zenpundit.com

[by Mark Safranski, a.k.a. “zen“]

The Last of the President’s Men by Bob Woodward

Last of the President’s Men is a short but revealing work by Bob Woodward, the prolific author on American presidents who returns full circle to the subject that made Woodward a celebrity journalist, Richard Nixon and Watergate. Specifically, Last of the President’s Men is about the relationship between Richard Nixon and Alexander Butterfield, the man who revealed to the world Nixon’s secret White House taping system which ultimately led to Nixon’s resignation under the sure threat of impeachment. Butterfield, who unsuccessfully attempted a book of his own, is virtually Woodward’s co-author here and it is Butterfield’s voluminous personal papers, carted out from his White House office against the rules and hidden away for decades, that serve as the evidentiary basis of this book.

Aside from the precise description of how the taping system came to be installed in the Oval Office, a task Nixon’s feared chief of staff, H.R. Haldeman, delegated to Butterfield, the focus is on Butterfield’s role as a top aide to both Nixon and Haldeman, a post to which Butterfield ascended only with considerable difficulty after first navigating Richard Nixon’s neurotic quirks, becoming in essence, “Haldeman’s Haldeman”.  Butterfield does not come across as an entirely admirable character. Like Mark Felt who in turning informer during Watergate had acted out of frustrated ambition, Alexander Butterfield’s betrayal of Richard Nixon had less to do with safeguarding the Constitution from an out of control president than the reaction of an unappreciated servant who had noted every slight and had nursed his grievances.

What shines through in the story is how truly weird and brittle Nixon had become in dealing with other human beings by the time he had reached the presidency. It is very difficult to reconcile the Richard Nixon of The Last of the President’s Men who had paralyzing anxiety attacks over working with – or even meeting- new staff with the Nixon who wrangled with lawyers, FBI agents and fellow Congressmen in investigating Alger Hiss, who forcefully debated Nikita Khrushchev or who remained steady when his limousine was attacked by a Communist mob in Venezuela. Perhaps Nixon grew worse with age or perhaps as president, Nixon finally had the means to keep unwanted people – and that would be nearly everyone – at bay. The portrait painted by Woodward of Richard Nixon is of a desperately lonely, misanthropic figure, inept at and pained by normal social relations to such an extent that he kept even his wife and children at a strange remove.

Yet Nixon had his gifts and even Woodward allows this, particularly his “strategic mind” which Woodward credits for Nixon managing to retain to this day, admirers. Nixon, for all his social awkwardness (which in sections is  downright painful to read and I speak as someone deeply versed in things Nixon) had a penetrating intelligence that let him understand the board and the players, the moves they might make and their strengths and weaknesses of which Nixon might take advantage. Had Richard Nixon not outsmarted himself with the taping system that Butterfield meticulously oversaw, he most likely would have prevailed in Watergate over his enemies and left office after two full terms. Nixon was far smarter than his critics gave him credit at the time and far more ruthlessly manipulative than his defenders are willing to concede to this day.

The Last of the President’s Men is fast read but an interesting one. Recommended.

[ by Charles Cameron — in which the Islamic State is nicely viewed through the lens of WB Yeats ]
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My review of Jessica Stern & JM Berger‘s book, ISIS: State of Terror, just came out in tbe Takshashila Institution‘s magazine, Pragati. Here’s a teaser..

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Things fall apart, the centre cannot hold,
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are filled with passionate intensity.

– WB Yeats, The Second Coming

In the closing pages of ISIS: the State of Terror, Jessica Stern and JM Berger quote Yeats’ celebrated poem and comment: “It is hard to imagine a terrible avatar of passionate intensity more purified than the ISIS. More than even al Qaeda, the first terror of the twenty-first century, ISIS exists as an outlet for the worst — the most base an horrific impulses of humanity, dressed in fanatic pretexts of religiosity that have been gutted of all nuance and complexity. And yet, if we lay claim to the role of ‘best’, then Yeats condemns us as well, and rightly so. It is difficult to detect a trace of conviction in the world’s attitude toward the Syrian civil war and the events that followed in Iraq…”

Stern and Berger suggest that in Yeats’ poem, “the reality of the world is distilled to the razor-sharp essence that the best poetry provides”. Indeed the poem and their comments on it, captures the essence of both their book and of the situation we find ourselves in.

