The Foundations of Barad-Dur

The Foundations of Barad-Dur

The leniency of Bali bombing mastermind Abu Bakar Bashir's sentence -- 30
months for the murder of 202 people --

has shocked the Australian public, not in the least because after long labor
the mountain has brought forth a mouse.

Former magistrate Brian Deegan, who lost his son Josh, 22, in the Bali
bombing, said Bashir's sentence was outrageous. "It equates to a bit over a
week (in jail) per man, woman and child that were hurt," Mr Deegan said today.
"You get no closure out of this, it's absolutely insulting."

Australian Federal Police commissioner Mick Keelty is

warning that the kid-glove treatment of Bashir has not satisified his
supporters, who regard the slightest inconvenience to their 'spiritual leader'
for the mere act of murdering infidels a mortal insult.

New terrorist attacks are possible in a backlash by supporters of
Indonesian Muslim cleric Abu Bakar Bashir over his jailing, Australia's senior
police officer said here Friday. Australian Federal Police commissioner Mick
Keelty said intelligence agencies would be updating terror threat assessments,
taking into account a possible violent response from Bashir's supporters.

Veteran newsman Max Soliven of the

Philippine Star who has covered Indonesia since the Sukarno era in the
mid-1960s talks about the shadow of fear that is spreading where it had never
been seen before.

"This sends the message to us, who live fearfully on the perimeter of the
JI venom this vicious agitator has been sowing among the pesantren, the
thousands of religious schools (equivalent to our Muslim madrasas here)
... the government prosecutors acted like a bunch of nervous Nellies at the
trial .... many witnesses refused to testify ... Only one witness, Nasir
Abbas, has linked Bashir to terrorism, resolutely testifying that the cleric
had personally pit him (Abbas) in charge of "terrorist activities in part of
the Philippines".

Indonesia�s turmoil had never been about religion. ... Indonesia was a
society in which women played a major role, free from the fetters of
second-class status ... In my recent visits, I�ve seen � while some of the
smiles remain spontaneous � a visible change. An increasing number of women
are wearing head scarves, and even all-black covering (ala the Middle East�s
structures). Christian churches are being bombed, Christian communities
embroiled in civil war with their once-friendly and happy Muslim neighbors,
with the ABRI (Armed Forces) too often siding with the militant Islamic
jihadis.

Salamabit*, you don�t even have to go to Indonesia. A Vice-Governor
of the Autonomous Region of Muslim Mindanao ... is now insisting on
implementing a city ordinance ...  which requires every Muslim female in
Marawi City, yep in our own Mindanao, to wear the head-scarve, otherwise be
penalized with a fine of thousands of pesos ...  (* Sonuvabitch)

Soliven notes what most of the regular newspapers have missed: that Bashir
was at the nexus of the Saudi madrassa system that is the assembly line
of terrorism. It is the

same system that produced Ahmed Omar Abu Ali, a "former Virginia high school
valedictorian ... accused in federal court Tuesday of allegedly conspiring with
al-Qaida to assassinate President Bush." And it is a system that has proved too
powerful to shut down or even criticize.

Lawyers for Abu Ali, who graduated at the top of his class from the Islamic
Saudi Academy in Alexandria, said he would plead not guilty. Raised in nearby
Falls Church, Va., he was enrolled at a university in Medina when he was
arrested. ... According to the grand jury indictment, items found at Abu Ali's
home in Falls Church a week after his arrest included a six-page document on
how to avoid government and private surveillance, a document praising the
Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar and the terror attacks on New York and the
Pentagon, a copy of Handguns magazine with the name "Ahmed Ali" on the
subscription label, audio tapes promoting violent holy war and the killing of
Jews, and a book by Al Qaeda deputy Ayman Al Zawahiri criticizing democracy.

Presiding judge O'Grady issued the ritual apology which has become a standard
part of treating with these men of the shadows. "I can assure you, you will not
suffer any torture or humiliation while in the marshals' custody". Already the
victims have become accustomed to craving pardon, in advance, for their
unspeakable inferiority, before the emissaries of the madrassas. If US
judges are halfway to their knees how likely is it that the Indonesians will
hold themselves erect?

