Countryconfusionoids,
Again, a poke at the world. I thought it might be time to let you in on one of the projects I have been developing on the side, this with some international implications. Several winters ago I happened to get into a conversation before a meeting in Tampa with the speaker of the evening, Prince Turki al-Faisal, the brother of the Saudi king and for decades the Saudi chief of intelligence. A quick, accessible, genuinely urbane gentleman in his sixties -- the prince was educated at Deerfield and Georgetown --, Prince Turki gave me his card and invited me to continue to exchange ideas with him via the internet. Once he was back in Riyadh I followed that up, and we have since gone back and forth as several issues between our countries have surfaced.
For many years Prince Turki has functioned, mostly behind the scenes, as a principal wirepuller throughout the Middle East. His attempts to broker and direct U.S. involvement in Afghanistan can easily be tracked in Steve Coll's indispensable volume Ghost Wars. With that in mind I wrote him in March of 2012 to empathize the extent of war-weariness that prevails in the United States at the moment and suggesting that "If indeed you do have a degree of contact with the Taliban leadership, now would be the time to reactivate it."
He wrote back: "My relationship with the Taliban ended on a sour note. They refused to hand over Bin Laden to me which let to the Kingdom suspending relations with them...I am fully retired and have no wish to have any contact with the Taliban."
We moved on. When a New York Times interview with the prince led him to remark that the apparent withdrawal of American commitment to the region raised the possibility of a Saudi atomic bomb, I wrote him urging him to reconsider. Atomic weapons were "yesterday's nightmare," I stressed, costly at every stage and turning their possessors into targets. He got back within a day or two, thanking me for my commentary, which he had circulated among his brothers and which he said had had an impact.
On December 18, submitting to an interview with Steven Erlanger of The New York Times, Prince Turki noted that "We've seen several red lines put forward by the president, which went along and became pinkish as time grew, and eventually ended up completely white." He called the world's failure to stop the conflict in Syria "almost a criminal negligence." The Saudis were turning down a seat on the U.N. Security Council in protest against big-power veto power.
I tried another e-mail. "There is a profound disconnect here," I wrote the prince. "As the Kingdom appears to back away, policy-makers in Washington who are already troubled by the increasing presence of the jihadist elements within the Syrian opposition and alert to the profound war weariness of the American public after our expensive and feckless adventures in Iraq and Afghanistan. They see us as increasingly isolated, again at the point of being dragged into another conflict.... There is a general feeling here -- and one that extends across the political spectrum -- that if it is to come to boots on the ground in Syria, they ought to be Saudi boots, or Turkish boots, or Jordanian boots...we are at the end of the cycle."
I held my breath after that: pretty direct stuff. A reply came back. "Mr. Hersh," the prince wrote, "Thank you. ...a super power does not always see the others in the room. Saudi Arabia's concerns are global.... America's unsolicited red line stand is what led not only the Kingdom , but the rest of the world to expect action. The sudden reversal is what led to anger. No one has asked for American boots on the ground. What the Kingdom expects is consistency and consideration. Raising expectations and then dashing them does not keep or win friends.
Respectfully,"
What the prince's graceful if forceful reply leaves out is that fact that Obama's threat worked: The danger from Syria's stores of poison gas was eliminated, and without sending in the Tomahawks. The fact is, the ground in Syria is shifting. "The hope is," I responded to Prince Turki's incisive comments, "that the current negotiations with Iran lead to at least a partial demilitarization of the region, with some diplomatic settlement in Syria. I suspect that the fear of Al Qaeda elements will entice policymakers here to prop up Assad and stage new elections."
Not long after I wrote that I had the chance to exchange ideas with Christopher Hill, our last ambassador in Iraq. His expectations paralleled mine. Perhaps our most experienced diplomat in the Middle East, Hill is extremely skeptical about the consequences of the "Arab Spring" and worried about the price we will have to pay once again trapped in the region-wide Sunni-Shiite civil war. Meanwhile, our own oil and gas production is on the upswing while our consumption falls. Prince Turki no doubt has grounds to be worried.
Best to all of you for 2014.