Yeats in his poem writes “The blood-dimmed tide is loosed”. It would be hard to find a more apt description for the IS’ video of the twenty-one Coptic Christians beheaded on the Libyan shores of the Mediterranean, their blood mingling with the tide, than these few words written a century earlier. Yeats writes “The worst are filled with passionate intensity”. This intensity is something we need to come to terms with. And how better explain the increasing sectarianism in the Middle East, than with the simple words, “The centre cannot hold?” Finally, Yeats’ vision is an overtly apocalyptic one, as the poem’s title, The Second Coming, eloquently testifies.

In understanding that intensity, three words describe the major strands with respect to the ISIS: barbaric, viral, and eschatological. The barbaric nature of IS behavior is not a spontaneous eruption, but a calculated move away from al Qaeda’s more subdued approach, premised on Abu Bakr al-Naji’s book, The Management of Savagery, which describes, according to its subtitle, “the most critical stage through which the Ummah will pass”. Al-Zarqawi, the leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq and the revered forerunner of today’s Islamic State, was heavily influenced by Naji’s tract, as is IS to this day, as Stern and Berger make clear. Indeed, to quote a phrase from within the book, their book itself might have been subtitled The Marketing of Savagery.

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To read the whole review, please visit the review on Pragati.

[ by Charles Cameron — capturing items no longer at their original links ]
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I’m grateful to the Internet Archive for still holding copies of web-pages I occasionally want to link to, but which have disappeared from their original URLs. I’m reposting a couple of them here, and will use the “Materials from the Archive” beading for any others that come along.

First, from The [US] Air force Research Institute site, my review of Jim Lacey‘s Terrorist’s Call to Global Jihad…

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A Terrorist’s Call to Global Jihad: Deciphering Abu Musab al-Suri’s Islamic Jihad Manifesto

Jim Lacey’s Terrorist’s Call to Global Jihad is an abridged translation (from 1,600 to 200 pages) of the premier contemporary manual of jihad, Abu Musab al-Suri’s Call to Global Islamic Resistance (Da‘wat al-muqawamah al-islamiyyah al-‘alamiyyah). US Joint Forces Command sponsored this book and two others as part of the Terrorist Perspective Project, which aims to allow “joint warfighters to get inside the terrorists’ decision cycle” by understanding the “mind of the jihadi movement.” The other members of the trilogy, all edited by Lacey and all published by the Naval Institute Press in 2008, include The Terrorist Perspectives Project: Strategic and Operational Views of Al Qa’ida and Associated Movements, which provides an overall synthesis of jihadist thought, and The Canons of Jihad: Terrorists’ Strategy for Defeating America, which supports this synthesis by offering selections from a variety of important jihadist texts. Thus, taken together, the three books offer a background in jihadist thought, some significant historical and near-contemporary readings from that tradition, and a detailed study of its most significant single document. In many ways, Jim Lacey is an appropriate choice as editor of Terrorist’s Call to Global Jihad given his position as an analyst with the Institute for Defense Analyses and his experience as an infantry officer and  a journalist for Time magazine, embedded with the 101st Airborne during the invasion of Iraq.