Secretary Donald Rumsfeld provided the broadest description of the nature of
the conflict and laid out what it took to defeat the enemy:

this struggle cannot be won by military means alone ... And since,
ultimately, what they need to survive is the support of those who they can
indoctrinate, this is an ideological battle as well. ... This war has required
not only the vigorous pursuit of known terrorists, but finding ways to stop
extremists from gaining recruits and adherents. It is this ideological
component, I suggest, that is the essential ingredient for victory.

And it is in this essential area that Australia and by extension the United
States, have lost a serious battle. Unless the foundations of the enemy's power
are shaken there can be no victory against ever-growing tide that will come
against us.

Who was it who said that all wars of consequence were conflicts of the mind? Without getting too metaphysical, it still makes sense to regard ideas as the foundation of historical struggles; the thing that animates the visible clashes. While an idea's potency remains it will find adherents.

The casual outside observer would conclude, from the apparent fact that the Western ideal can find no public defenders, that it is not worth upholding. Radical Islam, on the other hand, must self-evidently be an idea of great worth, as so many are publicly willing to die for it. And to a limited degree they would be right, for something must be terribly wrong with the West to cause such self-hatred.

America has shown itself apt at striking the visible parts of its enemy but seems unable to touch its foundations. On the contrary, every blow it deals seemingly reverberates within it, spreading cracks throughout its own base. Sometimes I think this is fortunate because I am beginning to suspect that the foundations of Barad-Dur lie within the West and not within Islam.

New Comments Policy

New Comments Policy

In response to complaints about the tediousness of the Blogger registration requirements, unregistered commenters are now enabled. However, if we get an influx of trolls and other unsavory characters, the 'registered users' policy must come back on. Let's see how it goes.

Update

In deference to the wisdom of the commenters, who note that anonymous comments will attract trolls, things are back to their previous settings.

Hanson Versus Edsforth

Hanson Versus Edsforth

Victor Davis Hanson recently
debated Dartmouth History Professor Ronald Edsforth on the subject of
whether the war in Iraq  or any war, for that matter, could ever be
justified. (Hat tip: DL)

By attacking Iraq, Edsforth said, the United States had usurped the
authority of the United Nations, in which the world community can take action
to promote the common good. Since treaties like those that established the
U.N. are held in the United States to be �the supreme law of the land,� he
said, the American government has effectively abrogated its own Constitution.
He noted, for example, that a White House lawyer drafted guidelines regarding
torture, even though the U.S. is party to the Geneva Conventions. ...

�War is terrible,� Hanson agreed. But in a rebuttal, he said the United
Nations has historically not intervened for the common good, even against the
worst abuses. The U.N., much of which he said is �populated by thugs and
brigands� like Syria, Iran, Sudan, and Cuba, failed to act against the
Rwandan genocide of 1994, against the Serbian slaughter of Kosovars in 1998,
or even against the ongoing genocide in Darfur�which only the United States
has declared a humanitarian crisis. �Innocent women and children died
waiting� for the United Nations to help them, he said. ...

Edsforth proposed that the human race has learned the dangers of war,
especially after the blood-soaked twentieth century. �Evolution [of human
behavior] is a fact,� he said. �It didn�t stop back in ancient times�
We are capable of learning as humans and changing our environment in such a
way that that which we abhor is less and less likely.� Indeed, he suggested
that American foreign policy has over the past several decades been a
reactionary effort to �turn back the clock� to the systems of the past.
�We should lead the world in creating this new environment,� he said, �and
not stand as a roadblock before its creation.� ...