Burton Hersh
are all available in a highly affordable electronic format at treefarmbooks.com
Showing posts with label middle east conflict. Show all posts
Showing posts with label middle east conflict. Show all posts
Sunday, December 29, 2013
Sunday, August 11, 2013
Before the Jihad VI
Countrycampasinos,
The rains are over, and the blistering heat has lifted from these friendly mountains. Was climate change yesterday's delusion? One might hope so, but....
Last week an alert went out to many of our embassies and consulates in the Near East. Al Qaeda had been overheard on a conference call. The threat is getting worse, Senator McCain assures the Sunday audience.
Sometimes it's a good idea to run back over the history, especially the incidents we've tended to bury like road kill because they looked so unsightly. Best to start with 1945, when F.D.R. and Ibn Saud agreed to trade the sweet Arabian oil beheath the Saudi sands for Pentagon protection. American drillers moved in, and whenever the shadow of nationalization fell across business as usual -- Iranian moves by Mossadegh to recover ownership of the country's resources from the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, predecessor of B.P. -- Westerners stepped in to turn that around, in this case Kermit Roosevelt of the fledgling CIA operating by British blueprints. In time the Ayatollahs recovered ownership in 1989. See my treatment in The Old Boys.
Early in the eighties, when a cataclysmic war broke out between Iran and Iraq, we had not forgotten. Behind the scenes we backed Saddam Hussein, once a CIA protege, providing intelligence and arms. Donald Rumsfeld was photographed regularly during his profitable visits to Baghdad, uninterested, apparently, in Saddam's willingness to gas thousands of Kurds. Weapons of mass destruction wasn't that important an issue during the Reagan years.
The crunch came during the nineties during the runup to Desert Storm. Saddam, who maintained that the Kuwaitis were slant-drilling into the vast oil reservoirs beneath the South Iraqui oil fields, sat down with the U.S. Ambassador to Iraq, April Glaspie, and posed the question, between allies, as to whether America would have any objection to a Saudi military action to take out the Kuwaiti drilling sites. Glaspie didn't see any problem. Saddam invaded; the first Bush administration brought down Desert Storm and left Iraq with much of its infrastructure destroyed and the Kurdish north of the country essentially autonomous, under CIA protection.
The second Bush administration came into office determined to finish what the first Bush administration had started. All that oil! The pretext would be the threat to the West of purported weapons of mass destruction. Saddam -- who had hit Israel with Scud missiles during Desert Storm and seemingly attempted to assassinate George H.W. Bush -- was supposedly a threat, despite clear evidence from U.N. inspectors that Iraq had been cleaned out militarily by saturation bombing. Meanwhile, after 9/11 a few detachments of CIA special operations troops moved into post-Soviet Afghanistan and appeared to take things over.
The Arabs were evidently easy targets. We had soon captured Baghdad and in the process stirred to life a region-wide religious war that erupted as the Arab Spring and at this moment is convulsing Syria and Egypt. Time to look elsewhere. Lacking a coherent energy policy, we have started to place our bets on tar-sands technology and fracking, both likely to poison the aquifers and release enough methane into the atmosphere to kill us off before climate change can fry us. We are an inventive civilization.
Enjoy these last, balmy summer days.
Burton Hersh
and
The rains are over, and the blistering heat has lifted from these friendly mountains. Was climate change yesterday's delusion? One might hope so, but....
Last week an alert went out to many of our embassies and consulates in the Near East. Al Qaeda had been overheard on a conference call. The threat is getting worse, Senator McCain assures the Sunday audience.
Sometimes it's a good idea to run back over the history, especially the incidents we've tended to bury like road kill because they looked so unsightly. Best to start with 1945, when F.D.R. and Ibn Saud agreed to trade the sweet Arabian oil beheath the Saudi sands for Pentagon protection. American drillers moved in, and whenever the shadow of nationalization fell across business as usual -- Iranian moves by Mossadegh to recover ownership of the country's resources from the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, predecessor of B.P. -- Westerners stepped in to turn that around, in this case Kermit Roosevelt of the fledgling CIA operating by British blueprints. In time the Ayatollahs recovered ownership in 1989. See my treatment in The Old Boys.
Early in the eighties, when a cataclysmic war broke out between Iran and Iraq, we had not forgotten. Behind the scenes we backed Saddam Hussein, once a CIA protege, providing intelligence and arms. Donald Rumsfeld was photographed regularly during his profitable visits to Baghdad, uninterested, apparently, in Saddam's willingness to gas thousands of Kurds. Weapons of mass destruction wasn't that important an issue during the Reagan years.
