James C. Bennett, author of The Anglosphere Challenge (Rowman & Littlefield, 2004), and Michael J. Lotus (who blogs at Chicagoboyz.net as “Lexington Green”), are proud to announce the signing of a contract with Encounter Books of New York to publish their forthcoming book America 3.0.
America 3.0 gives readers the real historical foundations of our liberty, free enterprise, and family life. Based on a new understanding our of our past, and on little known modern scholarship, America 3.0 offers long-term strategies to restore and strengthen American liberty, prosperity and security in the years ahead.
….America 3.0 shows that our current problems can be and must be transcended with a transition to a new America 3.0, based on modern technology, decentralized communities, and self-reliant families, and a reassertion of fiscal responsibility, Constitutionally limited government and free market economics. Ironically the future America 3.0 will in many ways be closer to the original vision of the Founders than the fading America 2.0.
America 3.0 gives readers an accurate, and hopeful, assessment of our current crisis. It also spotlights the powerful forces arrayed in opposition to the needed reform. These groups include ideological leftists in media and the academy, politically connected businesses, and the public employees unions. However, as powerful as these groups are, they have become vulnerable as the external conditions change. A correct understanding of our history and culture, which America 3.0 provides, shows their opposition will be futile. The new, pro-freedom, mass political movement, which is aligned with the true needs and desires of Americans, is going to succeed….
On behalf of all of us at zenpundit.com, I would like to extend our sincere condolences to Dr. James Joyner of Outside the Beltway and the Atlantic Council and his family on the sudden passing of his wife, Kimberly Joyner. Our thoughts are with you in this most difficult of times.
On that fatwa against nuclear weapons: it just doesn’t seem to be available anywhere. I haven’t looked today, but I have previously, as have others, and it’s not on the interwebs, or seemingly anywhere else.
I agree that it’s an important part of the entire situation, if it exists. One would want to know how far its influence goes in the Iranian government and among the Iranian public.
Conversely, one might want to know why it’s so unavailable. Was it the view of one person, removed by others? Politically unsound for other reasons?
2.
Hi, Cheryl:
I’ve seen a fatwa referenced, but haven’t seen a text (and wouldn’t be able to read it if I did).
I wonder whether the word “fatwa” is being used somewhat loosely here, to refer to a statement by the Supreme Authority, for the guidance of the faithful, but perhaps not issued as a fatwa as such.
Iran’s Statement at IAEA Emergency Meeting describes it as a fatwa, and this AhlulBayt News Agency report calls it a fatwa in the bulleted headline, but refers to it in the “box” as “Imam Khemenei’s [sic] message to the conference on nuclear disarmament in Tehran, that declared weapons of mass destruction as haram (unlawful)” and states that it “was registered as an official UN document on Thursday.”
So that might be one place to look…
3.
Whether or not the text of a formal fatwa exists, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has certainly stated his views on the topic himself and through his emissaries on numerous occasions. Thus Kamal Kharrazi, who was Iran’s Minister of Foreign Affairs at the time, wrote in January 2004 (New Perspectives Quarterly):
Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, has reiterated on several occasions a fatwa prohibiting the production, stockpiling and use of nuclear weapons. He repeated his fatwa most recently in an address Nov. 25. Given the importance of the fatwa institution in Shiite Islam, the broad significance of this should not be underestimated.
In a 5 November commentary in the “Los Angeles Times,” Iranian Ambassador to the United Nations Mohammad Javad Zarif referred to “serious ideological restrictions against weapons of mass destruction, including a religious decree issued by Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran, prohibiting the development and use of nuclear weapons.”
“We believe that the use of nuclear weapons is religiously forbidden,” Foreign Ministry spokesman Hamid Reza Assefi said on 12 September according to state television. “This is the leader’s fatwa [religious decree].”
