Ex-Taliban at Yale: another changed mind?

The New Neo Posted on by

The cover of last Sunday’s NY Times caught my eye with the following teaser: He was the Taliban’s spin doctor. So what’s he doing at Yale?

Okay, I’ll bite. What’s he doing there, indeed?

Well, according to the article, by Chip Brown, he’s doing what most of the students at Yale are doing (or are supposed to be doing): studying.

In Sayed Rahmatullah Hashemi’s case, the subject is mostly political science. He’s a guy who got a lot of on-the-job experience in the field, as the Taliban’s chief spokesperson abroad until the war that brought them down.

Rahmatullah has something to say about that, too:

Some of what I am studying at Yale in theory I think I have already learned in practice. Theory is always distant. Theory and experience hardly ever meet. I was more confident in 2001 than I am now. I was probably a better speaker then, because everything was so new to me. Before I was meeting high-ranking people ”” learning how to interact, how to argue, how to make points, how to write letters. I think I’m forgetting it now. I see myself not being focused enough. It’s easier to learn in practice than in theory.”

His Yale experience isn’t the first change for Rahmatullah. He’s twenty-seven years old, but he’s already lived several lifetimes. One of seven children born to a Pashtun family that exiled to Pakistan during the Soviet invasion, his childhood wasn’t easy. He had to drop out of regular school at the age of ten, but he did manage to enroll and learn English in a training school for Afghan refugees established by an American charity.

This knowledge of English proved to be the ticket to the rest of his life, which involved a return to Afghanistan when the Taliban came to power at the end of the bloody civil war that followed the Soviet invasion and pullout. Like many, he originally saw the Taliban as a force for order and peace in a nation torn by decades of strife and death:

“I went with my father to see Kandahar and our village,” he recalled in the late-afternoon hush of the Commons dining hall. “The reason why the Taliban were so successful at first was they were seen as the ultimate good guys. They stabilized the country. The areas they controlled were unique for peace and security. I said to my father, ‘I really want to join them.'”

So at sixteen Rahmatullah got his wish: he became an English translator for the Taliban. As such, his attraction to the group never seems to have been especially ideological–at least as he now tells it. There is, of course, no way to know whether he’s just spinning things again, for an American reporter and an American audience.

At any rate, this is his story:

Truth be told, Rahmatullah was beginning to wonder about some aspects of life with the Taliban. He was appointed to the position of diplomat in the Afghan Embassy in Islamabad in 1998, and when Wakil Ahmed Muttawakil became foreign minister in 2000, he made Rahmatullah a “roving ambassador.” The international image of the Taliban was increasingly dominated by the Vice and Virtue busybodies who were checking the lengths of beards and thrashing women with leather straps and herding crowds into the Kabul soccer stadium to witness lashings amputations and executions. Even among ordinary people, he was increasingly reluctant to appear in his black turban. Before long he found himself wrapping on turbans of a less controversial color.

“I felt better not being distinguished,” he said.

These doubts didn’t prevent young Rahmatullah from going abroad in 1999 as a translator and a sort of roving ambassador to try to improve the Taliban’s image. He managed to visit the Gulf states, Switzerland, France, Holland, Denmark, and Germany–and then in 2000, through an American he’d met in Afghanistan named Hoover (who later was instrumental in helping him go to Yale), the US.

The article describes an interesting exchange in terms of how minds change, or begin to change, or might begin to change. The following incident occurred when Hoover and Rahmatullah were first in Afghanistan:

Over the next three weeks, Hoover and Rahmatullah traveled around Taliban-controlled Afghanistan and formed a deep friendship. One night, a week or so into the trip, Hoover was sitting on the floor of the foreign office guest house in Kandahar, drinking tea as Rahmatullah and some other Taliban peeled potatoes and onions. Rahmatullah asked him a question.

“Do you believe people are related to dogs?”

Dogs are not favored in Afghan society; the question dared him to contradict common sense.

“Yes,” Hoover said.

The Taliban all laughed in amazement.

“How can you possibly believe that? We are so different.”

“You see only differences. I see similarities.”

“Similarities! Like what?”

Hoover wanted his first example to be an intellectual bunker buster, so he thought carefully.

“Bilateral symmetry,” he said. The laughter stopped, which pleased him.

“What does that mean?”

“It means dogs have eyes on either side of their nose, just like humans. Dogs have two nostrils, just like humans. They have two lungs. They have toenails. They have a heart in the center of their chest. Dog blood and human blood are indistinguishable.”

Recalling the exchange not long ago, Hoover said: “Now you could hear a pin drop ”” and it was a dirt floor. They were starting to get uneasy. There was a dog right outside. It was scraggly and covered with sores; I think the appropriate word for it would be ‘cur.’ When I finished laying out how they might be genetically related to the cur outside, they went off and started talking among themselves very intently. What they were discussing and what they wanted to understand was if what I was saying was true, would it fit within the teachings of the Koran. After a long time they came to the conclusion that it would.”

In this case, the new thought was absorbed into the old system; I assume without a change in basic beliefs. But it’s still an example of the ways in which beliefs can begin to change, an example of some flexibility when confronted with new information, and a willingness to listen to that information and not reject it out of hand.

In his US tour, Rahmatullah ended up lecturing and trying to defend the Taliban, despite what he says were his own doubts at the time. Audiences were often quite hostile; the majority of the verbal attacks he tried to counter (mostly unsuccessfully) were about the Taliban’s curtailment of women’s rights and their religious intolerance, particularly around the planned destruction of the giant Buddhas of Bamiyan.