The crunch came during the nineties during the runup to Desert Storm. Saddam, who maintained that the Kuwaitis were slant-drilling into the vast oil reservoirs beneath the South Iraqui oil fields, sat down with the U.S. Ambassador to Iraq, April Glaspie, and posed the question, between allies, as to whether America would have any objection to a Saudi military action to take out the Kuwaiti drilling sites. Glaspie didn't see any problem. Saddam invaded; the first Bush administration brought down Desert Storm and left Iraq with much of its infrastructure destroyed and the Kurdish north of the country essentially autonomous, under CIA protection.
The second Bush administration came into office determined to finish what the first Bush administration had started. All that oil! The pretext would be the threat to the West of purported weapons of mass destruction. Saddam -- who had hit Israel with Scud missiles during Desert Storm and seemingly attempted to assassinate George H.W. Bush -- was supposedly a threat, despite clear evidence from U.N. inspectors that Iraq had been cleaned out militarily by saturation bombing. Meanwhile, after 9/11 a few detachments of CIA special operations troops moved into post-Soviet Afghanistan and appeared to take things over.
The Arabs were evidently easy targets. We had soon captured Baghdad and in the process stirred to life a region-wide religious war that erupted as the Arab Spring and at this moment is convulsing Syria and Egypt. Time to look elsewhere. Lacking a coherent energy policy, we have started to place our bets on tar-sands technology and fracking, both likely to poison the aquifers and release enough methane into the atmosphere to kill us off before climate change can fry us. We are an inventive civilization.
Enjoy these last, balmy summer days.
Burton Hersh
and
Sunday, July 28, 2013
Before the Jihad V
Countrycoordinators,
We exchange again. Another fortnight of irregularities -- problems with a vintage computer in The Mother Ship, our sprawling farmhouse built originally on this New Hampshire crossroads by an avowed Abolitionist in 1837 and updated every half-century or so, whether the ancient relic needed it or not.
Further musings about where and how we ought to involve ourselves in the chaos of the Middle East. No doubt we'd better step back and size up what the Arab Spring has turned itself into. The shift is becoming tectonic, the enormous subcultural plates -- Shia versus Sunni, traditional versus modern -- are heaving up one country after another, grinding on one another and producing political chaos.
For years a very prominent Pakistani diplomat, Jamsheed Marker, a pal of Musharrev and at one time Pakistan's ambassador to the United States, lived part of every year in St. Petersburg. He became a friend. The descendant of an old and wealthy Zoroastrian family, Marker confided to me once that these upheavals in the Muslim world seemed to be endemic. Fanaticism took hold; from what he could tell it took some time -- seven years was typical -- before the fever passed and what could be regarded as normalcy returned. The populations throughout the Middle East were not conditioned to anything like democracy, and some form of responsible autocracy appeared to work best. Himself a deft negotiator -- he worked out the terms that finally ended the bloodbath in East Timor and created the resulting state -- Marker was a gifted and insightful analyst.
The upheavals in Syria and Egypt today certainly tend to bear Marker out. In Egypt the Muslim Brotherhood -- Morsi -- interpreted its victory at the polls as a mandate to bulldoze the judiciary, convulse the economy, force its radical Islamic precepts on the contemporary half of the citizenry. Millions took to the streets and the country's wary military brought down a coup, a Putsch. In Egypt the outcome is likely to be the return, without Mubarak, to what Sukarno liked to refer to as a "guided democracy," the sort of government our CIA ushered in to dump King Farouk during the fifties which led to the Nasser takeover.
Syria is more interesting. Right now we have an open Shiite-Sunni civil war tearing the place apart. Behind the Assad regime is Iran and Russia,
with effective elements of Hezbollah -- the Shia militants who blew up our Marine barracks in Beirut during the Reagan presidency and threaten Israel now with thousands of rockets -- starting to turn the fighting in Assad's favor. Most effective on the rebel side are the al Nusra brigades, an arm of al Qaeda, itself the outgrowth of the mujahedin guerilla campaign we sponsored to force the Soviets out of Afghanistan when Bill Casey was CIA director -- Charlie Wilson's War.