“The religious verdict of our leader is that using weapons of mass destruction is forbidden, is ‘haram’ [‘unlawful’ in Islam],” Supreme National Security Council official Hussein Musavian said in an 11 September interview that appeared in the 12 September “Financial Times.” “For Iranians, this verdict is much more important than the NPT [Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty].”
More than one year ago, on 25 October 2003, Supreme National Security Council Secretary Hojatoleslam Hassan Rohani told students at Shahrud Industrial University that Khamenei believes nuclear weapons are religiously illegal, IRNA reported.
One can have reservations about Khamenei’s ability to legitimately issue a religious decree, given his questionable theological standing. Nevertheless, as Supreme Leader and commander-in-chief of the armed forces he can ban or permit anything he wants.
4.
Juan Cole addressed the matter of Khamenei’s “ability to legitimately issue a religious decree” in his October 2009 Salon piece, Does Iran really want the bomb?
I was on an email list where someone expressed suspicion of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei’s 2005 fatwa against the possession and use of nuclear weapons by an Islamic state.
One suggestion was that Khamenei is not a real Shiite jurisprudent and has eschewed having followers inside Iran. But, no, Khamenei is a mujtahid or independent jurist and has the standing to issue a fatwa or considered ruling on the law.. A mujtahid may always decline to accept muqallidun or followers, which Khamenei appears to have done for Iranian nationals, without that affecting his legitimate right to issue fatwas. The theory of ijtihad or independent jurisprudential reasoning holds that the law inheres in the reasoning processes of the jurisprudent; whether the jurisprudent has followers or not is irrelevant to the discovery of the law in a particular instance. Moreover, as rahbar or supreme leader,, Khamenei’s pronouncements on such matters might even be seen as a hukm or standing command. Finally, since he sets policy on such matters, what difference, in any case, would it make what exact jurisprudential standing his fatwas enjoy?
The only real question is whether he is lying and insincere.
5.
As to whether it is strange that no published text of a fatwa under his name exists, Mehdi Khalaji writes (in Michael Eisenstadt and Mehdi Khalaji, Nuclear Fatwa: Religion and Politics in Iran’s Proliferation Strategy, a very detailed MERIP Policy Focus offering from this September):
Interestingly, no written texts exist for the Supreme Leader’s fatwas, though Shiite juridical tradition grants equal weight to an oral and written legal opinions-a phenomenon to be discussed further in the next section.
and again:
As such, even though Ayatollah Khamenei has produced no written record on the religious prohibitions pertaining to nuclear weapons, his verbal statements on the subject are considered his religious opinions, or fatwas, and therefore binding on believers.
[ see also Cole above on hukm ]
6.
Khalaji also suggests that Khamenei’s more recent statements have been more flexible, and indeed that it is not uncommon for jurisprudents to change their minds (and “opinions”):
Supreme Leader Khamenei has stated that the production, stockpiling, and use of nuclear weapons are forbidden under Islam. But his recent language on the subject has become more equivocal, emphasizing only the prohibition on their use and not on their production or stockpiling. And should the needs of the Islamic Republic or the Muslim umma change, requiring the use of nuclear weapons, the Supreme Leader could just as well alter his position in response. This means that, ultimately, the Islamic Republic is unconstrained — even by religious doctrine — as it moves toward the possible production and storing of nuclear weapons.
7.
An example of a more recent statement of this sort would be the one reported in this VOA piece from February 2011:
Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei christened a new, Iranian-built warship, as a military band honored him on the ship’s deck. Addressing a crowd of military commanders after the ceremony, he told them that “Islam is opposed to nuclear weapons and that Tehran is not working to build them.”
8.
Putting this in context, Cole in the Salon piece I quoted above suggests that Khamenei may be going for “latency” rather than “possession” – latency having the power of a threat, but not trespassing the limits of actual development allowed under treaty:
Latency is the possession of a nuclear energy program and of reactors, which would allow the production of an atomic bomb on short notice if an extreme danger to national autonomy reared its ugly head. Nuclear latency is sometimes called the ‘Japan option,’ because given its sophisticated scientific establishment and enormous economy, Japan could clearly produce a nuclear weapon on short notice if its government decided to mount a crash program.
