Disaggregation

This post at Blackfive is called "A Strategy for the Long War". What is most impressive about it is the way it links the media war with soft and then with hard power. It is very long, but worth the time spent on it. (You can also find out what "disaggregation" means.)

It links to an extraordinary letter from the Mayor of Tall 'Afar, Iraq, in praise of 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment, who liberated his town. It, in turn, links to this, which is a cheering indication that the US military is learning fast.

(via Instapundit)

Rich and free

Michael Totten in Beirut chats with some Hezbollah kids in the tent city. And they really sound like kids. Here's one exchange.

“So, what is it you hope to accomplish downtown?” I said.
“We want Seniora to leave,” one of them said.
“We want to fuck Seniora,” said another.
“I know,” I said. “Why do you want to get rid of him, though? What do you want from the government that you can’t get with Seniora?”
“War!” said one of the kids.
“We want war!” said another.

Which is followed soon after by this:

“We don’t hate the American people, only the government.”
“Okay,” I said. “So why then does Hassan Nasrallah repeatedly say Death to America?” I asked these questions in the most friendly and casual tone of voice I could muster.
“He only means death to the American government.”
“Why doesn’t he make that clear then?” I said.
“He does!”
“No, he doesn’t,” I said. “He says Death to America. What would you think of George W. Bush if he gave speeches where he screamed Death to Lebanon? Come on, guys. Be honest with me. I want to know what you really think.”
“I want to go to America,” the leader kid said. “I love America and I want to live in America. America is rich and free. I want to be rich and free, too.”

And read this piece by Jules Crittenden about Iran's good works in another sphere of influence.

And who's behind the Jews?

Until now, this knowledge has been disseminated strictly on a need-to-know basis. But finally, the Zionist hegemony of the news media has been broken and the Islamic Republic of Iran has managed to get the word out.

Nazi leader Adolf Hitler's parents were both Jewish and ... Hitler himself was one of the founders of the State of Israel.

Moreover

Hitler's paternal grandmother was a Jewish prostitute and his father even kept his Jewish name until finally changing it to Hitler when he was 40...the reason Hitler developed such an aversion to Judaism was because his Jewish mother was a promiscuous woman.

Hitler's relatives and the friends who brought him to power, as well as his mistresses and personal physician, were all Jewish.

Mohammad-Ali Ramin, a chief aide to Ahmadinejad, is the source. I remember some years ago the Sunday Sport revealed that Hitler was alive and well and living on the moon, but that he then had to flee to Mars because it had been discovered (by the Sunday Sport) that he was really a woman (and they had a photo). Do you think there's any connection between all these stories?

(via PJM)

Collaboration

The Confederate Yankee, Bob Owens, has been doing the work that AP have been unable to do. He been finding corroboration for the stories of Jamil Hussein. Or rather, he hasn't been finding corroboration for the stories of Jamil Hussein, but he has been looking.

In eight hours over three days last week, I tracked down online examples of the first 40 of 61 Associated Press stories citing Jamil Hussein, as replicated in news outlets and even official government press offices around the world...

Put bluntly, a search for other news agency accounts of the events described by Jamil Hussein seems to indicate that most of these events simply do not exist anywhere else except in AP reporting. I was completely unable to find a definitive corroborating account of any of Jamil Hussein's accounts, anywhere.

But the Blogoshere trumps us all.

(via PJM)

Like us or like them?

Mark Bowden in The Wall Street Journal.

Any nation is, at heart, an idea. Once people started organizing themselves in groups larger than their own blood lines, they had to invent reasons for considering themselves part of something bigger--tribes, city states, feudal kingdoms, nations, empires. Language, customs, religion, ideology and geographic proximity have all served. The idea of a state that accepts as equal citizens people from all corners of the globe, a nation founded on abstract principles, is a relative newcomer. We have been trying to get the people inhabiting a large swath of land between and on both sides of the Tigris and Euphrates to embrace the concept. It is an ongoing struggle with less-than-encouraging results...