Now, the ground having shifted utterly, strategic masterminds like Senator McCain keep pushing Obama to back these freedom-loving rebels, institute a no-fly-zone -- an expensive and difficult feat, requiring saturation bombing of airfields, heavy costs, and a huge commitment of vulnerable Western aircraft -- to back the anti-Assad forces. For what, to entrench Al Qaeda in Syria? They will no doubt dominate Afghanistan within a year or so in any case. Do we want to invite two al Qaeda-controlled states into existence?
One recent development that ought to send up some kind of a flare is the outright public opposition by Hamas, the fundamentalist Palestinian entity that governs Gaza, to the rebels in Syria. There are times in any Great Power's strategizing when it becomes apparent that own purposes are best served by permitting elements antagonistic to its own interests to have it out. Let's you and him fight. This is a cold-blooded, realist's approach, but it is clearly one that President Obama -- and the Israelis -- appear to understand. Befuddled by so many decades of American "exceptionalism," too many decrepid, aging Cold Warriors and too many greedy corporate spokesmen in the West are eager to resupply yet another bloodbath. As throughout our wasting, ill-fated march into Iraq, the facts on the ground speak for themselves.
This is not isolationism. This is well-informed common sense.
Cheers. Enjoy August.
Burton Hersh
We exchange again. Another fortnight of irregularities -- problems with a vintage computer in The Mother Ship, our sprawling farmhouse built originally on this New Hampshire crossroads by an avowed Abolitionist in 1837 and updated every half-century or so, whether the ancient relic needed it or not.
Further musings about where and how we ought to involve ourselves in the chaos of the Middle East. No doubt we'd better step back and size up what the Arab Spring has turned itself into. The shift is becoming tectonic, the enormous subcultural plates -- Shia versus Sunni, traditional versus modern -- are heaving up one country after another, grinding on one another and producing political chaos.
For years a very prominent Pakistani diplomat, Jamsheed Marker, a pal of Musharrev and at one time Pakistan's ambassador to the United States, lived part of every year in St. Petersburg. He became a friend. The descendant of an old and wealthy Zoroastrian family, Marker confided to me once that these upheavals in the Muslim world seemed to be endemic. Fanaticism took hold; from what he could tell it took some time -- seven years was typical -- before the fever passed and what could be regarded as normalcy returned. The populations throughout the Middle East were not conditioned to anything like democracy, and some form of responsible autocracy appeared to work best. Himself a deft negotiator -- he worked out the terms that finally ended the bloodbath in East Timor and created the resulting state -- Marker was a gifted and insightful analyst.
The upheavals in Syria and Egypt today certainly tend to bear Marker out. In Egypt the Muslim Brotherhood -- Morsi -- interpreted its victory at the polls as a mandate to bulldoze the judiciary, convulse the economy, force its radical Islamic precepts on the contemporary half of the citizenry. Millions took to the streets and the country's wary military brought down a coup, a Putsch. In Egypt the outcome is likely to be the return, without Mubarak, to what Sukarno liked to refer to as a "guided democracy," the sort of government our CIA ushered in to dump King Farouk during the fifties which led to the Nasser takeover.
Syria is more interesting. Right now we have an open Shiite-Sunni civil war tearing the place apart. Behind the Assad regime is Iran and Russia,
with effective elements of Hezbollah -- the Shia militants who blew up our Marine barracks in Beirut during the Reagan presidency and threaten Israel now with thousands of rockets -- starting to turn the fighting in Assad's favor. Most effective on the rebel side are the al Nusra brigades, an arm of al Qaeda, itself the outgrowth of the mujahedin guerilla campaign we sponsored to force the Soviets out of Afghanistan when Bill Casey was CIA director -- Charlie Wilson's War.
Now, the ground having shifted utterly, strategic masterminds like Senator McCain keep pushing Obama to back these freedom-loving rebels, institute a no-fly-zone -- an expensive and difficult feat, requiring saturation bombing of airfields, heavy costs, and a huge commitment of vulnerable Western aircraft -- to back the anti-Assad forces. For what, to entrench Al Qaeda in Syria? They will no doubt dominate Afghanistan within a year or so in any case. Do we want to invite two al Qaeda-controlled states into existence?