In fact, a clip of one of his unfinest hours ended up in the movie “Fahrenheit 9/11.” It featured a woman in the audience accusing the Taliban of crimes against women, and Rahmatullah answering, “I’m really sorry to your husband. He must have a very difficult time with you.”

But as Rahmatullah reports things, his doubts had increased about these aspects of Taliban rule, aspects he’d never really cared for in the first place. When he returned home, he says:

I nearly got into a fight with the chief justice of the Supreme Court, Mullah Saqib, who had verified the edict to demolish the Bamiyan Buddhas,” he recalls. “I said, ‘Why can’t we have women’s education?’ And he said, ‘We’ll have it later.’ I said: ‘There isn’t any time. Why are we waiting?’ He said to me, ‘I think you were really indoctrinated by America.’ That really ticked me off. I wanted something good for Afghanistan. I was saying what I was saying because it was for the good of Afghanistan, not because I was being paid by the C.I.A. He was a sycophant ”” he didn’t want to upset the conservatives.”

After the events of 9/11 the writing was on the wall and Rahmatullah’s entire family left Afghanistan soon after, leaving for the old haunts in Pakistan. Rahmatullah lay low for quite a while, then in 2003 took his high school equivalency exam and ended up returning to Afghanistan and undergoing an interrogation process that cleared his name with American authorities there. After that, Hoover resurfaced and started a long chain of events that ended up with the somewhat startling result that Rahmatullah came to Yale as a special student studying political science.

Here’s how a friend describes him now:

When you see him, you wouldn’t believe he’s the same guy. He chills with us, he cracks jokes with us. He’s a fundamentalist in the way he believes in the essence of religion, but he’s not an extremist at all. He gives you intellectual answers versus dogmatic answers. He’s very serious and disciplined about his education. He missed a class once and was horror-struck. I said, ‘Dude, we miss classes all the time!’ You can tell he’s seen a lot just by the aura around him. But even though he’s seen a lifetime of experience already, he’s young. He’s thirsty for the innocence of life without war, emigration, bombs, politics, danger. Everyone needs a time to be young.”

And this is what Rahmatullah himself says now about the whole thing:

I regret when people think of the Taliban and then think of me ”” that feeling people have after they know I was affiliated with them is painful to me. When I read that the neo-Taliban are burning girls’ schools, I am ashamed.”

Many distinctions could be drawn between his old life and his life at Yale. But he had seized on one.

“You have to be reasonable to live in America,” he said. “Everything here is based on reason. Even the essays you write for class. Back home you have to talk about religion and culture, and you can win any argument if you bring up the Islamic argument. You can’t reason against religion. But you cannot change Afghanistan overnight. You can’t bring the Enlightenment overnight.”

Well, I’m not at all sure I’d agree with him that everything in the US is based on reason, even at Yale.

And even neocons understand that you can’t bring the Enlightenment overnight to a place such as Afghanistan.

But if one accepts Rahmatullah’s story at face value, or even as an approximation of the truth, one has to believe that change is possible, especially in the young. The force of reason is probably one of the most important tools towards effecting that change. Not for dogs, perhaps (despite the points of resemblance to us that Hoover pointed out to the Taliban)–but for humans beings, whose innate capacity for reason doesn’t seem to vary very much throughout the world, despite cultural differences in the expression of that potential.

[NOTE: I’m fully aware that some may quarrel with affording Rahmatullah the opportunity to study at Yale and to be in this country at all, considering his background. And I’m likewise aware, as I said in the article, that he may be dissembling about his actual point of view, both then and now. In fact, much of the talk around the blogosphere about Rahmatullah is universally against his being at Yale. The point of this post is not to take a position on that one way or the other–I myself have some doubts about the whole endeavor.

I found, on a quick perusal of posts about this subject throughout the blogosphere, that none of their authors seem to have taken the time to carefully read the original article and to analyze what might have gone on with Rahmatullah himself. Because my particular interest is different–understanding political change–I’ve written this post from that perspective. And so I’ve decided to take the article at face value, because if it does in fact represent what actually happened, I believe it’s another fascinating case of change. At this moment, my personal opinion is that it has the ring of truth. Either that, or Rahmatullah is an excellent spin doctor indeed–which is certainly possible, in which case the change would be no change at all.]

War: the why, and the how

The New Neo Posted on by

Dean Esmay has an interesting theory on the bottom-line cause of war. He writes:

I believe that the source for all real wars–not violent outbursts, but wars–is: those who fight believe it is ultimately in their self-interest to fight…. En masse, people fight to the death for something only when they think they have more to gain by killing than by not killing, more to gain by risking death than by accepting the status quo. Everything else is just peripheral.

I think Dean is right about the self-interest part; but I disagree on the “just peripheral” part. The self-interest factor may indeed be a sort of overarcing meta-reason, but it doesn’t stand alone, and the “peripherals” are pretty central, IMHO.

Not that Dean is suggesting this–but no one wakes up one morning and says, “You know, it’s in my interest to fight a war, so I think I’ll start one” (no, not even George W. Bush). There are always other reasons present, and most of the time they include at least one or two of those listed by Dean as the usual suspects: hate, rage, spite, envy, avarice, pride, ethnic tension, and religious tension.

Dean’s post brought to mind a related topic, a somewhat controversial idea I’ve heard of about wars and how they are fought (not the “why” of which Dean speaks,” but the “how”). The principle may not hold true for Western countries fighting highly mechanized wars–but there’s a body of research that indicates that, at least in third world countries, local wars are fought most often in areas in which there is a surplus of young men, preferably unemployed.

