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Previously, I took a look at an academic paper by David Martin Jones and M.L.R. Smith that engaged in a critical analysis of COIN theory and found fault with its underlying premises. Now, I would like to examine the rebuttal offered by John Nagl and Brian Burton of CNAS.

David Martin Jones* and M.L.R. Smith**. “Whose Hearts and Whose Minds? The Curious Case of Global Counter-Insurgency”. The Journal of Strategic Studies. Vol. 33, No. 1, 81-121, February 2010.

*University of Queensland, Australia. ** King’s College London, UK.

John A. Nagl and Brian M. Burton. “Thinking Globally and Acting Locally: Counterinsurgency Lessons from Modern Wars – A Reply to Jones and Smith.  The Journal of Strategic Studies. Vol. 33, No. 1, 123-138, February 2010.

Center for New American Security (CNAS), Washington, DC, USA.

The rebuttal of Nagl and Burton, at a mere 15 pages including bibliography, was a more persuasive and focused argument than the COIN opus offered by Jones and Smith. Their tone was less academic and more practitioner-oriented, both in terms of policy shapers and soldiers in the field. Strategist Dr. Thomas P.M. Barnett, thought the entire debate was “too inside baseball” but nonetheless, that Nagl and Burton had the better of the exchange:

It is a sadly ghettoized argument–very inside baseball. And I am dismayed to see it happening in a sub-field that should be more inclusive than the usual war-discussed-within-the-context-of-war with the added dimension of the fight for political control in developing/failed economies (the whole national liberation bit, references to Maoism, etc.). So we’re still basically treated to two legs of the stool: security with the addition of politics/culture, but the economics remains a no-go-land that elicits the mention of jobs on occasion (the assumption usually being, public-sector financed with aid), but that’s it.

….I thought Nagl’s closing comment in response was fine: difference in degree but not kind. The first article reminded me of nuclear targeting theory, it was so esoterically wrapped around itself.

The intellectual insularity to which Tom complains arguably stems from COIN, an operational doctrine, being required to “pinch-hit” as a long-term strategy due to the abdication of responsibility by the civilian political elite to come to a strategic consensus among themselves on the war that would frame our global conflict with radicalized Islamist terror groups and insurgencies and enunciate the objectives we hope to achieve.

This unwillingness or inability of deeply divided USG civilian leaders to effectively, coherently and consistently articulate the nature of the war itself and our adversaries deprives our senior military leaders of appropriate policy guidance in designing campaigns and carrying out military operations. It is also a partial explanation for the determined resistance of COIN policy advocates like John Nagl and David Kilcullen to address the religious ideology dimension raised by Jones and Smith.

In “Thinking Globally and Acting Locally: Counterinsurgency Lessons from Modern Wars – A Reply to Jones and Smith”, Burton and Nagl firmly showcase “Neo-COIN’s” formidibile strengths as policy but cannot escape its’ enduring weakness. Here most concisely:

“Insurgencies, like other forms of armed conflict are better defined by methodologies than by ideologies. While causes change regularly, the fundamentals of insurgent strategy remain relatively constant”

A powerful throwing down of the theoretical gauntlet. It’s an appealing argument rooted in pragmatism, and to some degree, empiricism, becoming more true as one moves down to the level of small unit counterinsurgency and outward from jihadism’s core leadership toward insurgency’s marginal adherents of convenience, the “$10 a day Taliban” and Kilcullen’s “accidental guerrillas”. While it is the case that occasionally in COIN we have actions of “strategic corporals”, most of the warfighting concerns of NCO’s and junior officers will be tactical and eminently practical a majority of the time.

Earlier, Burton and Nagl expounded at greater length and specificity:

But this argument [by Jones and Smith] overemphasizes the superficial features of conflict. While specific characteristics of individual insurgencies have changed with local conditions and the technology of the day, the fundamental dynamics of insurgency remain largely the same. The essential competition remains between the existing power and the insurgents for influence and ultimately control over populations. The insurgent ’cause’, of which extremist religion can be a component, is generalized and malleable in order to mobilize the broadest possible base of followers.