Nine years ago, in the epilogue to "Black Hawk Down," I quoted an unnamed State Department official (he was Michael Sheehan, ambassador for counter-terrorism) as follows: "The idea used to be that terrible countries were terrible because good, decent, innocent people were being oppressed by evil, thuggish leaders. Somalia changed that. Here you have a country where just about everybody is caught up in the fighting. You stop an old lady on the street and ask her if she wants peace, and she will say, 'Yes, of course, I pray for it daily.' All the things you would expect her to say. Then ask her if she would be willing for her clan to share power with another to have that peace, and she'll say, 'With those murderers and thieves? I'd die first.' People in these countries . . . don't want peace. They want victory. They want power. Men, women, old, and young. Somalia was the experience that taught us that people in these places bear much of the responsibility for things being the way they are. The hatred and killing continues because they want it to. Or because they don't want peace enough to stop it."

I, too, have always assumed that most people, given the choice, would choose to have the things that I have had. But I have forgotten the conditions that need to be met for those things to be possible. A functioning economy, a stable and just (or at least accepted) political system, a (comparatively) large degree of freedom. When the Lebanese forebears of my father arrived in Australia, they cast off the baggage of their homeland within a generation and then married out. It was natural. But all those conditions were present, handed over by the British colonial administrators at the turn of the century. The ethnic identity that so many now insist on maintaining at all costs was cast off and a new one adopted without any trauma, as far as I know. This is very rare. So few peoples have the choice to strike off in a new direction; the road that history has laid for them is bordered by high walls and they must repeat what has always been done without deviation or hesitation.

Foolishness

In October, fearlessly throwing down the gauntlet to fortune, I passed on some snippets of good news. Among which, there was this: Hamilton College, long a flourishing centre of the Higher Cant, was to house something that sounded suspiciously like education - the Alexander Hamilton Center for the Study of Western Civilization, which would seek “excellence in scholarship through the study of freedom, democracy, and capitalism as these ideas were developed and institutionalized in the United States and within the larger tradition of Western culture.”

Well, that was then; this is now. The faculty would have none of it and demanded "that the center be subject to faculty oversight" - in other words, that it propogate the same PC buffoonery that the faculty do. Faculty oversight and excellence in scholarship being mutually exclusive, the Alexander Hamilton Center will not be.

To add derision to defeat, Dinocrat pointed me towards this credo by a certain Shelby Grantham, who teaches Writing at Dartmouth.

I teach writing. It's the second-best way I know to figure things out--such as what to do about racism, how to make non-violence a national priority, why so few students think they can make a difference, what poetry is good for, when and how to resist injustice, ways to share the planet with other species, and what gender has to do with anything. Seeking words to make such questions ring and their answers sing is what my English 5 sections [the required first-year writing course] are about.

I bow my head and crawl back into the closet.

Forster on Orwell

EM Forster on George Orwell, who had just died. [From an article entitled 'George Orwell' published in 1950 and included in Two Cheers for Democracy]

A true liberal, he hoped to help through small things. Programmes mean progroms.

All nations are odious, but some are less odious than others, and by this stony, unlovely path he reaches patriotism. To some of us, this seems the cleanest way to reach it...In the world of politics we see no salvation, we are not to be diddled, but prefer the less bad to the more bad, and so become patriots, while keeping our brains and hearts intact.

Like most of us, he does not define liberty, but being a liberal he thinks there is more of it here than in Stalin's Russian or in Franco's Spain, and that we need still more of it, rather than less, if our national tradition is to continue.

United 93

I saw United 93 last night and was very impressed. It involves you in a situation that is initially banal and then increasingly desperate and from which there is no escape and, because it indulges in none of the standard rhetoric of heroics or victimisation, is all the more effective.

One of the qualities it was praised for was that it was 'apolitical'. While I am not one of those who mount my high horse to proclaim that eveything is political (far from it), it is difficult to see how a film dealing with 911 could be apolitical, or indeed why it should be. And this film is not.

It only departs from the rigour of its 'in the moment' method once. Immediately after the opening scene showing one of the terrorists praying and then being interrupted, the camera takes flight over the skyline of Boston with the prayer continuing as voiceover. You need only read that flat description of mine to understand the impact of the sequence - the director, Paul Greengrass, is underlining the fact that the act these men were about to commit is grounded in and sanctioned by their religion (whether rightfully or wrongly is another point). Their prayers bookend the story.