9.
As to the question of how far the influence of Khamenei’s opinions go, Khalaji writes:
Iranian nuclear decision-making, therefore, bears the significant imprint of one man’s personality and politics — an imprint that may be unaffected by the will of other men, the decisions of other institutions, or, most ironically, the legal scruples or moral dictates of his own religion.
But the preponderance of evidence — Islamic history in general, specific Shi`i traditions and teachings as well as modern religio-political discourse in Iran – indicates, rather, that the rationality and spirituality of Iranian Mahdism is holding at bay its undeniable jihad aspect. Tehran thus, ironically, finds its potential nuclear policy fettered by Qom: mainstream Shi`i theology does not support violence (nuclear or conventional) in order to precipitate the return of the 12th Imam; furthermore, employing nuclear weapons is verboten in the Mahdi’s absence — except, perhaps, under the rubric of defensive jihad, were Iran itself to be attacked or invaded. Seen in this light, the Islamic Republic’s pursuit of nuclear weapons falls from the overly-alarmist apocalyptic register into a more mundane, and manageable, geopolitical one.
Coming from Dr Furnish, that says a great deal.
10.
And that’s what I have, Cheryl, all. I’m happy to learn more…
Gen. David H. Petraeus, the most recognized military officer of his generation, retires from the Army today after roughly four decades in uniform and a career like no other.
With that in mind, we invited four defense experts to reflect on his record. Some of them have known the general up close, others from afar. To each the question was the same: What is his legacy and how has he shaped the U.S. armed forces?
For some, Petraeus will be remembered as the model statesman-soldier – commander of two wars launched by the United States and chief intellectual author of a counterinsurgency doctrine that advances American interests. But for others, Petraeus will be remembered less for his remarkable accomplishments – which are almost universally admired – than for his association with a U.S. foreign policy that, in their view, is costly, misguided and not always effective.
In other words, the story of Gen. David Petraeus is in many ways the story of America’s wars.
The experts’ submissions – mini-essays of sorts – are below.
John Nagl on a soldier, teacher, mentor and commander
Hat tip to Lexington Green.
Dr. Nagl compares Petraeus to Dwight Eisenhower and Ulysses S. Grant. O’Hanlon compares him to Michael Jordan. Preble claims Petraeus as “one of the finest officers of his generation” but Gventer remarks that Petraues is a “fine military officer” who “doubtless has virtues” sounds oddly backhanded and grudging. Who doesn’t have some virtues?
I have never written much about General Petraeus, specifically. I like him because he seems supremely competent in more than one narrow dimension, a quality sorely lacking in public life these days, as well as highly intelligent. Comparing him to Grant, Eisenhower and Michael Jordan(?) is a tad premature, however. Even Grant wasn’t Grant until after Appomattox, and as the general is going to be a very important player “in the arena” for some time, that kind of praise may not be helpful for a man who is taking over an org whose senior mandarins have become notorious for leaks and intriguing to sabotage Directors sent by the White House to curb their independence. There’s a line somewhere between hagiography for a man who still has things to accomplish and a throwaway psuedo-compliment that minimizes a legacy, which in the case of David Petraeus is significant.
Secondly, on a lighter note, Courtney Messerschmidt, the gamine of milblogging and Great Satan’s Girlfriend, has some good-natured fun at the expense of Abu Muqawama:
We’re delighted here at Zenpundit to present a cross-post from our blog-friend Pundita— of whom it has been said that “What Julia Child did for French cooking, Pundita is doing for foreign policy discussion. She’s opened a haute pursuit to ordinary people.”
Pundita quotes Mark in this post, and also raises some interesting issues with regard to America and monarchism — and as I have been prepping a series of posts on “the impact of ritual and ceremonial in church, military and state,” we all agreed it would be good to bring this post across to ZP in the hope of stirring some discussion — and see how things develop from there.