….the fundamental dynamic of any insurgency is that, as David Kilcullen aptly describes, it needs the people to act in certain ways.[It] needs their sympathy, acquiescence and silence, or simply their reactions to provocation, in order to further [its] strategy

[Emphasis in original.]

There are pros and cons to this theoretical position. It is always a good idea to consider who an intended doctrine is written for; instrumentally, COIN doctrine is foremost for the soldiers who are expected to wage that kind of battle on the behalf of the rest of us. Only secondarily, is COIN doctrine intended as a kind of policy talisman for the government officials, politicians, journalists, academics and bloggers whom it has entranced or repelled. It is important to remember, it critiquing the evolving panoply that is USG COIN policy that the fundamental criterion of measurement is not theoretical niceties but real world results, which have been produced. Not perfection, not instantly, not everything we want plus a pony too, but progress in operational and tactical success. Even some strategic success if stabilization of an Iraqi government holds That weighs heavily on the pro side of the ledger.

The cons are of a different nature.

First, in terms of the Maoist paradigm, classical COIN theory is problematic because it extrapolates only from a very short period of Mao’s career as a guerrilla leader, mostly 1946 -1949 when the political dynamic in China’s civil war was a bilateral conflict between Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist government and Mao ZeDong Communist Party and Red Army. This was a period when Mao, courtesy of the Soviets, had suddenly inherited a great quantity of Japanese arms and could field divisions of semi-regulars to fight conventional battles in addition to insurgent units. Most of China’s long civil war was actually heterogeneously anarchic and Mao’s Communist armies were usually much inferior not only to those of the Kuomintang, but to those armies fielded by many provincial warlords and certainly inferior to the invading Imperial Japanese Army, which Mao strove to avoid fighting whenever possible. Much of Mao’s legend as a military genius is political myth constructed after the fact, and his ultimate success in China owed at least as much to Chiang, Hirohito, Stalin and Truman as it did to Mao’s real but frequently exaggerated political and military talent for insurgency.

Vietnam, another historical touchstone of COIN, acheived the bilateral conflict dynamic described in COIN theory only because initially the Vietcong, on the orders of Hanoi, tacitly supported Ngo Dinh Diem’s regime by eschewing military activities while Diem and Nhu systematically destroyed or weakened other potential military/political rivals to the Communists in South Vietnam. Namely, General Ba’s Hoa-Hao, the Binh Xuyen gangs and the Buddhist political clergy ( the Vietnamese Nationalist Party had previously been decimated by the French in 1930). Russia after WWI, Lebanon in the 1980’s, Somalia, Afghanistan and the Congo in the 1990’s are others examples of societies devolving into anarchic, social darwinian, violence before some became conflicts that are somewhat recognizable in COIN theory.

The heterodox Iraqi insurgency of the “surge”, where Neo-COIN found its proving ground, is really the recent historical rule and not the exception that classical Maoist COIN theory might lead you to believe. The theory in other words, is based upon flawed premises of a bilateral conflict. John Robb’s “open–source insurgency” concept gets closer to the probable reality of future COIN wars.

Secondly, the strong dismissal of religious drivers by Nagl under his “Kilcullen Doctrine” is tailor made for “disaggregating” the accidental guerrillas at the tactical level, but it seriously misleads us in understanding or effectively countering the “professional guerrillas” at the strategic or the moral levels of war. Instead, it blinds us by projecting our own elite culture’s secular assumption of religion as merely a cynical and antiquated facet of politics on to adversaries for whom such thought is both fundamentally alien and entirely blasphemous. Such a position is what ideologists of  jihad  argue that they are taking up arms against in the first place.

Erasing the religious or ideological motivation makes incisive analysis of the adversaries strategic decision-making impossible because it removes the driver for which he left home, comfort, family for the danger and privation of war. How can we walk in our enemies shoes, get inside his head, if we deny what is in his head has any relevance?