One recent development that ought to send up some kind of a flare is the outright public opposition by Hamas, the fundamentalist Palestinian entity that governs Gaza, to the rebels in Syria. There are times in any Great Power's strategizing when it becomes apparent that own purposes are best served by permitting elements antagonistic to its own interests to have it out. Let's you and him fight. This is a cold-blooded, realist's approach, but it is clearly one that President Obama -- and the Israelis -- appear to understand. Befuddled by so many decades of American "exceptionalism," too many decrepid, aging Cold Warriors and too many greedy corporate spokesmen in the West are eager to resupply yet another bloodbath. As throughout our wasting, ill-fated march into Iraq, the facts on the ground speak for themselves.
This is not isolationism. This is well-informed common sense.
Cheers. Enjoy August.
Burton Hersh
Monday, July 15, 2013
Before the Jihad
Countrycommandos,
Again, something of a delay. By spring this year the shingles on the Mother Ship were shearing off with every ice storm. This meant a new roof, with three layers of shingle, down to the ancient green hexagonals, landing for several weeks on the surrounding lawns and fields. Almost under control at this point.
Memories of my trip across Turkey in the fifties kept recurring after the last blog. Turkey is a venerable crossroads of civilization; Istanbul itself has nourished thousands of years of civilization, including -- as Constantinople -- an era as the Alternate Papacy. The Turks are traditionally hard-bitten -- their performance with UN Forces during the Korean War left our commanders breathless. Islamic but oriented toward contemporary political thinking, NATO members, the Turks function as a kind of bridge between Europe and the faction-ridden Middle East. Many of the Ben-Gurion generation of Israeli founders picked up their law degrees in Istanbul. Throughout most of Israel's besieged existence Turkey has been a closet ally.
Turkey came to mind recently at a small dinner party in Florida with a couple of retired, high-level State Department professionals. Syria came up -- should we get involved in the rebellion? These were seasoned policy-makers; they both came down hard: No! Even among the Cold-War generation, conditioned to alarm bells around the world, enough U.S. Excepionalism is enough. "The Turks are sitting right along the Syrian border, refugees are pouring in, they have some of the best military in the world and even the Islamist general elected president of Turkey is obviously hesitant. Uneasy as his government remains about the Kurds in Turkey, why would he add the Kurds in Syria to his sleepless nights? Why should we?"
Perhaps we can learn. For all our claims to sophistication we are still meat-eating primates, easily tricked into picking up our clubs and storming across the river to commit genocide against the next village. If anybody doubts this, review the vote in the Senate in 2003 approving the resolution to invade Iraq. The WMD evidence was clear, and still Senators Kerry, Clinton and Biden went along with this march into quicksand. Even Ted Kennedy -- I had a hand in his decision -- wavered before he cast what he later called the best vote of his life and opposed the invasion. This would become important for his legacy -- see my book Edward Kennedy -- An Intimate Biography.
Thoughts in a torrid July.
Burton Hersh
Sunday, June 9, 2013
Before the Jihad II
Countrykonjurers,
We are there. The ancient red Mercedes made the trip -- again. Time to go after all those cowering hearts and minds it is our mission to awaken. The following might well leave certain of you queasy, so jump off the dynamite wagon now before we skirt the cliffs.
These reflections grew out of another of those toxic sendalongs my cousin in Chicago makes sure I see. Pushes the right buttons -- I suspect retirement has aroused his demonic side
This beauty is attrubuted to Don Cherry, a Canadian hockey commentator for CBC television. Somebody apparently called in and asked what Cherry thought about torture of suspected terrorists.
"If hooking up one terrorist prisoner's testicles to a car battery to get the truth out of the lying "LITTLE =/+&*" will save just one life, then I have only three things to say: "Red is positive, black is negative, and make sure his nuts are wet."
I took the bait. "With contacts like yours, who needs shingles?" I wrote my cousin. "Have you ever had your nuts wired up? I came very close in western Turkey once, and it is reasonable to believe I wouldn't have appreciated it. My CIA and FBI friends tell me that torture is the worst way available to elicit good intelligence. The victim will tell you anything to make it stop, and send you on a wild goose chase while the threatened atrocity comes down. What works is to win the prisoner over -- the right cell mate is often effective -- and keep him talking. Hatred chokes off disclosure."
