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SMART POWER

Joseph S. Nye, Jr. has an evaluation of the Israel-Hezbollah War in the Boston Globe in terms of how ” soft power” was a crucial variable in the outcome of the war ( Hat Tip to Dave Dilegge of the Small Wars Council). An excerpt:

“Lebanon provides larger lessons for the United States about how to conduct a war against jihadist terrorism. The current struggle is not a clash of Islam vs. the West, but a civil war within Islam between a minority of terrorists and a larger mainstream of more moderate believers. America cannot win unless the mainstream wins, and needs to use hard power against the hard core like Al Qaeda because soft power will never attract them. But soft power is essential to attract the mainstream and dry up support for the extremists.”

Read the whole thing.

GETTING THE COGNITIVE PRIORITIES STRAIGHT

“A Holistic Vision for the Analytic Unit” by Richard Kerr, Thomas Wolfe, Rebecca Donegan, Aris Pappas

There’s a lot to like here from my perspective. An excerpt with some highlighting by yours truly:

“The Holistic Analytic Unit

Strong, high-level review, accountability, and measurement of performance to ensure against backsliding “

Obviously constructed by those with extensive familiarity with bureaucratic resistance to positive change.

My only significant concern is the accent on “real-time” adds momentum to an existing IC bias for warp speed “reporting” over “depth” – both in terms of predictive analysis as well as an emphasis on clandestine collection of hard to acquire information, something that requires investment, imagination, persistence and time. The wide dissemination aspect though was really great; an attempt to leverage the advantages of possessing critical information ( Art Cebrowski would have applauded) and get the IC out of the need-to-know-basis/ Cold War mindset.

Read the whole thing.

OLD BOOKS CONTRAVENING NEWER STEREOTYPES

I’m a huge fan of books and despite the excessive amount of time I spend online, the computer does not replace for me the experience of reading the printed word. Non-literate peoples or adults in literate societies who never become comfortable with reading are akin to those born deaf or blind. A formative experience is missing from their worldview.

This interest of mine includes old as well as new books, some of which I pick up and read if they represent worthwhile historiography. I read something the other day which I found interesting because it so strongly clashed with conventional wisdom regarding world history. The book in question was A History of Europe: From the Invasions to the XVI Century by Henre Pirenne. Here is the passage:

“Raised to the rank of kingdom for the benefit of Roger II by Pope Innocent II, in 1130, the Norman State of Sicily was incontestably the wealthiest, and, in the pint of economic development, the most advanced of all the Western States. Byzantine as to its continental portion, Musulman as regards the island, favored by the enormous extent of its coastline, and by the active navigation which it maintained with the Mohammedans of the coast of Africa, the island Greeks of the Agean Sea, the Greeks of the Bosphorous, and the Crusader settlements in Syria, it was remarkable for its absence of national characteristics as for the diversity of its civilization, in which the culture of Byzantium was mingled and confounded with that of Islam.

…Despite their devotion to the Papacy, these Norman princes, in their political lucidity of thought, allowed both their Musulman and their Orthodox subjects to practice their respective religions.”

The popular view of the middle-ages in the media, influenced as it is by current events and P.C. attitudes, is one of simple civilizational-religious warfare and European-Christian intolerance vs. Muslim-Arab enlightenment. History in reality was far more complex and accuracy is forsaken when you resort to compressing a vast period of time and geographic space into a few jaunty assumptions .

Medieval warfare was always far more savage and frequent in terms of intra-religious conflict than in wars between Christian principalities and Muslim potentates ( and Christians and Muslims alike were dwarfed in ferocity by the pagan Mongols). The crusades, from the Muslim perspective of the time, were a small affair compared with their long march toward the conquest of Constantinople, a city that had already been brutally sacked by fellow Christians in 1204. The crusades themselves were, we must remember, partly an attempt by the Church to put a brake on European slaughter by directing aristocratic bloodthirst outward.

Tolerance also varied tremendously. As a rule, it is historically accurate to say that Muslim rulers practiced greater tolerance toward their subjects than did their Christian counterparts but we musn’t get too carried away. Tolerance here is both relative and varying given the circumstances.

The Christian Levant and North Africa was converted to a Muslim majority by the sword and that this was considered normal for the day and that even the more enlightened rulers allowed their victorious troops the traditional three days pillage after a siege, if military circumstances permitted it ( Wise rulers of small kingdoms, like the Princes of Georgia, tried to avoid this fate by pro-actively offering fealty to would-be conquerers- be they Persian, Arab, Turk, Mongol or Russian. More often than not they succeeded in their policy of appeasement). That being said, we shouldn’t forget that Maimonides wrote in Cairo, not in London, and that the Jews were expelled from Spain to the Ottoman Empire and not the reverse.

Complexity rules history and undermines all stereotypes.

THE VALUE OF COUNTERFACTUALS

Dave Schuler at The Glittering Eye had a short post on the New York Magazine series on what if 9/11 never happened ? Dave was unimpressed with what he read:

“Some of the pieces have minor insights; some are mildly interesting; most not particularly so.

I think a far more interesting question would be: what specific steps or policies could have been taken that might conceivably have precluded the likelihood of the attack occurring at all, ever?”

Dave was being kind. The series is a disappointing and starkly unimaginative waste of time to read. All the moreso that the magazine line-up included several well known historians who ought to be more practiced and fluent at counterfactual thinking.