This position makes no sense on the strategic level. Ignoring the influence of Islamism is a prescription for errors and missed opportunities. It is a politically comfortable position for COIN theorists because our political elite are deeply enamored of a PC ideology that provides an excuse to punish and destroy the careers of officials who challenge the orthodoxy of multiculturalism with frank discussion of facts. Avoiding the question of Islamism in front of politicians greases the skids for COIN. Have you heard many members of Congress make a robust defense of liberal, democratic, capitalist, open societies as a morally superior alternative to autocratic Islamism lately? No? Well now you understand why the COIN gurus are not doing it either. Powerful people in Washington and the media do not want to hear thart message.

Yet without confronting Islamism and the attraction of its call to a dissatisfied “pious middle class” in the Islamic world, we can hardly hope to bring the war to a satisfactory close, much less victory.

Charles Cameron, my regular guest blogger, is the former Senior Analyst with The Arlington Institute and Principal Researcher with the Center for Millennial Studies at Boston University. He specializes in forensic theology, with a deep interest in millennial, eschatological and apocalyptic religious sects of all stripes.  Here Charles begins a three part series entitled “CONFLICT OF COMMANDS”.

Conflict of Commands I: Intro

by Charles Cameron

What happens when people in the military find themselves torn between the requirements of two chains of command?

I came to this question because two of the topics I have recently addressed here — that of Major Hasan and the Fort Hood shootings, and that of Major Luckert and his monograph on the risk of millennial beliefs driving US foreign policy — have this much in common: that in both cases the issue of obedience to military orders when they are perceived to be in conflict with divine commands came up.

Having stumbled on this correspondence between two otherwise fairly remote incidents, I began to notice similar elements cropping up elsewhere.

Aha, a pattern worth pursuing! I thought.

I have phrased my inquiry in terms of “two chains of command” without specifying that one of them is military and one divine, though that will be the general rule, because there are also instances where the potentially supervening command comes from international law or individual conscience .

I have decided to approach this issue in a three-post series.  This post introduces the issue, the second post consists of a series of quotes that illustrate it, the third post zeroes in on the issue as it affects Muslims in the US armed forces, and contains a link to a significant MEMRI post on the subject, and the full text of a US Department of State document, both of them dating from shortly after 9-11 — and as far as I can tell, not referenced previously in our post-Fort Hood thinking.

My overall purpose in this sequence of three posts is to show that the dilemma of a double chain-of-command is a prominent feature of a variety of different contemporary situations, some of them religious in nature, some revolving around other moral or legal concerns. 

*

The second post in the series deserves some commentary, but I wanted to restrict it to the body of the quotes themselves rather than attempting to comment on individual quotes.

I have culled them from a wide variety of sources — friend and foe alike, moderate and extremist, local and far-flung.  I have included sources from Iran, Israel, El Salvador, Pakistan, Burma, and within the United States from an Aryan Nations “archbishop” (in an appendix, see below) to the sitting President — and in some cases I have included quotes from opposite ends of a given political spectrum.  On the whole, I have tried to avoid any explicit patterning and just skip around from one nation, part of the globe or religion to another, although in the case of three different “takes ” on Maj. Stuckert’s monograph, I  have kept the three together for easier comprehension. I do not claim to have been exhaustive, and make no claims of sympathy or disapproval for the individual views expressed.

Indeed, my hope is that as we move through the different examples, many if not most of my readers will find themselves in sympathy with first one side then the other in terms of the need to obey military orders in general, and the need to disobey them in certain situations. 

I imagine, for instance, that the majority of my readers will in general disapprove of inserting a divine obligation between a soldier and his or her plain duty of obedience to orders from a superior officer — but that in the case of the current Iranian government ordering members of its military to attack crowds of protesters, our sympathies are liable to be on the other side of the equation.  In this way, the diversity of the instances may facilitate a deeper understanding of the nuances of the question.

I would also like to state quite categorically that I am not in the business of making “moral equivalences” here. The fact that I juxtapose a variety of quotations in which the issue of divided lines of command comes up in no way means that I equate the principled opposition to state brutality of one quotation with the wilder reaches of conspiracist rhetoric in another.