How valid this research is, I don’t know; I haven’t studied it in any depth. But it makes a certain amount of sense, especially in economically strapped areas such as Africa where there is a great deal of sectarian civil-war strife.

This is not the same thing as saying “poverty causes war.” It doesn’t. Nor does it cause suicide bombers. But the combination of lack of employment and a surplus of young men provides an especially fertile field for the recruitment of willing participants in a conflict, men who happen to be of just the right age and the right gender, and who have a lot of time on their hands with not too much else going on otherwise that might tie them down.

Here’s a discussion of the phenomenon as it relates to civil wars and localized conflicts in particular (and perhaps these are the ones Dean means by the phrase “violent outbursts,” which he excludes from his definition of wars):

First of all, it is a common feature of livelihood conflicts that the rank and file of most atrocious militias around the world are filled by large cohorts of young men, who have been subjected to a rapid devaluation of their expectations as a result of loss of family livelihoods, and forced to accept a much more lowly situation in society than they had been led to believe they were entitled to, in their position as men.

In such situations, and if they are unable to find alternative livelihoods, in the cities, or in other sectors than agriculture, young men are extremely easy to mobilize in one or another movement, or even militia – particularly if they are promised land, livelihoods, or even just looting…

Every society is filled with fault lines. In good times they may be relatively unimportant. When times get tough, however, they provide an easy channel to pit one segment of unemployed young men against another, and thus to mobilize them.

If you are unscrupulous enough, it is easy to mobilize an ethnic army of discontented young men – provided they have been subjected to the rapid process of loss of livelihoods. When times are good, young men are not that easily mobilized to commit atrocities against a part of the population in their own country.

A book has been written on a related subject, although I haven’t read it and therefore can’t vouch for its quality. It’s entitled Bare Branches : The Security Implications of Asia’s Surplus Male Population , written by Valerie M. Hudson, Andrea M. den Boer.

Here’s a summary:

…historically, high male-to-female ratios often trigger domestic and international violence. Most violent crime is committed by young unmarried males who lack stable social bonds. Although there is not always a direct cause-and-effect relationship, these surplus men often play a crucial role in making violence prevalent within society. Governments sometimes respond to this problem by enlisting young surplus males in military campaigns and high-risk public works projects. Countries with high male-to-female ratios also tend to develop authoritarian political systems.

Hudson and den Boer suggest that the sex ratios of many Asian countries, particularly China and India — which represent almost 40 percent of the world’s population — are being skewed in favor of males on a scale that may be unprecedented in human history. Through offspring sex selection (often in the form of sex-selective abortion and female infanticide), these countries are acquiring a disproportionate number of low-status young adult males, called “bare branches” by the Chinese.

Hudson and den Boer argue that this surplus male population in Asia’s largest countries threatens domestic stability and international security. The prospects for peace and democracy are dimmed by the growth of bare branches in China and India, and, they maintain, the sex ratios of these countries will have global implications in the twenty-first century.

If the theory is in fact valid in the first place, I still think there are a few things that might make it less operative in China and India than in some other areas of the world: economic development there means fewer of these males are likely to be unemployed in the future; both countries have a mechanized military–as compared to that of Africa, for example; both countries have stable, ancient, and relatively cohesive cultures that would tend to mitigate the sort of local, civil war type of violence that I believe is most associated with these population imbalances; and both countries seem to be in the process of discouraging the selective abortion of female babies (it is now illegal, although that’s not too difficult to circumvent), the practice that had lead to such great imbalance in the first place.

So I’m not at all sure that the Bare Branches premise will pan out, and I certainly hope it won’t. But it’s food for thought.

Fear: charges and counter-charges (the only thing we have to fear is…)

The New Neo Posted on by

I’ve been a bit puzzled as to why neocons have been accused so often of being motivated by fear in taking the policy positions they do (see this, for example).

When I’ve written here about the evolution of my own opinions, I don’t see fear as predominating, or even as taking an especially active role. In addition, I would wonder about the emotional makeup of any ordinary citizen who didn’t have at least a tiny bit of fear after watching the events of 9/11 unfold, or on observing the spectacle of suicide bombers who seem to relish and seek out the murder of women and children.

But now, reading this post at All Things Beautiful, about the lawsuit brought recently by the NY Times against the US Defense Department, in which the newspaper seeks to gain access to documents about the National Security Agency’s domestic spying program, I had one of those sudden Eureka moments. Here’s the money quote from Alexandra:

As I have always said, the left hates the President far more than it fears al-Qaeda, therefore any arguments of this nature [that the release of the documents threatens national security] will simply be filed as some sort of phobia, with different words attached to it….that is until the next attack.

Concerns about the dangers posed by terrorists, hesitations about the wisdom of press leakage of possibly sensitive security material, all of these must be labeled as unwarranted fears–as Alexandra explains, “as some sort of phobia”–so that they can safely be ignored to pursue a different agenda. And what is that agenda?

It seems to have two interrelated parts. The first is to have a role in bringing down a detested President–and in this, there is precedent. Apparently, the Times is aching to relive its dragon-slayer days (Richard Nixon being the original dragon): the publication of the Pentagon Papers, when the Supreme Court upheld the Time‘s right to do so despite government claims of national security threats. The aftermath of this lawsuit helped to bring Nixon down–with his own guilty cooperation, of course, since the Watergate burglary was motivated partly by a desire to get the goods on Pentagon Papers leaker Ellsberg (see this).