With a book in mind to follow up on my study of the early CIA, The Old Boys, I have been reading my way through contemporary intelligence literature. Much concerns, inevitably, our conduct during the "War on Terror," which is our government's euphemism for its campaign against Muslim extremism. President Obama, with his genius for walking gracefully on both sides of the street, often simultaneously, seems to have closed down the worldwide rendition parlors, to which the Bush administration consigned prisoners it intended to charm into disclosures with thumb screws, but pumped up the drone attacks. The claim is made that every victim is meticulously identified, the moment is selected when a minimum of "collateral damage" might result, and pooh-bahs in the administration as high as Obama himself must sign off.
The fact is, under this president hundreds -- possibly thousands -- of "targeted killings" have been authorized and executed. The residual CIA and the burgeoning Joint Special Operations Command vie for assassination privileges. What is becoming apparent, even to such professional hardasses as Generals McRaven and McCrystal, is that each of these murders is engendering perhaps hundreds of Al Qaeda recruits, given the character of Arab society.
Unlike us, atomized as we have become, the Mohammedan world is still largely organized into tribes, clans. You kill a favored nephew, you take us all on, and all can number into the thousands. Such computer-friendly techniques as "signature strikes" -- based sometimes on the presence of a group of young men algorithm programs have suggested might possibly be unfriendly and now known to be gathering in some marketplace in Waziristan -- have resulted in casualties high enough to inflame a village. We have become radical Islam's best recruiters. Bin Laden's strategy was simple -- stir The Great Satan up, and he will bring on war.
All this is expecially true where many of those fighting are mercenaries, not subject to any nation's laws or the Uniform Code of Military Justice. In his important book Blackwater, Jeremy Scahill points out that during Desert Storm one in sixty participants were mercenaries. During the Iraq occupation one in three were "contractors," a frequently lawless, brutal bunch, at home in Abu Ghraib, many roustabouts from death squads from El Salvador and Chile to South Africa. The population rose against us.
Torture really doesn't work on either a national or a personal level. Don Cherry should go soak his head -- or his nuts -- and then reexamine his position.
Cheers,
Burton
We are there. The ancient red Mercedes made the trip -- again. Time to go after all those cowering hearts and minds it is our mission to awaken. The following might well leave certain of you queasy, so jump off the dynamite wagon now before we skirt the cliffs.
These reflections grew out of another of those toxic sendalongs my cousin in Chicago makes sure I see. Pushes the right buttons -- I suspect retirement has aroused his demonic side
This beauty is attrubuted to Don Cherry, a Canadian hockey commentator for CBC television. Somebody apparently called in and asked what Cherry thought about torture of suspected terrorists.
"If hooking up one terrorist prisoner's testicles to a car battery to get the truth out of the lying "LITTLE =/+&*" will save just one life, then I have only three things to say: "Red is positive, black is negative, and make sure his nuts are wet."
I took the bait. "With contacts like yours, who needs shingles?" I wrote my cousin. "Have you ever had your nuts wired up? I came very close in western Turkey once, and it is reasonable to believe I wouldn't have appreciated it. My CIA and FBI friends tell me that torture is the worst way available to elicit good intelligence. The victim will tell you anything to make it stop, and send you on a wild goose chase while the threatened atrocity comes down. What works is to win the prisoner over -- the right cell mate is often effective -- and keep him talking. Hatred chokes off disclosure."
With a book in mind to follow up on my study of the early CIA, The Old Boys, I have been reading my way through contemporary intelligence literature. Much concerns, inevitably, our conduct during the "War on Terror," which is our government's euphemism for its campaign against Muslim extremism. President Obama, with his genius for walking gracefully on both sides of the street, often simultaneously, seems to have closed down the worldwide rendition parlors, to which the Bush administration consigned prisoners it intended to charm into disclosures with thumb screws, but pumped up the drone attacks. The claim is made that every victim is meticulously identified, the moment is selected when a minimum of "collateral damage" might result, and pooh-bahs in the administration as high as Obama himself must sign off.
The fact is, under this president hundreds -- possibly thousands -- of "targeted killings" have been authorized and executed. The residual CIA and the burgeoning Joint Special Operations Command vie for assassination privileges. What is becoming apparent, even to such professional hardasses as Generals McRaven and McCrystal, is that each of these murders is engendering perhaps hundreds of Al Qaeda recruits, given the character of Arab society.