The final quote in the body of the second post is of particular interest, since it alludes to the theory of Preference Falsification — the only theoretical model for making predictive analysis of this type of conflict that I have seen.

Please note that as an appendix, I have attached two quotes that only indirectly address the issue of conflict of commands — a white nationalist quote, immediately followed by a principled quote about militia movement members “disgust at the genocidal fantasies in white supremacist discourse” — because I believe it is important to be aware just how far the rhetoric of hatred can go, and just how firmly it can be rebutted. 

*

The double trouble of Sgt. Hasan Akbar and his influence on Major Nidal Hasan is worth exploring in a little more depth, because Sgt Akbar, who tossed grenades into a tent in Kuwait killing two officers, seems to have been something of a research project for Major Hasan, who apparently asked about Sgt Akbar in an intercepted email to Sheikh al-Awlaki in Yemen:

One e-mail in particular is getting attention from investigators now.

In that e-mail – which the Washington FBI office didn’t see – Hasan mentioned the case of Sgt. Hasan Akbar. He is the Muslim soldier who threw grenades at fellow troops in Kuwait at the beginning of the Iraq war. The attack killed two soldiers and wounded 14 others.

In the e-mail to the imam, Hasan asked whether Akbar would have been considered a shaheed – or hero – for his actions. Given what happened later at Fort Hood, investigators say this e-mail now appears suggestive. But at the time it was not conclusive. Investigators in San Diego weren’t alarmed by the query because it appeared to be consistent with research Hasan was doing at Walter Reed. The Akbar case was thought to be at the center of his research.

For an Army psychiatrist counseling soldiers returning from, or about to enter, combat in Iraq and Afghanistan — and perhaps with a heavier than average caseload of Muslims, with whom he would share a common language — researching jurisprudential aspects of the Sgt Akbar case would be natural.

As Juan Zarate, Bush’s deputy National Security Advisor quoted in the article cited above pointed out:

It is very difficult in the moment I think for analysts and agents and his cohorts and coworkers to piece this together and see they had a ticking time bomb on their hands.

In fact, as we’ll see in the third post in this series, Major Hasan needn’t have troubled the Sheikh in Yemen for an opinion.  The State Department had posted a note on this very topic in October 2001.

But he did contact the Sheikh, and the Sheikh presumably eulogized Akbar’s action, as he was later to eulogize that of Maj. Hasan.

And as I suggested recently in a comment on David Ronfeldt’s fine blog, we can see with the 20/20 hindsight that Juan Zarate also mentioned, that whatever was true regarding the double chain of command that Sgt Akbar was under, which Maj. Hasan was on the face of it legitimately studying, might also hold true for Maj. Hasan himself — for whom the issue was both a research topic and a personal dilemma.

So the FBI gives a pass to the research topic — and the personal dilemma gives rise to the tragic shootings at Ft. Hood.

*

One final point:

The problem of conflict of commands has its origin in religion, so it makes sense to take quick note of the theological basics.

The shema or daily faith statement of the Jewish people states “the Lord our God, the Lord is one”, while the first Commandment in the Jewish scripture, the Torah, declares “You shall have no other gods before Me”.  The central tenet of Islam, similarly, is tawhid, the unicity of God as expressed in the first part of the profession of faith or shahada, “There is no God but God” — while to treat any person or other part of creation with the respect due to that God is shirk, the unforgivable sin.

From a secular perspective, these may seem high-flown philosophical and devotional matters, but for the believer they may also have “real-world” consequences, in a way that is prefigured in Christ’s observation, recorded in Matthew 6.24, “No man can serve two masters: for either he will hate the one, and love the other; or else he will hold to the one, and despise the other…”

But here we are entering the terrain of Part II of this essay: the collection of quotes.