In 1997, Adam Clymer of the Times wrote, in a review of a new book–The Day the Presses Stopped: A History of the Pentagon Papers Case, by David Rundestine:

The Supreme Court’s 6-to-3 decision in the Pentagon Papers case was a monumental victory for The New York Times and The Washington Post and a huge defeat for the Nixon Administration. In practical terms, it meant that the United States Government bears an awesome — perhaps impossible — burden before it can censor the press. But the opinion written by Justice William J. Brennan did not tell courts how to weigh that burden, though it made clear that a just claim of injury to the national security is not enough.

So, “a just claim of injury to the national security is not enough.” Think about it: what would be enough? How bad an injury to the national security is sufficient to muffle a story, and how certain does this injury have to be?

The Pentagon Papers case marks the point at which the Court set the bar very high in favor of the press and against the government’s ability to claim national security as a reason to stifle information. In his Times article, Clymer goes on to dismiss the book’s contentions that the Pentagon Papers’ publication represented an actual threat to national security. I’d have to do a lot more research on that subject to venture an opinion as to how large a threat was posed; I simply don’t know. But the book’s author, David Rudenstine, certainly thinks the danger was a bona fide one:

[Author] Mr. Rudenstine, an associate dean at Cardozo Law School of Yeshiva University, has spent years getting access to secret transcripts and briefs. He uses them to make it clear that Government witnesses like Lieut. Gen. Melvin Zais honestly believed that the country could be harmed by further publication… But Mr. Rudenstine’s most striking conclusion — that there were real threats to the nation in the papers — is debatable….

So Rudenstine came to the “striking” conclusion that the attempt to stifle the Papers’ publication was not just a grudge match by Nixon against the press, but motivated (at least in part) by an honest belief that publication would be dangerous–and that this contention has legs.

And who is Rundenstine? Some Republican party hack, a hawkish Nixon-loving neocon? Apparently not, if you study his bio, here (scroll down a little bit and you’ll find it). He seems to have typical liberal bona fides, with a background in the ACLU, legal services, and the Peace Corps. And here’s another similar bio of Rudenstine, which includes the fact that he is ex-Harvard President Neil Rudenstine’s brother.

I would have imagined that if someone such as David Rudenstine had contended that there was a bona fide case to be made by the Nixon White House of an actual possible threat to national security when the Times published the Pentagon Papers, that Clymer would have paid quite a bit more attention to it than he did. As it is, his dismissal of Rundenstine’s claim seems perfunctory, at best. It’s hard to escape the notion that Clymer’s review is a poorly-disguised a case of butt-covering, by the Times, for the Times, and of the Times.

(As a little aside, while researching Adam Clymer for this post, I was reminded that Clymer himself had a subsequent moment in the sun; apparently, he was the Times reporter whom Bush called a “major-league asshole” during the 2000 campaign, to which Cheney responded “big-time.”)

So, going back to Alexandra’s quoted accusation about leftists–it seems that the NY Times, as well, could be considered to have a history of hating (or fearing?) certain Republican Presidents more than it fears the consequences of its own national security disclosures.

But I mentioned that the “neocons are motivated by fear” accusation has a second (although absolutely related) agenda, and that is fear of the consequences of overreaching by the executive branch of the government. Many conservatives have this fear, too (and libertarians are extraordinarily sensitive to it). But it’s a question of at what point each group draws the line between acceptable intrusions and unacceptable ones, and what they might consider justification for those intrusions. National security is far more likely to be considered a justification by conservatives than by liberals or leftists, who have a history of seeming to actively downplay such concerns.

The legacy of Vietnam is that the left has a lingering mindset that considers national security concerns to almost always be mere excuses for government spying. This is the sort of approach that led to the famous CIA/FBI firewall (I discuss the firewall’s development here)). The left, and many liberals, seem to feel that the raising of security issues in these situations is almost always bogus–a sort of screen, used by a proto-totalitarian government to cover its own misuse of power, with the goal of getting away with domestic spying on its enemies, and the further consolidation of its own power.

If this is the conception, then national security concerns must be downplayed in almost all cases, and the role of fear as motivation for those concerns exaggerated instead. The fear of many leftists/liberals is a different one: the evil Cheney is going to tap their phones and look up their library history, to be used for his own nefarious purposes. (That’s not even too much of an exaggeration: I’ve had friends express as much to me, and it sure didn’t sound as though they were joking.)

There’s an interesting cyclical process going on here: the publication of the Pentagon Papers was one of Nixon’s motivations for Watergate, which in fact did represent an abuse of power by the executive branch, which led to further checks (such as the firewall) on that power, which in turn hampered the government’s capability to conduct surveillance of terrorists, which then was part of the reason 9/11 wasn’t prevented, which later led to Bush’s decision to implement the so-called “domestic spying program” in question, which has taken us to the present-day lawsuit by the Times to compel the release of the NSA documents.

So, how does this all tie into the accusation that neocons and Bush-supporters are motivated by fear? The accusers cannot afford to concede that there are bona fide national security concerns involved, or their argument would begin to collapse. That collapse might even end up reaching back in time to events such as the Pentagon Papers lawsuit–which could end up at least partially exonerating the evil arch-enemy Nixon (for his attempt to stop their publication, not for Watergate). Thus we have the need for Clymer’s airy dismissal of Rudenstine’s research about the Pentagon Papers lawsuit. The collapse might also reach back to the famous firewall, and implicate those who erected it in at least partial responsibility for the failure to prevent 9/11.

Another recent post, “Don’t Worry, Be Happy…About Iran,” by Gerard Van der Leun, touches on some of the same themes, although it concerns a different issue and a different NY Times article. In it, Van der Leun locks formidable horns with Barry R. Posen, the MIT political science professor whose op-ed piece dismisses, with a perhaps now-familiar breeziness, the security considerations that would be involved in Iran’s acquiring nuclear weapons.