Hanson, though, maintained that the human race has not changed
significantly in the past several thousand years. �Human nature is set,�
he said�it was �primordial, reptilian,� adding that man is always �governed
by pride and fear and envy.� He cited Thucydides, who wrote that his works
would remain valid through the ages precisely because human nature is
unchanging. �We have not reached the end of history.�

It is well that we have not, as Dr. Hanson put it, "reached the end of
history". While man struggles on, his final chapter is postponed for yet a
little longer. Man may be reptilian, yet the snake was always destined to be
crushed beneath his heel; pride and envy may rule yet always be at war with
man's better nature. The more interesting philosophical question is whether we
could abolish war without abolishing ourselves. The possibility of heaven is
purchased at the risk of hell and the gift of fire balanced by the danger that
we should set ourselves ablaze. The Leftist impulse is at heart a longing to be
rid of the burden of freedom. What was the dreamed-of Worker's Paradise except
the same old places repopulated by the New Soviet Man?

The Beat Goes On

The Beat Goes On

The

Chicago Tribune describes a new method for detecting nuclear material. The
Los Alamos-developed detector relies on measuring the interaction between cosmic
rays and and the material being scanned. The different materials have
interaction signatures which identify them.

By placing detectors above and below a vehicle, scientists can monitor muon
interaction with different materials in the vehicle's cargo. The higher
density a material is, the more muons will scatter when they make contact. A
computer uses the scatter data to create an image of the different materials
in the vehicle. High-density materials, such as plutonium or uranium, are
flagged.

The system is said to require only 20 seconds to scan a shipping container
and because it simply measures cosmic rays which are present in the everyday
environment, the method does not pose a risk to users, even illegal immigrants
who might be hiding within the container.

The

Homeland Security site at Ohio State has more details on the actual
application of this and other technologies.

Bolstering its assets to deter a dirty-bomb threat, the Bush Administration
is expected to announce plans to considerably expand homeland security
monitoring efforts for radioactive materials coming into and traveling within
the nation, The New York Times reported 1 February. The plan reportedly calls
for the establishment of the office of domestic nuclear detection, to be
housed within DHS, to coordinate the consolidation of the presently fragmented
network of radiation detection equipment. ... The security department is the
biggest player in this field, installing more than 400 radiation monitors in
the past two years at ports, border crossings and post offices that handle
international mail. Cities like New York have also been buying detection
equipment. "The threat is very real," said Representative Heather A. Wilson, a
New Mexico Republican who led a recent study that called for better
coordination of nuclear security efforts. "The possibility of nuclear material
falling into wrong hands may be small, but it would have devastating
consequences."

Recent -- and very real -- successes at spreading democracy in the Middle
East, even coupled with impressive technological advances will not change the
fact that widely available commercial technology has put enormous destructive
potential in the hands of private groups. Nuclear, chemical and biological
weapons, once the sole province of states, may become available to powerful
nonstate organization or even individuals and we will always have to guard
against them. General John Abizaid, during a trip to Baghdad covered by

US News and World report used a curious term to describe the GWOT, as if he
stood not in a particular place, but was the universal soldier standing on the
timeless field of conflict.

The White House uses the term "global war on terror." With the military's
well-known fondness for acronyms, this has, inevitably, been reduced to GWOT,
but Abizaid tends to cast the conflict slightly differently, as the "war on
extremism" or the "long war." ... "We didn't have the guts to get out in front
of the fascists or the Bolsheviks. This time we have to get in front. This
time we have a chance. If we don't fight this fight here, we will fight it at
home. I would ask you to please talk to your captains, young gunnery
sergeants, and tell them we need them. We need them to fight that long war."

A

National Journal interview late last year with Army Chief of Staff Gen.
Peter Schoomaker brought up much the same theme.

NJ: As you look forward, how long do you foresee the global war on
terrorism lasting?

Schoomaker: In my view, the conflict we're now engaged in is not a
short-term endeavor. I think we're into something that will entail some level
of conflict for a great deal of time to come. Some people see war and peace as
a light switch. When the lights are off, it's peacetime. When the lights go
on, it's wartime. I see more of a dimmer switch. We'll see the intensity wax
and wane, but there will always be some level of conflict going on.

George
Santayana ridiculed Woodrow Wilson's ambition to fight a 'war to end all
wars'. "Yet the poor fellows think they are safe! They think that the war is
over! Only the dead have seen the end of war." Some plagues are cured but for a
season; though that is enough. Santayana was a brilliant philosopher, but he
would have made a poor garbage collector.