Counterfactual thinking allows us to rexamine our premises and chains of logic by altering a critical data point. By looking for inconsistencies in the sequence of our counterfactual model compared to the factual record we test ourselves for bias and get a chance to reevaluate the variables in the historical record and our argument for causation. New points or angles appear when looking at the road not taken and the significance of the event itself may be cast in a new light.

Obviously, counterfactual models are interesting in proportion to the extent the event chosen represents a supposed “tipping point”. “What if the Nazis had invaded Great Britain during WWII?” or ” What if if the Greeks had lost the Persian War?” are more useful questions than “What if America won the Vietnam War ?” or ” What if Columbus had not discovered America ?”. The answer to the latter questions is that the history of the world would have proceeded apace without changing all that much – the Americas were due West from the Old World, they would have been discovered sooner rather than later. Somebody else would have invented the printing press if Gutenberg hadn’t. On the other hand, the Turks sacking Vienna in 1683 and spreading Islam to the Rhine ( or Paris) sends the history of the world on a very different course.

“What if ?” is sometimes almost as useful a question as asking ” Why not ?”.

ISLAMISTS VS. “ISLAMOFASCISTS”

A desultory debate on the extent of totalitarianism within Islamism has reemerged in the blogosphere due to President Bush saying ” Islamic Fascist” in reference to Islamist terrorist groups. There’s a lot of objections to that term on pragmatic as well as technical grounds ( some Islamists are quietists, others accept democracy, some are “moderate” authoritarians, some are takfiri extremists with scores to settle against “apostate” Muslims) or the utility of the analogy.

Twentieth century totalitarianism in its Marxist, Nazi and Fascist manifestations have some commonalities with radical Islamism, notably opposition to liberal democracy, as well as important fundamental differences, radical atheism being a noteworthy example. Juan Cole’s assertion that Fascism is incompatible with Islamism because Islamists reject the nation-state ignores the fact that Nazis emphasized not the state ( that was Mussolini’s version) but the “Aryan race”. Hitler himself was emphatic on that point, that the German state was an inconsequential thing before the wellbeing of the German” racial community”. “Ein Reich, ein Volk, ein Fuhrer” puts the state at the bottom of the pyramid.

Quite frankly, the most radical Nazis looked forward to a postwar, de-Christianized, Judenfrei, European racialist superstate that incorporated all “teutonic” nationalities under Nazi dominion. State, race, religion – fascism is a collectivistic and exclusivist creed and religion is probably at least as durable an emotive basis for Fascism as nationalism or racism. While some radical Islamists have been ” eucumenical” in their desire to build a united, Islamist, Ummah others like the psychopathic Zarqawi took a violently takfiri and exclusionary approach to Caliphate-building.

Nevertheless, “Islamic Fascism” as a term has a number of problems given the diverse, at times inchoate and dynamic nature of radical Islamist movements. At HNN, Dr. Tim Furnish, a stern critic of radical Islamists, found ” Islamic Fasicism “, for his own reasons, as objectionable as did Juan Cole:

“Does this paradigm fit with the ideology of Islamic terrorists? That ideology has four major aspects: 1) a starting point of victim-hood, especially vis-à-vis the West and Christianity; 2) an intermediate goal of re-pietizing Islamic society via imposition of “true” shari`ah (Islamic law); 3) a long-term goal of re-creating the early Islamic ummah (community) under a new caliphate, which would eventually encompass the entire planet; and 4) the preferred methodology to achieve these goals of jihad. Put up against the characteristics of fascism, Islamic-based fundamentalist ideology seems obviously to share the emphasis on the group (the ummah) and a clear sense of being victimized. Also, since a caliphate, historically, has been essentially an Islamic monarchy, the dictatorial aspect should be included as common; likewise for repression of opposition, since pre-modern Islamic regimes (and, indeed, most modern ones) have not been known for their political tolerance. The other three elements of fascism—extreme nationalism or ideas of racial superiority, socioeconomic regimentation and extreme militarization—really are not prominent themes in Islamic political thought and praxis, today or in the past. So, definitionally, while “Islamic fascism” at first glance appears appropriate, upon more careful consideration its descriptive value is nominal at best.

A second point is that the term reinforces the questionable tendency of us in the West, and especially in the U.S., to see every new global threat as a reprise of Hitler and Nazi Germany. Perhaps this is because World War II was the last war that all Americans agreed was truly legitimate, for every war since then—Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq both times (albeit much less so the first time)—has had its critics. Whatever the reason, wouldn’t it be more useful to the conduct of, and debate about, the undeniable global problem of Islamic-based terrorism if we analyzed the issue on its own terms? The differences between Nazi Fascism and Islamic-based terrorism are myriad, starting with the fact that the former was a state ideology and the latter is not (at least not yet). And whatever one wishes to say about Usama bin Ladin and his ilk, they are not devotees of racial purity. Religious purity, to be sure—but that calls for a different response. “

In an intellectual parallel, there is a fashionable tendency to call every modern ( or historical) mass atrocity “genocide”. An ahistorical error which cheapens the value of the term for the actual victims of genocide and obscures what was unique about such horrors like American Slavery or China’s Cultural Revolution; rendering elusive the very characteristics that makes these terrible events worth examining in their own right.

Perhaps, we ought to accept that the crimes of Islamist terrorism and the delusions of Jihadi ideology are distinctive enough to stand on their own merits and not try to paint them over with swastikas or hammers and sickles.