statesman, successful adversary of the second attempt to charter the United States Bank, the Jackson of legend has a good claim to be considered the last of the Machiavellian Romans and the warlike, expanding, agrarian democracy he symbolized a Fourth Rome, perpetutaing republican virtus as the Third Rome of Moscow perpetuated sacred empire. -- p. 535

Scott McLamee does a pretty decent--albeit predictable--autopsy; I might take a hand at it once I get over my grief...

McLemee writes:

The final image of the series really did sum it up perfectly. It shows a man [Al Swearingen] on his knees, scrubbing a pool of blood off the wooden floor.

Another character, Johnny, has just asked for some reassuring words about the event that led to the giant stain. Johnny leaves, and the man with the brush gets back to work. “Wants me to tell him something pretty,” he says.

It’s not a rebuke, exactly — just a reminder that, as someone once put it, every document of civilization is also a document of barbarism.

Read more!

Wildcards, "Democracy", and Neocon Game Plans

In response to the following analysis of the Pentagon's recent report to Congress on the state of the US military situation in Iraq and Pat Lang's analysis of that situation, I wrote the following:

I think that the talk about democratization etc. is merely a way of making that plan palatable to the rather idealistic sensibilities of Bush. The only form of democractization that he neocons hope to establish is the imperial republican's notion of client state in Iraq. All other concerns are simply window-dressing. ...

With a weak central government in Iraq, the US will continue to impose its will to expand further destabilization in the region. The present anarchy in Iraq allows Iran to look like it is gaining influence; but this appearance only makes the neocon call for invading/attacking Iran look stronger. Whether or not that influence is real is really beside the point.

Just as long as it looks like Iran is gaining influence--to a president whose grasp of socio-cultural or geopolitical realities is tenuous at best, to a press that relies on the think-tankers who mouthe neocon platitudes--is all that counts.

On a more macroscopic level, the pieces continue to fall into place for an eventual invasion/attack of Iran. The Israelis have a forward operating base in Kurdistan. While in a more precarious situation, the US troops can simply reinforce its rear and swivel toward Iran and either feign an attack on Iran's western border or actually use it as a base for special ops tactics.

The wildcard in this scenario is Turkey and its continuing concern about Kurdish guerilla groups based in Kurdsitan. They've already made incursions into Kurdish terrotory to attack these groupos and they've bombarded the guerilla camps. Interestingly, they've done this in seeming coordination with Iran, which has also bombarded these guerilla positions.

No doubt, the State Department is taking strong measures to assess Turkey's intentions here, perhaps promising more economic aid. We must remember that it was Turkey's refusal to allow US troops to use it as a base for invading northern Iraq that caused Rumsfeld conniptions.

MSNBC writes, quoting a US Pentagon report:

"Death squads and terrorists are locked in mutually reinforcing cycles of sectarian strife,'' the report said. The Sunni-led insurgency remained "potent and viable", it said.

"Conditions that could lead to civil war exist in Iraq, specifically in and around Baghdad, and concern about civil war within the Iraqi civilian population has increased in recent months,'' the report said. "Nevertheless, the current violence is not a civil war, and movement toward a civil war can be prevented," it added.

Commenting on this report, former Defense Intelligence ret. Col. Pat Lang writes:

What lies within the psyches of the peoples of Iraq is a belief that their communities are not "Iraq" as President Bush imagines it. He believes that these peoples see themselves as individuals, acting as individuals within the polity of Iraq, but most of them see themselves in far older and more deeply rooted categories.

These categories are now engaged in combat on the dusty plains of Mesopotamia. They are like lions fighting over the "kill" that our intervention has left for them.

Related Links

• A Warrior's Warning on Iraq

Read more!

Who Should Muslims Blame for Their Malaise?

The notion that Muslims worldwide are looking for someone or something to blame for their problems is perhaps a dangerous over-simplification. I don't think it's too much to imagine that many if not most Muslims rely on their innate talents and common-sense to get through life, like many people of all ethnic and religious backgrounds. I can imagine that most--faced with the complexities of the modern world--also try to answer numerous questions with the same quizzicalness that inhabitants of a modern, post-secular world do.

So why ask the question about what Muslims have to blame for their malaise? This question is directed mostly at answering why some Muslims resort to terrorism or support the terrorist mentality. At a deeper, more empathetic level, it attempts to answer questions asked by those in the Arab world who are not faring well in the neo-liberal world economy. To answer this question might go some way in addressing the sources of discontent, to use a cliche. ...

My own answer to a question like this is perhaps confined by my experiences as an American who has befitted from the freedoms--economic and political--that living in this country affords. At the same time, no doubt, my views are limited by that very experience. While I have dealt with hardships, some worse, some not as worse, as others, I have striven to expand the boundaries of that experiential prison as much as possible.

I have lived on the streets--by choice and by circumstances. I have dealt with fallout from family issues--again, some worse than, some not as bad as, what I know of others' lives. Through various religious, behavioral, aesthetic, and intellectual experiments I have tried to both flee from, struggle with, and resolve my relationship to the past, personal and communal.

In this way, I have tried to see the world as others might see it. Indeed, I have done so sometimes I think to the point where I think that I have completely lost myself, if that's possible without going insane. Or perhaps that insanity is the edge over which we must indeed go and at which many simply refuse to either draw near or acknowledge.

I am not saying that this is the answer to the questions asked by those who face hunger, poverty, want and so on every day. The questions they face are much more material, much more urgent. The types of questions that I have faced are actually a luxury afforded by my environment.