A big hat tip to John Robb for finding and posting this gem. I guess Nazism, the French and Russian Revolutions, the Spartacus Revolt and several world religions could all have been ignited by an inspired moment of interpretive dance:

Charles Cameron, my regular guest blogger, is the former Senior Analyst with The Arlington Institute and Principal Researcher with the Center for Millennial Studies at Boston University. He specializes in forensic theology, with a deep interest in millennial, eschatological and apocalyptic religious sects of all stripes.

High Conceptual Thinkers

by Charles Cameron

This isn’t the first time I’ve seen Eric Drexler’s advice on this topic, but unless Zen mentioned it previously, or perhaps John Robb, I don’t know where I’d have seen it before. This is the part that gets to me:

Read and skim journals and textbooks that (at the moment) you only half understand. Include Science and Nature.

Don’t avoid a subject because it seems beyond you – instead, read other half-understandable journals and textbooks to absorb more vocabulary, perspective, and context, then circle back.

Each time I see that, I have to laugh. Here’s the same tale, told from the arts and humanities side of the house…

*

When I was a lad, they sent me to Wellington College, the private boarding school that prepares officers’ sons for admission to Sandhurst, and the life of a British army officer. I was not that way inclined, to be honest, and soon found myself a nice corner of the library with a comfortable chair, which I made my own.

I scanned the books in that area more closely than most, and one set of books caught my eye. It was the set of six volumes of the Eranos Yearbooks.

Eranos was a yearly gathering in Switzerland, at which CG Jung more or less presided, and at which his scholar friends read learned papers to each other at the highest levels of their own expertise.

These books night as well have been in Ge’ez, as far as I was concerned. They talked about things like “Theriomorphic Spirit Symbolism in Fairy Tales” (which is actually about gods in wild animal form, Ganesh with his elephant’s head for example), “Aeschylus: The Eumenides” about the Greek tragedy of that name, “The Spirit of Science” (that would be Erwin Schodinger speaking, which will give you an idea of the caliber of invitees) — and those are just picked from the first of the six volumes.

And how these folks went at their discussions! If a nice quote from Horace was in order, Latin’s the language. French, yes, German too, for Kant or Nietzsche. That’s okay. But Coptic? Egyptian hieroglyphs? Diagrams culled from Kabbalistic treatises about how there’s a waterfall of grace that falls constantly from G*d through ten distinct steps to the creation we inhabit, and how to climb carefully back up before the Throne?

Scattered through the six volumes were Jung, Schrodinger, Rahner, Kerenyi, Zimmer, Puesch, Quispel (between them, these two covered the waterfront on Gnostic studies), Massignon, Corbin (ditto for Islam and its mystics and martyrs), Neumann, Eliade, Tillich, Suzuki (he brought Zen to the west), Danielou, Zimmer, van der Leeuv, Wilhelm (he brought the west the I Ching), LL Whyte… I don’t believe Wolfgang Pauli ever   attended, but 400 of his dreams were discussed there under cover of anonymity by CG Jung.

I had not the least idea what these folks were on about, maybe a third of the nouns and verbs were nouns and verbs I’d never met before, and maybe a sixth of those weren’t even in my trusty Concise Oxford Dictionary: this was true scholarship, and I was aware I was in paradise.

I left that school, thankfully, and went up to Christ Church, Oxford, where I studied Theology, and learned early on that my interest was not in studying that “particular subject as if you had to pass a test on it” — I scraped by Oxford’s intense finals with what was called a “gentleman’s Third” — and I have spent the rest of my life searching out scholarship and experiences having to do with inspiration, intuition and imagination.

I’ve found myself trotting around the globe, studying now Zen then Hinduism then Lakota shamanism, at last returning to the European west via Jung and Hermann Hesse, singing Gregorian Chant under the baton of the choir master at Solesmes, meditating, sweating my buckskin out (as they say) in “stone people’s lodges”, teaching creativity in the Los Angeles atelier of a master artist, Jan Valentin Saether — and somewhere around the age of forty, I discovered the six volumes of the Eranos Yearbooks again in a second hand bookstore, and once more read them.