Dismissing that particular “fear” is quite a stretch, even for the Times. But Posen seems up to the task. And, on reading Posen’s article with my newfound insight about the left’s need to deflect such fears and label them as unfounded, it’s interesting to see how well Posen’s article follows the familiar framework.

Van der Leun writes:

On the one hand, the message of [Posen’s] essay is “Don’t worry. Be happy,” while on the other it is the parallel message of “What? Me worry?”

It’s true; the “stretch” in this case seems to take Posen close to Alfred E. Newman territory.

And note how often Posen explicitly and implicitly mentions fear in the first paragraphs of the article (emphasis mine):

The intense concern about Iran’s nuclear energy program reflects the judgment that, should it turn to the production of weapons, an Iran with nuclear arms would gravely endanger the United States and the world. An Iranian nuclear arsenal, policymakers fear, could touch off a regional arms race while emboldening Tehran to undertake aggressive, even reckless, actions.

But these outcomes are not inevitable, nor are they beyond the capacity of the United States and its allies to defuse. Indeed, while it’s seldom a positive thing when a new nuclear power emerges, there is reason to believe that we could readily manage a nuclear Iran.

A Middle Eastern arms race is a frightening thought, but it is improbable…

As Van der Leun points out, the arguments Posen musters for that improbability are not exactly convincing. But Posen, by offering them–and the Times, by printing his article–is following in the time-honored tradition of trying to reassure by downplaying national security concerns. I’m not sure what motivates Posen–perhaps he actually and sincerely believes that he’s speaking the truth–but it seems that the risks of believing him and of him being wrong are rather high, unacceptably high. And that’s not just fear talking; it’s common sense.

If you really want to hear fear talking, you can hear it in the voice of appeasement. This appeasement can be seen most clearly in Western Europe today, although it is not confined to it. It bows down–in the name of “tolerance”–to forces that would weaken freedom of speech and a host of other Enlightenment values so dearly won and highly cherished.

As David Warren points out in his recent column, quoting Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the brave woman born in Somalia but residing in the Netherlands, who’s not afraid to speak out and to risk her life in the process (emphasis mine):

Publication of the cartoons confirmed that there is widespread fear among authors, filmmakers, cartoonists, and journalists who wish to describe, analyze or criticize intolerant aspects of Islam all over Europe. It has also revealed the presence of a considerable minority in Europe who do not understand or will not accept the workings of liberal democracy. These people — many of whom hold European citizenship — have campaigned for censorship, for boycotts, for violence, and for new laws to ban ‘Islamophobia‘. ”¦ The issue is not about race, colour, or heritage. It is a conflict of ideas, which transcend borders and races.

In this conflict of ideas, we cannot win if we are afraid to defend our own values against those who would seek to destroy them.

Warren adds (my emphasis, once again):

Even after the experience of the Great War, and the Depression, people on the eve of the Hitler war could not appreciate what was coming. It is only in retrospect that we understand what happened as the 1930s progressed — when a spineless political class, eager at any price to preserve a peace that was no longer available, performed endless demeaning acts of appeasement to the Nazis; while the Nazis created additional grievances to extract more.

This is precisely what is happening now, as we are confronted by the Islamist fanatics, whose views and demands are already being parroted by fearful “mainstream” Muslim politicians. We will do anything to preserve a peace that ceased to exist on 9/11.

Of course, it’s not only fear operating–some of the motivation for appeasement is hope (naive and often misplaced, I’m afraid): the conviction that talk, trust, and kindness will prevail, that all people are reasonable and good and don’t really have in mind what they say they have.

And then there’s another hope, the one Churchill labeled as “feeding the alligator in hopes it will eat you last.” At least that hope is a bit more realistic: it recognizes that sometimes you’re dealing with an alligator.

Perhaps the whole disagreement between right and left boils down to this one: who are the alligators, and how hungry are they?

Back the same day

The New Neo Posted on by

I’ve got a busy day today–further posting is planned some time this evening.

[ADDENDUM 10:30 PM: Well, everything took much longer than I thought it would–not an unusual situation for me. So, posting will resume tomorrow.]

Sweets for the sweet: chocolate and its rivals

The New Neo Posted on by

In my recent post about chocolate and its supposed health benefits, reader Ben-David has this to say:

I think your [inability to eat chocolate] can be seen as a spur to creativity. So many unimaginative menus conclude with a chocolate dessert, instead of something that draws on seasonal or exotic flavors.

Yes I like chocolate. But I also like halvah and anything with sesame, and I love lemon-flavored desserts (especially after a heavy meal).

You can’t always wear a little black dress…

Well, if I kept eating chocolate and all those other wonderful desserts you mention, I probably wouldn’t ever be able to wear a little black dress. It would have to be a great big one.

But seriously, Ben-David (and this is a serious matter, this matter of chocolate deprivation), I appreciate your concern. Rest easy–I have no problem finding other desserts to enjoy.

But, you know what? I still miss chocolate–there’s something uniquely delectable about it.

I’ve thought about what that thing might be–and so have scientists. This article features a few of their theories. I do indeed love some of the very things you suggest: anything with lemon is great, fruit pastry and pies, sorbet, and I have a special fondness for caramel sauce over vanilla ice cream (although these days it’s hard to find a high quality caramel that isn’t just corn syrup and artificial flavorings). But since I’ve been off chocolate (several years now), I’ve discovered that these other sweets are somehow sweeter than chocolate. Often, they’re just too sweet, even cloying.