Pundita’s epigraph for this post is as follows:
Alan Rickman‘s Sheriff of Nottingham to a scribe: “Wait a minute. Robin Hood steals money from my pocket, forcing me to hurt the public, and they love him for it? That’s it then. Cancel the kitchen scraps for lepers and orphans, no more merciful beheadings, and call off Christmas.”
The title of this post refers to the punch line in a series of TV commercials in the USA for Sears Optical eyeglasses. The ads feature amusing skits of people in serious need of a pair of glasses, such as the woman who mistakes a police patrol car for a taxicab. But helped along by bravura performances from Tara L. Clark as a blind-as-a-bat cat owner and Squirty as a wild racoon who can’t believe his luck, one of the skits is so funny it’s gone viral on the internet:
Oh look it’s a democracy! Come snuggle with the United States!
There is nothing funny, however, about American officials who are so blind to what the United States stands for they snuggle with governments that march to a very different drumbeat than their own. Yet the officials are supported in their blindness by an equally blind populace. So in this post I’m going to break a taboo and wrestle with topics that are only whispered about in this country: monarchism and America’s involvement with it. To set the stage I’ll start with quotes from two recent news reports:
Stephen Harper is working to recast the Canadian identity, undoing 40 years of a Liberal narrative and instead creating a new patriotism viewed through a conservative lens.Restoring the “royal” prefix to the navy and air force this week is just part of the Prime Minister’s attempt at “creating a new frame” for Canada and Canadians. …
A photograph taken last Friday of Gary F. Locke, the new United States ambassador to China, buying coffee with his 6-year-old daughter and carrying a black backpack at a Starbucks in the Seattle airport, has gone viral on the Chinese Internet. The seemingly banal scene has bewildered and disarmed Chinese because they are used to seeing their own officials indulge in privileged lives often propped up by graft and bribery and lavish expense accounts.
[…]
The first impression from the Starbucks episode has been bolstered by another photograph that shows Mr. Locke, his wife, Mona, and their three children carrying their own luggage after landing at Beijing Capital International Airport.Chinese who saw them then spread the word that the family had gotten into an anonymous minivan because a formal sedan that had been sent to pick them up was too small.
“To most Chinese people, the scene was so unusual it almost defied belief,” Chen Weihua, an editor at China Daily, an official English-language newspaper, wrote in an article Wednesday.
Cheng Li, a scholar at the Brookings Institution who studies Chinese elite politics, said in an e-mail: “Ambassador Locke’s photo contrasts sharply with the image of the Chinese officials who often live in a secret, insulated, very privileged fashion.
Often I’ve heard it asked why Britain’s political Right doesn’t seem much less socialist than the country’s Left. I’d say the answer is that the United Kingdom’s welfare state has as much to do with Marxism as bread and circus did under the Roman emperors. I’d also say the same answer would apply to the welfare state in the Kingdom of Norway and the Kingdom of Sweden and a number of other countries that are constitutional monarchies.
Yet my fellow Americans have such difficulty seeing monarchism that they confuse it with something else. The same blindness can afflict Americans who insist that China is not much different from the United States. In his 2008 article for the May/June issue of Good magazine (Ten Reasons Why China Matters To You), Thomas P.M. Barnett, an American security analyst, wrote that “China’s transformation echoes much of America’s past. … right now, China is somewhere in the historical vicinity of ‘rising America’ circa 1880.”
In my retort (The National Petition Bureau will see you now, Dr Barnett), I pointed out that Chinese make the pilgrimage to a bureau that’s a CCP placemarker for an emperor’s go-fers. I added in exasperation, “Ah yes, I remember as if just yesterday the tens of millions of American peasants in the 1880s who pilgrimaged to the nation’s capital every year to seek redress from the emperor.”
