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LESS A CLASH OF CIVILIZATIONS THAN CIVILIZATION’S UNIVERSAL STRUGGLE AGAINST BARBARISM

At Whirledview, Patricia Lee Sharpe has an outstanding post on the larger issue that the so-called “cartoon crisis”, partly genuine and partly orchestrated political theater, epitomizes:

“Let’s broaden the context for any discussion of the political cartoons that cropped up in Denmark last September. Let look back to a moment in the very recent past when much of the world was trying to prevent a stunning act of iconoclasm.

…The current demand to protect “religious sensibilities or sensitivities” would be far more credible if there were more remorse in the Muslim world over the destruction of the Bamian treasures. In addition, the “popular” nature of the protesting is highly suspect. There had been little or no violence until a gathering of Muslim heads of state in Mecca in December produced an inflammatory joint statement.”

Very true. Islamic civilization has an amazing cultural heritage, of incredible breadth and diversity stretching back almost fourteen-hundred years. Most Muslims, as Juan Cole pointed out, did not engage in violent protest over cartoons in a Danish newspaper. Neither the elite nor the devout middle-class of the Muslim world are embassy burners or jihadists. These things should be remembered.

But as Germany, once the apex of European culture and science, fell into the hands of a brutal and barbaric political minority, the Muslim world appears to be daunted by the barabarism of the minority of postmodern, neo-Salafi radicals with their engineering degrees from German universities and the takfiri -venom rhetoric of the Mosque-addict. These fanatics oppose civilization itself, be it in the form of a tolerant, cosmolpolitan, modernizing Islamic state or the secular West. What I wrote at the time of the destruction of the Buddhist statues of Bamian holds true today:

“What has stirred the world’s wrath over the Buddhist statues is the Taliban’s sheer defiance of not only civilizational norms but itscontemptuous rejection of civilization itself, of which the impulse tocreate and preserve art for its own sake is an exemplary value. A morecalculated gesture of purified barbarism would be hard to imagine. Notthat this is surprising because the Taliban are in fact unreconstructed tribal barbarians even if they may have laptops. cell phones and
mechanized armor at their disposal. The Taliban does not oppose Western
civilization so much as they do any complex and rationally ordered society
that generates ideas, Buddhism for example, foreign to their narrow and
primitive cultural horizons. The Taliban’s wanton destruction merited the near unanimous outrage of nations that it received.”

The Jihadi -Takfiri radicals by their words and deeds have marked themselves as the enemy of all mankind. We can neither ignore them nor make concessions on the nature of Western society to their grandiose, world-historical, totalitarian claims on behalf of Islam, a religion they interpret with the greatest selectivity to meet their current political need. The devout middle class of the Muslim world, ultimately, will have to choose where to throw in their lot, with a global modernity which can accomodate ascetic piety if it does not trouble others holding different views or with the mentality of the suicide belt and the videotaped beheading.

There is no third way.

ADDENDUM:

Oliver Roy on the Cartoon crisis ( Hat tip: the UK Spectator magazine)

MORE FROM 4GW

Fabius Maximus – ” The Fate of Israel” at DNI

Well, this one should set off some sparks. This post represents part II of an at least three part series by Fabius at DNI. Part I. can be found here. I see that John Robb linked yesterday as well where a discussion has begun in the comments section.

I prefer the Boydian ” constructive” description of grand strategy to this one used by Fabius:

“Grand Strategy: a state’s collective policy with respect to the external world. Paul Kennedy defined it as “the capacity of the nation’s leaders to bring together all of the elements {of power}, both military and nonmilitary, for the preservation and enhancement of the nation’s long-term … best interests” (from his “Grand Strategies in War and Peace”). From a Trinitarian perspective, it focuses and coordinates the diplomatic and military efforts of a state’s People, Government, and Army.”

On the other hand, his primal strategy is actually closer to Boyd’s “theme for vitality and growth“. It would also be harmonious with my concept of state resiliency:

“Primal Strategy: often found in the early years of a society when its people have a “single-minded” commitment to a goal, often just a drive to grow. A “primal strategy” is an expression of a people’s core beliefs. It is non-intellectual, with no need for theories and plans.”

Getting to the specifics of the case of Israel and the Palestinians as argued by Fabius he has hit on an important point regarding emigration, that does represent a strategic threat to Israel’s survival. The Palestinians however will not gain the incremental surrender that Fabius expects if in the interim they manage to pull off a ghastly act of mass destruction terrorism inside Israel; a coup numerous Arab nationalist and Islamist terrorist groups would gladly attempt. Such an event that results in the deaths of tens of thousands of Israelis will instantly change the moral calculus for world opinion, particularly if the attack involved poison gas. We can expect that the Israeli leadership would then move beyond the current policy of unilateral separation from the Palestinians to expelling them en masse from the West Bank.

Yes, this would be ethnic cleansing and yes this will cost Israel much Western support but national survival would take precedence over any other consideration for Jerusalem and the Palestinian demographic advantage would then be rendered irrelevant.