Having described my anxieties about my ability to truly understand others in their own existential circumstances, however, does not leave me weaker, as some who lampoon and parody such a view as pathetically liberal. Indeed, I think such anxieties make whatever it is that's me stronger in a way.

Without trying to push this on anyone or even identifying myself with the author, I have found that Paul's words on weakness in 1&2 Corinthians somewhat resonant. Of course, my own experiences are simply pale shadows of anything the Apostle experienced but it does show something I have found to be worth striving for in some way.

Paul writes:

And he said unto me, My grace is sufficient for thee: for my strength is made perfect in weakness. Most gladly therefore will I rather glory in my infirmities, that the power of Christ may rest upon me. Therefore I take pleasure in infirmities, in reproaches, in necessities, in persecutions, in distresses for Christ's sake: for when I am weak, then am I strong. I am become a fool in glorying; ye have compelled me: for I ought to have been commended of you: for in nothing am I behind the very chiefest apostles, though I be nothing. (2 Cor. 9-11)

Be that as it may, it is this weakness, these anxieties and questions that bring me to the boundary where I and others disappear but remain, perhaps transformed; where weakness turns to strength that seeks meaning not in power but in something above power; where loss and pain are seen as gifts.

I imagine that some will see this little confessional posting as an attempt to oppose one religion to another. Not at all. If anything, I hope that it will show that those questions that make us human are not confined to one religion versus another. I don't think this means, either, that all religions are one and indistinct.

Perhaps it does show that there's some level respect for the unknowability of the Transcendent that all such differences--while important for knowing who and what I am or you are--ultimately mean more when they are seen through that transcendent without wishing to profane it by knowing what it expects other than the demand to love others as they are through it.

According to Haroon Siddiqui:

He who wrongs a Jew or a Christian will have me as his accuser on the Day of Judgment. — Prophet Muhammad
...
Muslims do not have much to be proud of in the contemporary world. So they take comfort in their burgeoning numbers. At the turn of the millennium in 2000, there were many learned papers projecting the rise in Muslim population. But if Muslims have not achieved much at 1.3 billion, they are not likely to at 1.5 billion, either.

To escape the present, many Muslims hark back to their glorious past: how Islam was a reform movement; how Muslims led the world in knowledge, in astronomy, chemistry, mathematics, medicine, natural sciences, philosophy and physics; and how the Islamic empires were successful primarily because, with some egregious exceptions, they nurtured the local cultures and respected the religions of their non-Muslim majority populations. This is why Egypt and Syria remained non-Muslim under Muslim rule for 300 years and 600 years, respectively, and India always remained majority Hindu.

As true as all that history is, it is not very helpful today unless Muslims learn something from it — to value human life; accept each other's religious differences; respect other faiths; return to their historic culture of academic excellence, scientific inquiry and economic self-reliance; and learn to live with differences of opinion and the periodic rancorous debates that mark democracies.

It may be unfair to berate ordinary Muslims, given that too many are struggling to survive, that nearly half live under authoritarian regimes where they can speak up only on pain of being incarcerated, tortured or killed, and that they are helpless spectators to the sufferings of fellow Muslims in an unjust world order. Yet Muslims have no choice but to confront their challenges, for Allah never changes a people's state unless they change what's in themselves (13:11).

Read more!

SlowMo Coup?

With Bush and Rumsfeld's present attack on those who disagree with their Iraq policies in the air, it seems time to assess the state of the military-industrial complex. The militancy of the military has never been so great.

The military takes an oath to uphold the constitution, but if they buy in to the unitary executive theory, they think that the Pres. has ultimate authority--and that he has the right to declare what is and is not constituional. While I do not think a military coup--as in direct confrontations, etc.--is in the works, I am concerned that the framework is in place for a coup behind the scenes (also see here). ...

I floated this idea a few months ago, when Harper's held a round table of defense brass and intellectuals. They noted that, while they thought the military part of the equation might remain loyal, the civilian part might indeed carry such a coup out.

I quote from Harper's:

The question that arises is whether, in fact, we're not already experiencing what is in essence a creeping coup d'etat. But it's not people in uniform who are seizing power. It's militarized civilians, who conceive of the world as such a dangerous place that military power had to predominate, that constitutional constraints on the military need to be loosened.

Someone left a comment to that posting, writing:

Blackwater USA
http://www.blackwaterusa.com/ , friend of C/B and contract defender of the Green Zone has announced the evolution to full combat operational services. A "turnkey service" for those nastiest of ops that might prove reportable, accountable and embarrassing. (opposition assassination anyone?) A heavily armed, special ops trained by our elite US commando forces, now retired to six figure income, private corporate army right here in the Tar Heel State.

I think that many are concerned--as I myslef am--with the seeming flowing of power to the executive branch. As Machiavelli pointed out, when one person or branch of government takes unto itself more power, or most of it, and creates a situation where all others depend on that person or entity that is by definition a tyranny.

Pres. Bush has shown himself immune to congressional oversight, makes end runs around the judiciary, and pays no heed to laws and legislation passed by congress. These issues are not making their way into the so-called "liberal" press nor, obviously, in the conservative side of the media. I don't know how much you follow the military-idustrial complex. I used to work in that industry, and I know something about how they operate. The number of sole-source contracts has risen, as has the influence of this industry in congress via campaign donations. That's a sign of tyranny and corrupton in a republic.

Update 1 Global Guerillas writes:

The war in Iraq has catalyzed the growth of the mercenary industry (populated with a wild array of private military/security companies), and serves as yet another sign of the return of the pre-Westphalian warfare documented here. A good way to get up to speed on the topic is to watch the documentary "Shadow Company" by Nick Bicanic and Jason Bourque.

Read more!