Dr Barnett turned out to have a sense of humor or at least a fair-minded attitude about receiving criticism because he linked my post at his blog. Yet that did little to allay my concern that Washington’s foreign policy establishment was blind as a bat to the fact that modern China is an imperial society with a frownie face of Communist Party dictatorship painted on it, and that modern Britain and a good number of other NATO-member countries are basically monarchist societies with a smiley face of democracy plastered on them.
One could even make an argument that modern Mexico’s most entrenched problems are rooted not in the rule of the Spanish but in indigenous imperial civilizations that predated Spain by thousands of years.
In fact, the more one starts looking around the world for societies that are not holdovers from the days of kings the more one appreciates that the United States of America has very few natural allies; i.e., countries that represent a real break with monarchism and the class systems that uphold it.
Norwegians might bristle at their society being described as monarchist. They would point out that their noble class has no political power anymore and that Norway today is an egalitarian society. However, it is an egalitarianism so rigidly enforced that the Norwegian mass murderer Anders Behring Breivik believed after he set off a bomb in Oslo that he would be caught and killed by the police before he reached Utoya island.
His faith in the omniscience of Norway’s government was dashed but the point is that the country’s egalitarian “open society” is maintained by the second largest deployment of public-space CCTV cameras outside the United Kingdom. And Norway’s generous public welfare system means that from cradle to grave Norwegians are easily monitored by the state, which helps the government make sure Norway stays an open, egalitarian society.
Yet Americans insist on describing such states as Leftist! Karl Marx would roll in his grave if he saw what passes today for many Leftist governments.
These same Americans decry their government’s close alliance with absolute monarchies such as the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. They do so without realizing that there is a long history of the United States being closely allied with monarchies; that many of these are no longer “absolute” but “constitutional” with parliamentary forms of government and voting rights makes them no less monarchist.
Americans were also miffed at what they considered snobbishness when they heard the Swedish Chairman of BP, Carl-Henric Svanberg, expressing concern for the victims of the Gulf oil spill by referring to them as “the small people.”
Translation malfunction, explained his apologists. There was no malfunction; English is Svanberg’s second language. And he wasn’t being snobbish, he was being Swedish. Noblesse oblige and all that; one must always look after the basic needs of the small people so they don’t revolt.
None of the above is meant as a criticism of the countries I’ve mentioned or their people, and one would be hard-pressed to find nicer peoples than the majority of Swedes or Norwegians — and Canadians for that matter, who also live under a constitutional monarchy. I see no harm in people upholding traditions that provide them with a sense of order and give them continuity with their past, which is why I cheered on the royal pomp associated with the marriage of William and Kate. If it helped Britons get clearer on their values I was all for that.
The harm comes when Americans are so unclear on their own values, their own past and traditions, they can’t engage closely with the rest of the world without becoming terribly confused. One consequence is that the more the U.S. government has tried to mesh with the “international community,” the lower America’s standing in the world has fallen.
Americans can’t turn the situation around without first acknowledging that the international community is in large measure of bunch of royalists. Arriving at this realization doesn’t mean Americans should eschew friendly relations with people in such societies or that official Washington should spurn engaging with the governments on issues of mutual interest. It does mean that Americans are asking for ever greater trouble by lumping “democratic” monarchies” with American democracy.
Over at ZenPundit, Mark Safranski has again expressed concern about what he calls an emerging American oligarchy, an elite that’s manipulating the rest of the American populace to accept its rule. Meanwhile, Fareed Zakaria is seriously proposing that America replace its president with a prime minister and Congress with a parliament — with an upper house, I suppose, to be stuffed with Mark’s oligarchs, duly elected of course, so that Americans will stop the troublesome habit of vehemently disagreeing with one another.
Now just see how one thing leads to another. First you’re snuggling with liberal monarchies, then authoritarian ones, then one day you’re asking, ‘Why is there no USA anymore? Why is there only the international community?’
Zenpundit is a blog dedicated to exploring the intersections of foreign policy, history, military theory, national security,strategic thinking, futurism, cognition and a number of other esoteric pursuits.