ADDENDUM:

I am really behind the blogging curve lately but I want to point out that since 4GW is the theme , Dan of tdaxp had a post recently featuring the observations of Dr. Chet Richards on John Boyd’s OODA Loop

METACOGNITION [ Updated]

Intelligence analysts, strategists and educators all require clarity of thought for their respective domains. Frequently, they rely upon – or too often assume they are using – formal logic for organizing and sequencing concepts or deconstructing patterns of information into component, isolated, parts. Generally, we can also assume that our respective thinkers all represent persons of with considerable vertical expertise, masters of a particular field or subfield of knowledge and, consequently, frame new information according to the received intellectual culture and rule-sets of their professional discipline as well as logical reasoning.

On average, this primarily analytical approach to engaging the world is very efficient and productive. Time is saved by recourse to preexisting and commonly accepted conceptual categories when integrating new data and the accumulation and verification of new knowledge is orderly and most of the time a valid and reliable process. Problems arise with this process however when new data

a) Seemingly represents familiar old data because our habitual use of our conceptual categories, our received intellectual culture from professional training, our entire worldview and the underlying genetic predispositions in terms of cognitive behavior render us blind to the implications of the new which lay hidden in plain sight.

Or

b) If the new data contradicts all that we have been led to believe to be true.

The cognitive distortions that can arise then have various manifestations, among them:

Educated Incapacity

Denial

Magical thinking

Self-referential logical errors

Non sequitors

Mistaking correlation for causation

Paralysis by analysis

How to avoid this mental fog of distortion ? One possibility is the deliberate practice of metacognition during the analytical process to help prserve the integrity of the “Observation” and “Orientation” stages of John Boyd’s OODA loop. Metacognition is a term coined by pyschologist and cognitive theorist John Flavell to describe the processes involved in ” thinking about thinking”. Metacognition has rationally methodical as well as intuitive aspects, both of which are useful in accomplishing the task of mental self-regulation, monitoring and evaluation:

Rational:

Asessment: Identification of state of knowledge, attention and task at hand

Executive control of behavior: Self-regulation

Metamnemonic planning: Selection of mnemonic strategies appropriate for the task

Schema Training: Generation of new conceptual-categorical structures

Evaluation: Of changes in knowledge

Intuitive:

Fingerspitzengefuhl or ” fingertip feeling”

Tip of the tongue feeling or memory retrieval

Rechecking your analytical premises against your ” hunch”when the data seems to be contradictory as well as systematic self-assessment of your reasoning process helps identify errors, blind spots and weakly supported assertions that represent more ideology than empiricism. In short, metacognition preps the brain for a burst of insight by bringing into simultaneous or sequential focus:

New data

Your premises

The operative rule-sets

Your logical reasoning

Your intuitive expectations

Past knowledge

Your evaluation of the validity and reliability of the above

You are now poised to look at the big picture, discern the interconnections and look further afield for analogies and parallel patterns.

LINKS FOR READERS:

This post has stirred some considerable traffic today so I thought I might highlight a few
“gurus” on my blogroll who also feature systemic, strategic, analysis on a regular basis:

Thomas P. M. Barnett

Art Hutchinson’s Mapping Strategy

John Robb

Nicholas Carr ‘s Rough Type

Dave Chesbrough’s net-centric dialog

Chris Anderson’s The Long Tail

WHILE I’M GETTING MY OWN ACT TOGETHER…

I suggest you check out Jeff Medcalf’s post on war powers and the NSA wiretapping at Caerdroia:

“The Constitution does not limit the President to fighting the enemy abroad, nor require a separate declaration of Congressional intent to fight the enemy in the United States. The President’s power is to fight the enemy defined in the declaration of war, wherever that enemy is.

The only valid way to claim that the surveillance is illegal is to claim that the AUMF does not trigger the President’s war powers because the AUMF is not a declaration of war. But nowhere in the Constitution is the President’s power to make war divided between “real wars” and “so so wars”: there is no way to grant the President the power to make war except to declare war. The Constitution does not require that such a declaration contain particular wording, such as “a state of war exists between the United States and [enemy]”. So on what grounds, other than claiming that the Constitution is a “living document” and means whatever we want, can anyone claim that AUMF is not a declaration of war? If not, then what is it?”

Jeff has hit the nail on the constitutional head. There is no such legal distinction unless specifically articulated by the Congress in the language of their AUMF which makes the ” not a real war” argument legally specious. And in the case of the 9/11 resolution, the Congress itself declared the terms of the War Powers Act to be satisfied by the AUMF.

International law is even more of a slam dunk than American Constitutional law as IL requires only the de facto recognition of a ” state of armed conflict”. We have a de jure recognition by NATO which has invoked Article IV, recognizing 9/11 as an act of war for which ” an attack against one is an attack against all”.

The Bush administration may be politically inept but they are constitutionally correct and their critics are wrong. AUMF trumps FISA. Separation of powers trumps statutes.

POSTING PROBLEMS CONTINUE APACE

Knocked out again. Some comments are visible only if you click to make a new comment. For example I responded to Fabius Maximus but my comment is neither registered numerically nor can you see it without posting a new comment.

Blogger was down again last night and when it went up again it did not accept my post so if you are annoyed at my prevailing radio silence I have to plead technical difficulties in this instance.

I’ll try to get something to ” stick” today.