Again, as the film reaches its climax and the passengers ready themselves to attack, several of them intone the Lord's prayer just as, opposite them and with equeal intensity, the terrorists mutter invocations to Allah - a more economical and back-to-basics means of signalling the clash of civilisations, I cannot conceive.

There is one other moment I would point to where the story broadens its field for a moment and makes a political point. Before take-off, the co-pilot goes down to the tarmac to check on the re-fuelling, to make sure that they'll have enough for the journey. We see the fuel gushing behind perspex and into the wings and linger on the counter (625.5 gallons and counting) - and cannot but reflect on the nationality of most of the terrorists, of the source of their revenue and where that revenue originates.

A final point, and possibly the most overtly political of all, at least in terms of immediate policy - the German passenger, the appeaser, the one who must be suppressed as the other passengers begin their revolt. This was the only moment in which I thought, 'A bit crude that bit'. Obviously, if we think of the political build-up to the Iraq War, such an approach would be justified. It's just that this film otherwise avoids that sort of rhetoric - it doesn't have characters playing hero, second-fiddle, comic, love interest - characters don't 'represent' any group. When the flight begins, they are wrapped up entirely in personal concerns. As the film ends, they are reacting to a threat from which there is no escape. And there is no hope of rescue. During the film, they don't even 'represent' the United States - it's not shot like that. But then there's this German who stands in for European pusillanimity.

Don't get me wrong. I think it was right to present and quash the appeasement approach; it's just that I think it should have been done 'from within'. Matching it up with a German is an unnecessary distraction and also lets in the unworthy question of why no-one on the other three planes rebelled. Were there too many Germans?

Aside from that quibble, I think United 93 is a superb film which, quite unexpectedly, does justice to its subject.

The State of the Jihad

Bill Roggio gives a quick guide to the state of play in the countries under Islamist attack. The maps are really useful.

Who's got the six-pack?

Madeleine Bunting at The Guardian

The abolition of the slave trade is a painful reminder of British imperial history, which we have, incredibly, managed to largely forget. Who remembers the Bengal famine or Hola camp, the empire's opium trade with China or our invention of concentration camps in the Boer war? We too easily overlook how empire was a linchpin to British national identity, vital to welding Scotland and England together. Indeed, historian Linda Colley suggests three ingredients for British identity: "Great Britain is an invented nation that was not founded on the suppression of older loyalties so much as superimposed on them, and that was heavily dependent for its raison d'etre on a broadly Protestant culture, on the treat and tonic of recurrent war, especially war with France, and on the triumphs, profits and Otherness represented by a massive overseas empire."

I have already written on the absurdity of beating ourselves up over the slave trade, but that is beside the point. Notice how the events we have to come to terms with are all events we are supposed to be ashamed of. Coming to terms with history for people like Maddy of the Sorrows is always penitence for wrongs done to others, who are implicitly assumed to be innocent. The analysis she quotes is one done from Zero, that is, as if the starting point were Eden or Rousseau's noble savage, so that everything that comes from the past, such as social cohesion and the national sense of self, is an artifice. The pre-Protestant, pre-imperial country just disappears as if there were no continuity between Chaucer's England and Disraeli's Imperial Britain.

In a sense, the real problem (if that is right word) for British identity is its success. What holds this country back from the moist embrace of Europe is the difference in starting point between these islands and the continent. France, Germany and Italy needed Europe as a bulwark against their past political failure and the fear of similar future catastrophe. Just count the systems of government employed by those countries over the 20th century. Contrast it with the one system that has been evolving here (with a brief interuption in the 17th Century) since the Norman invasion. Only a fool rushes to change something that has been so successful, and while economic forces push us towards the EU, we are rightly very diffident about the political cosiness that would seem to follow.

Perhaps there is no clearer sign of the difference bestowed by Britain's historical success than its willingness to act while the Europeans talk. The great question remains hovering over the continent: will it ever have the confidence to match its economic muscle with a military six-pack? While that question hovers unanswered, the UK does well to keep its distance and to re-assert its identity not just in the microcosm of these islands, but in the macrocosm of the Anglosphere. Of course, it is just that confidence here that Madeleine Bunting and her ilk most want to undermine.