Al-Suri is also the subject of Architect of Global Jihad: The Life of Al-Qa’ida Strategist Abu Mus’ab al-Suri, a biography by Norwegian scholar Brynjar Lia of the Norwegian Defense Research Establishment. That book complements Terrorist’s Call to Global Jihad by offering us a portrait of the man and an unabridged translation of two key chapters from al-Suri’s work. In the context of other jihadist literature, al-Suri’s Call to Global Islamic Resistance is a major event. In their article “Stealing Al Qaeda’s Playbook” (Studies in Conflict and Terrorism, June 2006), Jarret Brachman and William McCants write that “as the author of a massive handbook on global insurgency—or, as he calls it, ‘the remedy for the U.S. disease’—Mustafa Setmarian Nasar [i.e., al-Suri] has written his way into the intellectual heart of today’s jihadi-Salafi movement.” An individual named “Bearer of the Sword,” posting a comment about the Fort Hood shootings on the English language Ansarnet forum, called al-Suri “the greatest military theoretician our Ummah have had in this age.” Clearly, Lacey and Lia are introducing us to a major treatise on contemporary jihadism.

Biographically speaking, Lacey’s portrait of al-Suri is brief, but he quotes a memorable remark from CNN journalist Peter Bergen, who contacted al-Suri for a celebrated interview with bin Laden: “He seemed to be a very intelligent guy, a very well informed guy, and a very serious guy. . . . He was certainly more impressive than bin Laden.” Prior to his capture in Quetta, Pakistan, in October 2005, Suri received military training from the Iraqi and Egyptian militaries, served as an instructor in the Afghan-Arab camps in Afghanistan during the late 1980s, lived in Spain and the United Kingdom in the 1990s, and served as a media liaison for al-Qaeda in Afghanistan.

Lacey suggests that al-Suri’s work is comparable to Hitler’s Mein Kampf, and Lia terms it “the most significant written source in the strategic studies literature on al-Qa’ida.” Obviously, it is crucial to understand what Lacey offers us of al-Suri’s work and what he omits. The preface lays out the book’s program: “Recognizing that 1,600-page documents of densely written ‘jihadi thought’ would deter all but the most dedicated analyst, Lacey has produced this condensed version and translation of al-Suri’s work capturing the essence of his thoughts.” What follows is an analysis of the jihadist current, beginning with al-Suri’s own experiences in Syria (1980), passing via Madrid (1991) and London (1996) to Afghanistan (1997–2001), and following through to include the US invasion of Iraq (2003–4)—presented as background for the “third generation” of mujahideen “created by the events of September (9/11/2001), the occupation of Iraq and the apex of the Palestinian intifada.” Chapters explore the status of Muslims today, sharia rulings appropriate to the situation, and a history of jihad from 1990 onwards (in three chapters), omitting a major discussion of al-Qaeda, which Lacey deems inappropriate since (1) it would require book-length treatment and (2) the war on that front is ongoing.  He closes with chapters on the doctrinal foundations of jihad, sharia-based decision making, and the role of the media.

The book does suffer from one serious omission. As mentioned in the preface, “Where appropriate, we have also removed most of the repetitive theological justifications undergirding these beliefs.” The final pages of Call to Global Islamic Resistance are what Jean-Pierre Filiu terms “a hundred-page apocalyptic tract” concerning “signs of the end times.” Sadly, both Lacey and Lia pay little attention to this specifically Mahdist element. In al-Suri’s reading of jihadist history, “one event brings another event and then another, leading inevitably to the arrival of the Mahdi.” Given the importance of apocalyptic expectation as a potential (and potent) force multiplier, we await the English translation of Filiu’s L’Apocalypse dans l’Islam for further insight into a serious and hitherto neglected part of al-Suri’s message.

Lacey’s Terrorist’s Call to Global Jihad opens a significant window on the jihadist mind-set. However, downplaying the religious doctrine that al-Suri includes alongside his strategic guidance blocks our view of the importance of religion in persuading people to follow that guidance.

Charles Cameron

Forestville, California

A Terrorist’s Call to Global Jihad: Deciphering Abu Musab al-Suri’s Islamic Jihad Manifesto edited by Jim Lacey. Naval Institute Press, 2008, 205 pp., $19.00.