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BELMONT CLUB ON AL QAIDA

Thoughtful as always. Go here.

POSTING WILL BE LIGHT

Until Sunday.

PROFESSORS DEMAND THE END OF EDUCATION

Noted rising star historian, KC Johnson, reports that the American Association of University Professors has voted in favor of ending liberal arts education – i.e. the premise upon which universities are founded and for which most are funded with taxpayer dollars – and replacing it with ” diversity” training. The code word for viciously indocrinating students to have the correct opinions on race, gender and social issues as described by the current trends in “Crit Theory ” and other, more obscure, forms of bastardized Marxism.

Aren’t these the same tenured clowns who are concerned that the David Horowitz’s proposed Academic Bill of Rights would impinge on the tenet of academic freedom ?

Well, if we’re trashing liberal arts let’s get rid of tenure too and fire their sorry, authoritarian zealot asses. They can discuss the hidden transgender meanings in Cornel West’s latest pack of gibberish on the unemployment line.

UPDATE: SPEAK OF THE DEVIL !

David Beito of Liberty& Power blog alerts HNN readers to an attempt to impose mandatory diversity training of the most noxious, ” whiteness studies”, left-wing fascist, kind at the University of Alabama. The ” white privilige ” theory, by the way, is a concept that came out of the arguments within the New Left as the most violent fringe of the SDS were breaking apart into the Weathermen terrorists and various neo-Stalinist factions.

ISLAMISM’S “ARMED INTELLECTUALS “

Nathan at The Argus posted a link to a superb article on al Qaida’s next generation.

Konrad Heiden, the anti-fascist journalist who wrote the first analytical book on Hitler and the Nazi movement distinguished within the NSDAP, in the early days when they were a small part of the volkische and nationalist lunatic fringe in Weimar Germany, two basic types – the armed bohemians and the armed intellectuals.

The time of al Qaida’s armed bohemians, the Arab Afghans has passed – a new and more dangerous breed is coming to the fore.

MORE ON SYSTEM ADMINISTRATOR FORCE

Dr. Barnett gave my post on Leviathan vs. System Administrator Force a nice plug . It’s a wonderful experience to bounce ideas back and forth like this – perhaps poli sci is the route to go for doctoral studies ! It’s very much unlike the give and take among historians which often tend toward adversarial debates over causation – when things don’t degenerate into ” gotcha ” charges over standards of professionalism or at worst, undisguised, politically-motivated, personal attacks.

In any case, I’ve been pondering what System Administrator Force should be and it occurred to me that it might be helpful to consider what it should not become – poorly armed, inadequately supported, overly restricted duplicates of UN peacekeepers. The experience of the Dutch peacekeepers in the Balkans or the impossible position of General Romeo Dallaire’s UN command in Rwanda must never be repeated.

A System Administrator Force could enter a nation on a possible situation continuum ranging from an anarchic failed state ( Somalia, Haiti) , in the aftermath of Leviathan ( Afghanistan, Iraq) to reluctant cooperation with the sovereign government under international pressure ( Cambodia, East Timor, Kosovo) or by invitation. Their role is to wield force in a manner which creates a security zone in which humanitarian, infrastructure and political problems can be addressed – initially by the System Administrator Force if required but increasingly by NGO’s, international agencies and the citizens of the state themselves.

System Administrator is a protector, mentor and coordinator but to be effective in these roles System Administrator soldiers and personnel must deploy as an effective military organization and not as lightly-armed potential hostages to the forces of disorder. The warrior aspect, while more muted than with Leviathan, must be in Dr. Barnett’s words ” robust “. They aren’t there to suppress a major national rebellion but they should be able to deal with pockets of bitter-enders, snipers, bandits, thugs and the occasional, large-scale urban riot. The posture generally is that of the MP or the combat engineer rather than the Ranger or airborne trooper – these people arrive in the Gap combat-ready but that’s not their primary mission.

Max Boot, who had a slightly different but not unrelated argument in mind in his The Savage Wars of Peace did a very successful job of providing numerous examples of the U.S. military, the Marines in particular, acting as a System Administrator Force. They fought guerrillas but in ” Small Wars ” they also did the ” Big Chores ” of nation-building. They frequently set up modern sanitation, built roads and schools, established police services, provided clean drinking water and even in some cases – notably Cuba, Germany and Japan – forced a revision of the social contract. Some of these things are more important than they appear – few things can dramatically change a nation’s demographic future than a wide-scale shift to potable water or access to rudimentary medical care.

Given the nature of bureaucratic longevity, it is most likely that units of the current military services will be organized into a ” System Administrator Force “on an ad hoc basis, attempting to implement the principle behind that concept through greater cooperation with NGO’s and other departments of the USG. The learning curve is apt to be steep, as Iraq has demonstrated though the power of that example is going to fuel the will within the officer corps to avoid another ” Iraqi occupation ” the next time around.