This time, I found they were heady but somewhat comprehensible reading, covering the entire extent of the studies to which my fascinations had led me in the intervening years — Alchemy, the Gnostics, Sufism, Zen, the Mystery cults, poetics, comparative religion, cultural anthropology, depth psychology, symbolism, the philosophy of science.

And that roll call of contributors was the roll call of half the modern masters in each of those fields.

I have the hope that I shall live to be seventy five, and read those papers as though a peer of those who assembled by the lake there in Eranos at Jung’s invitation: that those miraculous inkings of paper will at last make almost perfect sense to me, and that maybe, perhaps, it might be, may it be so — insh’allah and the creek don’t rise — I might even be able to write the odd footnote updating a passage here or there with my own insights.

Science and Nature didn’t get a look in. For me, it was Eranos all the way.

And one more story, unrelated to Eranos, but still describing my time at Wellington:

I seem to be one of those High Conceptual sorts the Eide’s are talking about — eccentric, to be sure — and I vaguely recall being hauled into the Headmaster’s office at Wellington and being accused of plagiarism, because I had written a fifteen page paper on the Contortionists of Saint Medard, the Jansenists, and Pascal. Here we go again — prior to that, I had submittedeach week three page essays on assigned topics such as “The football game” or “What I did on vacation” — but this week my English master was sick, and had   phoned in to say we could write about whatever we wanted. I’d taken him at his word, and spread my wings — and lucky for me, I could point out that the College library didn’t have enough material on the subject of the Jansenists for me to have plausibly plagiarized my essay.

Why were the strange people of Saint Medard so interesting to this young lad? Because they contorted and tortured their bodies like yogis, in what was (as far as I could tell) the first experiential attempt within Christendom to prove the hypothesis of the triumph of mind over body.

*

Now that’s all a bit selfish and introspective by way of background. But it lets you know the kinship I feel for Drexler’s crafty strategy, and likewise for the Eide’s notion of (I hesitate to write the words) “High Conceptual Thinkers”.

I want to make two points about HCTs here.

The first is to suggest that what Zen calls seeing meta-patterns is pretty much analogical / metaphorical thinking (ie lateral vs linear): the poet’s spécialité de la maison.

The second is that there exists a great project — great as in the Olympics, great as in the search for the Grand Unified Theory in physics, great as in the Italian Renaissance — for the assembly of all human cultural and scientific knowledge in a single architecture, in the form of the conceptual Glass Bead Game of Hermann Hesse.

Lewis Lapham,  in a Harper’s editorial back in 1997 said he expected the editors at Wired would soon discover Hesse’s book, and that Microsoft would want to name software in its honor.

It hasn’t happened yet. I hope it does. And that’s another story, for another day.

Charles Cameron, my regular guest blogger, is the former Senior Analyst with The Arlington Institute and Principal Researcher with the Center for Millennial Studies at Boston University. He specializes in forensic theology, with a deep interest in millennial, eschatological and apocalyptic religious sects of all stripes.

One blogger’s rant to another: for AbuM

by Charles Cameron

Abu Muqawama seemed a reasonably nice and interesting guy, so I invited him in.  He came into my living room and was holding forth on Afghanistan and Iraq and matters military, and he seemed well informed.  I was glad I’d invited him in, and from time to time I found myself over in that corner of the room, and I listened. 

I think it’s important to learn from reasonably well-informed people, so I invite them into my home.  That’s the basic exchange that happens when you write a worthwhile blog: people invite you into their homes to listen to you.

When I invited Abu Muqawama into my room the other day — Andrew Exum, of the Center for a New American Security, that is — he happened to be talking about Mosab Hassan Yousef, the son of a top Hamas sheikh who converted to Christianity a while back, and was run as an inside agent by the Mossad for years.  Yousef has a new book coming out, and that’s why Exum and others have been taking an interest in him this week.