So I’ve concluded that chocolate’s wonderfulness lies partly in the fact that there’s something about the bitterness and depth of the chocolate taste itself that grounds the sugar in it. The taste is complex, and simply magnificent.

So, although I greatly appreciate your attempt to comfort me and expand my horizons (and my waistline), it ain’t gonna work. There’s nothing like chocolate.

The current prospects of civil war vs. unity: Iraq the Model

The New Neo Posted on by

When events such as the mosque bombing and the subsequent unrest and violence in Iraq happen, I turn–as I’ve done so many times before–to Iraq the Model for some inside information.

I’ve written this previous post about Iraq the Model, a tribute to its authors and the fine job they’ve done over the years since the official Iraq War ended. I’ve been reading the blog for all that time, and you know what? Omar and Mohammed, the Baghdad-based Iraqi brothers who write the blog, have never disappointed.

That’s not to say they’ve never had negative things to say–they certainly have. But, in retrospect, I can’t recall a time when they turned out to be seriously incorrect about anything important that was happening in their country. Unlike some even in our own beloved MSM, their reports and predictions on Iraq have withstood the test of time.

A few days ago, right after the bombing, Omar seemed shaken by the turn of events. Usually calm and level-headed, he displayed uncharacteristic anxiety:

As if we didn’t have enough problems already!

The quality of the target and the timing of the attack were chosen in a way that can possibly bring very serious consequences over the country….

Things look scary here in Baghdad and I hope there won’t be more updates to report as I can’t see a positive thing coming out of this.

What are the brothers saying now? They seem to have found quite a few positives, although the difficulties of the situation are far from over.

Take a look:

Life is coming back to normal in Baghdad and marketplaces and offices are open again after being shut for 4 days…

However, it seems there are also some positive outcomes from this incident and its aftermath; the first one in my opinion was the performance of the Iraqi army which had a good role in restoring order in many places. Actually the past few days showed that our new army is more competent than we were thinking.

But the latest events have also showed the brittle structure of the interior ministry and its forces that retreated before the march of the angry mobs (if not joined them in some cases) and I think the statements that came from the meetings of our politicians pointed this out so clearly when Sunni politicians said they wanted the army to replace the police and police commandos in their regions and this indicates growing trust between the people and the army.

The other positive side is represented by the line we’ve seen drawn between clerics and politicians.

In spite of the attempts of clerics to look like as if they were the defenders of national unity with all their meetings, joint prayers and hugs, the political leaderships got a sense of their growing danger and the meeting at Jafari’s home (which al-Hakeem didn’t attend) showed that the government is keen to keep the country intact and the government systems as functional as possible to contain the crisis. This meeting indicates that politicians have realized that those clerics whether Sunni or Shia are the origin of the problem and are ready to coup on even their political allies which made the politicians more aware of the danger imposed by clerics on the project of building a state ruled by the law.

It’s worth reading the whole thing. As I said, I’ve grown to trust the brothers’ analysis and insight more than I trust that of the media. It appears that the bombing has created an opportunity, at least. We’ll see whether the government can capitalize on that opportunity in order to form a more unified state.

Unity, in traditionally fragmented Iraq, a country cobbled together post-WWI, and with the additional legacy of decades of Saddam and his Sunni Baathists persecuting the Shi’ites and Kurds? Gateway Pundit has a roundup of stories, photos, and posts that seem to indicate there is more desire for unity among Iraq’s people than many think.

Perhaps some of this unity comes from the recent adversity that the Iraqi people have shared. There’s an old Bedouin saying that you’ve probably heard:

I against my brother I and my brother against our cousin, my brother and our cousin against the neighbors all of us against the foreigner.

The saying has been invoked many times to illustrate why Iraqis will rise up against any US occupation. But as I read Omar and Mohammed’s posts, it seems that the Iraqis may actually be in the process of becoming more united against a different foreigner (or, rather, foreigners) influencing events in their country lately: Syria and Iran.

[ADDENDUM: The NY Times is reporting that the Sunnis have returned to participate in discussions for a new government. The talk, at least, is of unity:

The Sunni negotiator, Mahmoud al-Mashhadany, said Sunni politicians now recognize the need to form a widely inclusive government as quickly as possible to succeed the current interim government, dominated by religious Shiites and Kurds.

“We’ve canceled our withdrawal from the talks,” Mr. Mashhadany said in a telephone interview. “We should hurry up and form a national unity government, to change this hopeless government. In the new government, everyone will handle responsibility.”…

But he [Mashhadany] generally struck a conciliatory tone, saying “there’s a desire to accelerate the formation of the cabinet” and adding, “This is from the leadership of all the groups ”” the Sunnis, the Shia and the Kurds.”

Doesn’t sound exactly like civil war to me. We’ll see.]

Death by Chocolate?–not

The New Neo Posted on by

No fair, no fair!!

In the continuing and ongoing revision of health directives by medical science, today’s bulletin is that chocolate has been found to be non-hazardous to your health.

In a study conducted in–where else?–the chocolate-loving chocolate-producing Netherlands, it was found that older men who ate a third of a bar of chocolate a day had lowered blood pressure and a decreased risk of death.

You’d think this was good news–and for most people (especially older men in the Netherlands), it is. But not for me. Because, as I wrote here, I can’t eat chocolate. And that’s really sad, because I love it.

But to the rest of you: enjoy. Don’t mind me, sitting in the corner, watching you all, tears slowly rolling down my face.

And maybe it’s time to rename this dessert.