The theater widens

The theater widens

Austin
Bay links to

Mark Steyn and
Christopher
Hitchens' view of events sweeping across the Middle East: Iraq, Lebanon,
Palestine, Egypt and possibly Syria. It is a reminder of why Iraq was commanded
through CENTCOM. During the days when the overt action was centered on Iraq, it
was easy to forget that it was one battlefield within a theater. Now the theater
itself has come to the fore and the atmosphere is one of 'breakout and pursuit'.

The breakout creates a new set of
opportunities and problems. These can be described as 'emergent
phenomenon',  -- the result of interactions between individual
elements within the Middle East and Southwest Asian theater that are now
bouncing off each other. Worse -- or more
exciting -- is that these recent developments now have linkages into Europe and Russia.
France and the EU, for example, are getting engaged in Lebanon while going in the other direction, Russia has declared interest in supplying technology to Iran. Just as it was important to
recall that Iraq was part of the Middle East theater, the Middle East itself is
part of action spanning the globe. In retrospect, events as disparate as the
dismantling of of the Libyan nuclear program and the exposure of the AQ Khan
atomic weapons mart played their part in leading up to current developments. As
historical drama the GWOT's scope is staggering and may prove to be bigger in
certain respects than that old yardstick, the Second World War.

 'Militant' groups have often attempted to stabilize the front whenever
events threatened to take a direction which they could not control. This usually
took the form of a spoiling terrorist attack to re-mire things in blood, chaos
and hatred as often happened during negotiations between the Palestinian
Authority and Israel. It would not be surprising if the terror masters fell back
on this old repertoire by staging attacks directed not only at Middle Eastern
targets but at the United States to throw back the threatening psychological
wave. The problem is that there is no longer any widespread confidence, even in
the places like Lebanon, that terror tactics will prevail. To that extent even
the most heinous attacks, like the carbomb which recently killed more than 100
in Iraq, have lost their bite. Psychologically speaking, the greatest
contribution of the Iraq and Afghanistan campaigns is that they have shattered
terrorism's myth of invincibility. The terrorists embarked on a maximum effort
to dislodge the US from Iraq, employing every weapon of violence, political
maneuver and propaganda they could muster and came up much the worse for wear.
This lesson has not been lost to public perception and has emboldened dissidents
all across the region.

The real challenge will be to find ways to respond to the campaign of
spoiling terror which may be forthcoming. Unlike Iraq, where US forces can
respond directly to challenge, the problem will be the ability of the US to
affect events over the wider region in clandestine or indirect ways. Tempo is
America's friend, but the enemy is even now looking for a place to stem the rot.

Posting will be light

Real pressure at work these past days has left me with no time to post. Pretty exciting stuff is happening in Lebanon though. Go to the Syria Comment site for additional info. Across the Bay is another excellent site.

Betrayals

Betrayals

The Denver
Channel reports that 200 University of Colorado faculty members have
published a petition in a local newspaper asking that the investigation against
Ward Churchill be dropped.

The faculty members paid for the ad to run Monday in The Boulder Daily
Camera. The ad says the review of the professor, expected to complete by
the middle of March, should be stopped immediately. The ad says the inquiry is
the result of political pressure and not based on "any prior formal
complaint of specific professional or academic misconduct on his part."
...

CU's Arts and Sciences Council passed a resolution Feb. 10 protesting the
investigation, and said administrators should know that faculty members are
serious about their opposition to what some consider a witch hunt. Margaret
LeCompte, an education professor, said, "It is going to be extremely
difficult, if academic freedom is on the block, for us to hire and keep good
faculty members.' LeCompte and the other teachers who signed the ad paid
$1,600 to have it published. "We're all thinking twice about what we're
saying," LeCompte said, recalling the climate in the McCarthy era when
professors were fired for alleged communist ties.