I turned to Exum and told him my own thoughts on the matter, but Exum didn’t respond, which is not ideal, but he’s a busy guy, okay — and anyway we were interrupted at that point.  Unfortunately, Exum seems to have had a drunken friend with him when he came into my living room this time, a ranting, homophobic drunk who spewed comments across my Bokhara rug (it’s not like it’s a museum piece you know, but I like it, I like it) such as…  well, let me quote his comment on Yousef himself, his conversion and his spying:

He’s probably celebrating Ask and Tell, say it proud, say it loud, it’s raining men in the Military. Hell, he’s probably volunteered to be the first gay in a submarine, along with all the pregnant sea persons. Gay. He probably saw Brokeback Mountain one too many times in that Israeli prison. Them Jews are smart, making gays out of Islamist, letting them sodomize each other.

Utterly charming. The only problem being, it’s not the sort of conversation I really want in my living room.

It is, Andrew Exum, should you ever read this, distinctly uninvited.

If I lived in a rowdy bar, perhaps, and slept in the sawdust during the day?  But I don’t. 

There are, by one count, around 15 such comments on that particular post on Exum’s blog that — what shall I say? will make me think twice about inviting Exum over to my place unless I can find a grownup to vouch for him first?

Look, there was another commenter on that particular blog post who told Andrew — if he was even listening — that that he was letting his blog “be ruined by not IP banning the moron”.  And I excerpted that phrase and put it in quotes because the commenter was plainly annoyed by this time and his own language was getting a little salty.

I think he had a point.  Exum wants into the living rooms and offices of people like myself: that’s why he has a blog.  Exum works for CNAS, which is an interesting group with friends in fairly high places, like Michele Flournoy.  Their logo is atop Exum’s blog these days, though I remember when it was just this young soldier’s blog, and no less interesting for lack of official sponsorship.

But look, today it is part of the web-presence of the much touted Center for a New American Security, so they’re in my living room, too.  And you might think they’d have a concern for their reputation.

I’m a reasonably civil chap — brought up in England, and a bit old school, you know — so I fished up their email address and asked them very politely if they would remove comments like the one from “Bubba loves them Sabra girls”.

Somehow, I don’t see them letting someone stand in their office suite handing our fortune cookies that read “Bubba loves them Sabra girls” — do you?  I don’t want them to think they can encourage that in my home, either.  I tried to tell them that politely via email, but that was almost a week ago, and I don’t think they read all their email.  And almost that long ago, the same comment poster who had complained earlier posted again, this time saying:

Rofl, this is amazing. 1 guy with 15/21 comments in a thread. Exum, you’re being an idiot. I’ve read this blog for well over 3 years now, and this is terrible. You’re letting your blog sink.

It’s truly sad. It would take 2 seconds to moderate this blog.

 He’s right, you know.  Exum isn’t an idiot, but his tolerating this sort of trolling on his blog is idiotic.  Exum would like to make conversation with anyone who’s listening, but he doesn’t appear to be listening himself. 

Look, this is all focused on Abu Muqawama, who doesn’t entirely deserve it.  And I understand: he’s a busy man.  But I love this internets thing, and I happen to think it’s an opportunity for all of us.

There are blogs out there for hatred, blogs for poetry, blogs for discussing issues in Byzantine history or Catholic liturgy, blogs for porn, blogs for someone and the cousins to share photos of their pets and kiddies, lots and lots of blogs.  But within the enormity of the ‘sphere, there’s an opportunity for civilized discourse on matters of significance.

Abu Muqawama aspires to speak in that place, as does Zenpundit, as do I.  We are trying to build a conversation of informed insight across the webs, blog calling to blog, in a project that might make the world a little wiser and less liable to suffer the consequences of ignorance and prejudice.

If, like Abu M, you are a web notable, and you blog — as I see it, you have an opportunity and an obligation.

I want to say this quite clearly, because I invite you and your peers and friends into my living room and into my life, every day:

You have an obligation to listen, as well as speak.  You have an obligation to read the comments in your blog — or if you’re too busy, okay, to have an intern read them for you, and select the best for you to read — and you or your intern have a responsibility to notice when some foul-mouth splashes your pages with regurgitated bile, and to clean up the mess.