Conspiracy theories, Arab and otherwise

The New Neo Posted on by

Not too long after 9/11, I read an interview with Mohammad Atta’s father in which he said his son could not possibly have committed the attack.

I would have written this off as the typical and understandable reaction of a grieving and distraught father–after all, who wouldn’t be in denial, under similar circumstances?–if it hadn’t been accompanied by a curious charge about who had done it: the Mossad. The Jews.

So preposterous did this assertion seem to me at the time that I came up with an alternate theory: Atta’s father was somewhat out of touch with reality. Whether he’d already been this way before 9/11, or whether he’d been driven off the deep end by the event, I didn’t know. But he was clearly a crackpot, with some unusual ideas.

That was then; this is now. In the years that followed I learned to consider people such as Papa Atta almost mainstream–especially in the Arab world, although also not so unusual elsewhere, including the US and certainly Western Europe. I’ve become all too aware that conspiracy theories and theorists are everywhere (lurking under the bed, no doubt).

Just Google “mohammed atta father jews 9/11,” or any similar combination of words, and a long listing will spring up of websites dedicated to the proposition that some combination of the Jews, Bush, and Israel engineered 9/11 and framed the loveable Atta Junior–and the authors of said websites have far less reason to want to exonerate Atta than his own father had. So, what’s their excuse? And, if such a proliferation of “evidence” can be proffered even in the face of the facts of 9/11, how much more easily can conspiracy theories take root to “explain” events that are less well-documented?

Conspiracies are very appealing. They appeal to simplicity (one or two linked and evil groups are responsible for the horrors and turmoil of the world, rather than many groups and a complex sequence of events that we understand only poorly). They appeal to the need to know (rather than the acknowledgement that some things are mysterious). They appeal to a sense of order (rather than chaos). They appeal to predictability (rather than the unknown). They appeal to scapegoating and displacement and denial of one’s own culpability. They appeal. They appeal. (Some of the reasons for their widespread appeal are discussed in psychological terms in Dr. Sanity’s fine essay on defense mechanisms).

And the granddaddy of all conspiracy theories, of course, is anti-Semitism (although anti-Americanism is now breathing down its neck in the “anti” sweepstakes). There is little doubt in my mind that the need to believe in conspiracies is one of the main reasons for anti-Semitism, rather than any other single factor related to Jews, who are merely a convenient target. It’s the conspiracy part of anti-Semitism that gives the phenomenon its punch and its “legs.”

But there is never any lack of targets, I’m afraid. If the Jews didn’t exist we’d have to invent them–or find somebody else to take the rap.

The need to find conspirators certainly has not let up recently, and shows no sign of doing so–au contraire. According to Big Pharaoh, our Egyptian informant, US/Israel conspiracy theories continue to be overwhelmingly dominant in the Egyptian (and, by extrapolation, perhaps much of the Arab) world in explaining the recent mosque bombing in Iraq.

And, of course, Iran has wasted no time getting into the blame act.

Here’s a BBC article on reactions around the Arab world (plus Iran) to the mosque bombing (hat tip: Roger Simon). Note the unanimity of conspiracy theories coming from Iran, and their absence in the Iraqi press.

I find it exceptionally interesting that–at least as far as their media goes–the Iraqis, the ones facing the real danger in this particular case, don’t seem to be in denial about who’s doing what. At least in the quoted excerpts, there’s no blaming of either the Jews or the Americans for the bombing (although I have little doubt there’s a contingent in Iraq who heartily blame both).

The relative strength of conspiracy theories in the Arab and Iranian world, serving to deflect blame from other Arabs/Iranians/Moslems and onto the usual suspects, protect that world from looking in the mirror and facing its own need to change, and the rot within. Because the mosque bombing is an affront to the Islamic faith as a whole, to believe that fellow-Arabs or fellow-Moslems did it is tantamount to admitting a truth that many cannot, and will not, acknowledge. To do so would be too shattering.

But conspiracy theories are hardly the sole province of the Arab/Islamic world; not by a longshot. They may indeed be more common there (I seem to recall some post-9/11 polls that indicated the vast majority of Egyptians agreed with Atta’s father about who was responsible for 9/11, for example). But one only has to tune into Coast to Coast on almost any night, or surf the web–or, of course, go to the websites of David Irving‘s rabid supporters (I refuse to show the links, but you can find them easily enough yourself) to see the universality of the theme that some group–Jews or Illuminati or Bush’s Minions or Aliens–is Behind It All, pulling the strings of the world’s puppets.

[NOTE: Jeff Goldstein’s post about evaluating the situation in Iraq mentions that one of the ways to counter the ascendance of conspiracy theories would be a much stronger effort to publicize the truth–in other words, propaganda, as I’ve defined it here.]

Lottery winners, the camera, and the mirror

The New Neo Posted on by

The other day I happened to be catch part of the Powerball winners’ interview on TV.

I missed the beginning, so I didn’t hear all them speak. But I thought those I did hear were very impressive. There were eight winners, co-workers from a meat-processing plant in heartland flyover country, Nebraska.

Three are immigrants, two from Vietnam and one from central Africa. One of the Vietnamese immigrants said simply, when asked about his motives for emigrating, “I came here to be free.”

Several of the winners had habitually worked about seventy hours a week in the plant; no doubt, that will change (some had already quit by the time of the interview). Working in a meat packing plant for seventy hours a week sounds like a punishing job, although many spoke of liking their fellow-workers. I listened to about five of the interviews, and the winners I heard sounded remarkably relaxed–so much so that they drew gales of laughter for their humor–as well as articulate, poised, and very levelheaded, especially considering their about-to-be transformed lives.