The same story is being carried by the Rocky
Mountain News on a feed from the Associated Press. Some newspapers are
connecting this 'witch hunt' with the mandatory Loyalty Oaths the State of
Colorado requires of teachers at institutions of higher learning. According to
the Denver
Channel:

State law requires anybody who teaches at a higher education institution to
sign an oath affirming they will uphold the U.S. and Colorado constitutions.
University officials said somewhere between 80 percent and 90 percent of staff
have signed loyalty oaths. Those who haven't, will be required to do so.
Churchill was among the minority that hadn't before the controversy. But he
subsequently has signed.

Dissent has long been described as a patriotic and legitimate activity and
Professor Churchill's patriotism is a thing to behold. A transcript of a speech
he gave on February 21, 2005 is provided by InfoshopOrg,
an anarchist website, from a Counterpunch source.

Ward Churchill: Hello my relatives; you humble me. Bill Owens: do you get
it now? [applause] If you can count on your toes, you'll be able to count the
percentage points of contribution to the budget the University of Colorado you
and your ilk have reduced the taxpayer contribution to. It comes to seven. I
do not work for the taxpayers of the state of Colorado. I do not work for Bill
Owens.....

Question #4: I'm glad I came here tonight; I've heard a lot more than I
heard on the average sound bytes we've been hearing on the radio. I agree with
some points, there are other points that I disagree with, but I do believe you
have a constitutional right to say what you have to say. On the other hand, do
you agree that the First Amendment rights for the people marching in the
Columbus Day parade should be taken away, because that is their freedom of
expression as well, and I'm one of those people.

Ward Churchill: Let me answer the man. No, I don't believe you have a
First Amendment right because that bounces off against my Ninth Amendment
right. You know what my Ninth Amendment rights are? Do you know what the
Ninth Amendment says?

Question #4: No, sir.

Ward Churchill: Yeah. Do we have a law professor in here? I think this is a
lesson for law school, because I addressed another university auditorium with
about this many people in it last week, and I posed the same question to the
whole group. Professors, students, townspeople and all, not a soul, including
law professors, could tell me what the damn Ninth Amendment said. [laughter]
S'pose there might be a reason for that?

Question #4: Sir, sir, sirdoes that negate the First Amendment?

Ward Churchill: No, no, wait a minute; let's get an answer to it.

Audience Member: Basically it says that whatever rights were not given to
federal government are given to the states.

Ward Churchill: Actually, wrong, beep. [laughter] What it says, in very
close paraphrase, is that all rights not otherwise enumerated herein that are
inherent in people are retained by them, OK? You can have a real entertaining
time looking at the nature of those rights as articulated, and it can be
rather nebulous and it can be debatable, but I'll tell you one place you can
look where it's not debatable at all and that's in black letter legal
articulation. That goes to human rights, particularly the articulation of
international human rights that take the form of ratified treaties. Under
Article Six of the Constitution of the United States, those are the supreme
law of the land, and among them, are fundamental human dignity, OK? And
celebration of the conditions that I was describing as pertaining to native
people as an outcome of the process initiated by Christopher Columbus,
celebrating that guy in any respect at all is a celebration of those
conditions. That's a denial of fundamental human dignity, that's a denial of
my Ninth Amendment rights and you don't have a right to do that, and you
know exactly what you're doing. [applause]

This exchange recalled an earlier Belmont
Club post which said:

The implicit assumption underlying this discourse is that "we" --
and not you -- ask the questions. ...  As Robert Kaplan pointed out in The
Media and Medievalism, the most powerful tool of totalitarianism is to don
the guise of righteousness and assume "the right to question and to
demand answers, the right to judge and condemn, and the right to pardon and
show mercy." It is in the end an attempt to usurp the wellsprings of
legitimacy.

From that acceptance a tyranny follows from which even the dead have no
escape. The victims of the World Trade Center may have spent their last moments
imagining that they would be avenged. Wrong. Society cannot even undertake to
preserve their memory from those who would call them "little Eichmanns".
What is at stake is not even the remembrance. To paraphrase another Churchill,
it is the universal human experience to be forgotten; but what is at stake now
is incomparably greater: the ability to remember who we are, and to prevent, for
those who trusted us on that September day, the extinction of their light, their
memory and their story.