It’s one of those stories that seems to be a combination of the human dream and the American dream, and somehow it’s not just about money. It’s about hardworking people getting lucky, and trying to keep their heads on straight. I get the impression that these particular people will do just fine; I certainly hope so.

But another thing that struck me (and which has nothing to do with the lottery) is how comfortable people have become in front of a camera. One day you’re a worker on the assembly line in a meat-packing plant, the next day you’re at a full-court-press press conference in front of America and the world? No sweat–just open up your mouth and talk.

It wasn’t always that way. When I was a kid, the older generation didn’t even feel comfortable talking on the telephone, especially long distance. Terse and tense, their conversations were the equivalent of Civil War era photos in which the people posed, stiff and rigid. Long distance calls cost a lot of money back then, not just in relative terms but in absolute terms–at least twenty-five cents a minute, and often a great deal more. So a long-distance phone call was usually just a way to hear a person’s voice; and then, over and out.

When my boyfriend went to Vietnam back in the late 60s, letters were pretty much the only means of communications, and delivery was sporadic and chancy. No e-mail of course, but even no telephones. For a year–his entire dangerous tour of duty, when he was in the thick of things–I only spoke to him once, and that was when he called me unexpectedly from Australia, where he’d gone for his R&R. Our one-hour conversation may have cost him a hundred dollars or so, to the best of my recollection (not that he much cared; what difference did it make at that point?). Expensive thought it was, it seemed nothing short of miraculous to be able to have a telephone conversation with someone halfway round the world.

Do you remember the first home telephone answering machines? There was a time when they were rare. Then they became common, but it still took a while for people to get used to them. At the beginning, I tended to freeze whenever I encountered one, nervously trying to frame my message, unaccustomed to being recorded. Now the words usually flow in a relaxed little monologue, including quips and conversational asides.

In the audio/visual realm, first there were home movies (already quite well-established in my childhood, but rare, expensive, and short). Then sound came into the picture, and then home videos. At first, people would pose for home movies as though for the still camera, especially older people–they had to be reminded to move around, that this was a move-ie– and then, later, to speak.

Then there was the first time I saw and heard myself on videotape. It was on TV, of all things, on a show entitled “It’s Academic,” a sort of College Bowl-type quiz show for New York City high school students. I was the only girl on the show that day, and I wore a red suit and heels (we used to dress up back then). I was the literature expert on my high school’s team, and I fulfilled the purpose for which I was chosen: I got all the lit questions right, although we ended up losing. And then I got to go home and watch myself a week or two later–but only once, and in black-and-white. There were no video recorders back then, so it was all ephemeral, and I didn’t really identify with the person on the screen, who seemed a stranger.

About seven years passed before I saw myself on video again. This time I was in graduate school, taking a course in interviewing techniques. Bulky and elaborate videotape equipment had been set up by the professor in a special room, and we had to team up with a partner from the class and then go to the room and interview each other while we were recorded. The video session lasted about a half hour, and my friend and I got so into our conversation that after a few minutes we forgot that the camera was running and acted fairly natural.

So for the very first time I got to see myself as others see me–at least, somewhat, although in two dimensions only. I was surprised to find I seemed a bit different that what I’d always pictured in my mind’s eye–friendlier, more relaxed, not displaying whatever tension I felt inside.

Home videos came much later. At first they were a novelty, then we all got used to them. Then they became a bore, much too much of a good thing. The cute kids–subject of most of the videos–grew up, and after that no one was all that eager to document the advance of wrinkles and sag in the parents.

But the permanent legacy of it all is that virtually everyone seems comfortable in front of a camera now. Still another legacy is that we’re much more acutely aware of the aging process. That’s a function of the ubiquity of cameras (digitals make it ever easier to take more and more photos, and to distribute them to more and more people, who seem to care less and less about seeing them).

I imagine the days when there were no cameras, and the only way to chart the process of age in oneself was through memory. Did recollection accentuate the gap–“oh, I used to be so beautiful, and now look at me”? Or did it smooth things over–“I still don’t look half bad, even though I’m older; I really haven’t changed that much”?

Either way, however, there was no need–and no way–to confront the actual evidence of what one’s younger self had looked like, as we now can do so easily through the mechanism of photos. Painted portraits were only for the few back then, and the more wealthy, and of course they lied. Photos lie also, but ordinarily much less (for example, the snapshots we’ve saved from our youth are the more flattering ones, and so the gap between past and present becomes even wider).

Our current obsession with looks and youth is partly a human constant; most societies value such things, although standards of what is beautiful may differ. But in modern life, it’s been exacerbated by all the ways we can remind ourselves of what used to be. Narcissus, after all, had only a pool of water in which to see his reflection, but still it drove him mad and led to his death. Crossing the river Styx, his shade bent down to try to glimpse its reflection in the waters. I wonder what it saw there.

Mark Twain had the same problem I do

The New Neo Posted on by

I’ve written before, here, about how hard it is for me to write short posts.

But now I’ve learned that I’m in very good company. This NY Times piece on the demise of the Western Union Telegram (RIP, telegrams!) describes how Mark Twain dealt with the same problem:

Mark Twain, like most writers, found it easier to write long than short. He received this telegram from a publisher:

NEED 2-PAGE SHORT STORY TWO DAYS.

Twain replied:

NO CAN DO 2 PAGES TWO DAYS. CAN DO 30 PAGES 2 DAYS. NEED 30 DAYS TO DO 2 PAGES.

But just to prove I can write short–there. That’s it.