Unlike us, atomized as we have become, the Mohammedan world is still largely organized into tribes, clans. You kill a favored nephew, you take us all on, and all can number into the thousands. Such computer-friendly techniques as "signature strikes" -- based sometimes on the presence of a group of young men algorithm programs have suggested might possibly be unfriendly and now known to be gathering in some marketplace in Waziristan -- have resulted in casualties high enough to inflame a village. We have become radical Islam's best recruiters. Bin Laden's strategy was simple -- stir The Great Satan up, and he will bring on war.
All this is expecially true where many of those fighting are mercenaries, not subject to any nation's laws or the Uniform Code of Military Justice. In his important book Blackwater, Jeremy Scahill points out that during Desert Storm one in sixty participants were mercenaries. During the Iraq occupation one in three were "contractors," a frequently lawless, brutal bunch, at home in Abu Ghraib, many roustabouts from death squads from El Salvador and Chile to South Africa. The population rose against us.
Torture really doesn't work on either a national or a personal level. Don Cherry should go soak his head -- or his nuts -- and then reexamine his position.
Cheers,
Burton
Monday, May 20, 2013
Before the Jihad
Countryconvivialists,
Again, again. It has been several weeks, and it will be several weeks, since we are on the brink of our semiannual Drang nach Norden, up to our ancestral fortification in hardcore New Hampshire ("Live Free or Die!"). Packing the elderly Mercedes.
This dispatch was triggered by one of those send-arounds the politically or culturally motivated release on their acquaintanceships, with instructions to forward to ten or twenty like-minded friends. A cousin of mine, a devoted and very capable fellow, put me on the distribution list.
The title on the circular was: "CAN MUSLIMS BE GOOD AMERICANS/CANADIANS?" The answer was, resoundingly, NO! Because -- I am selecting a number of the source's one-line responses at random -- "Geographically--no...Because his allegiance is to Mecca, to which he turns in prayer five times a day.... Socially-- no. Because his allegiance to Islam forbids him to make friends with Christians or Jews.... Politically --no... Because he must submit to the mullahs (spiritual leaders) who teach annihilation of Israel and destruction of America, the great Satan. Domestically -- no...Because he is instructed to marry four Women and beat his wife when she disobeys him. Intellectually -- no, Because he cannot accept the American Constitution since it is based on Biblical principles and he believes the Bible to be corrupt."
And on in this vein, ending with the admonition: "THE Armed Forces WANT THIS EMAIL TO ROLL ALL OVER THE U.S. & CANADA. Please don't delete this until you send it on."
I wrote my cousin immediately: "I don't know where you picked up this drivel, but it is historically inaccurate and philosophically toxic. For a thousand years, when Europe was confining Jews in ghettos and worse, the Muslim world, from Cordova to Alexandria, was supporting and encouraging its Jewish and Christian communities and permitting Jews to flourish and survive the Crusaders and the Inquisitors who were attempting to destroy them. My own personal acquaintance includes a prominent imam and a member of the Saudi royal family; when I was young I hitchhiked all over much of the Arab world, from Istanbul to North Africa, and several times my life was saved by kindly, well disposed natives. Any responsible reading of the Koran reduces the statements you are propagating to gibberish. Like Christinaity, Islam is a direct outgrowth of Jewish thought -- take a look at Leviticus if you have any doubt of this. Both the Jewish and Christian bibles are holy books within Islam. All three Abrahamic religions share the same patriarch, the same spiritual roots.
Don't spread this poison. You are much too civilized to lead people to believe you are an ignorant hate-monger."
The whole exchange jogged some memories. There was that unforgetable incident in a lamplit alley in the Cahsbah in Tangier, when -- I was in my early twenties, and cheaper and even less likely to show signs of common sense than today -- a big Moorish bouncer with a knife attempted to collect the bar bill for a B-girl I had engaged in casual conversation. Ugly, almost suicidal
There was the morning, early, when I was sleeping steerage, on the deck of a Greek freighter bound for Crete among a crowd of Muslim peasants crossing from the Piraeus for Ramadan -- I remember how loud the poultry, trussed upside down, was clucking -- and a little Greek sailor decided to pull the plug out of my air mattress. I never have thought very clearly before breakfast. Deeply irritated, I crawled out of my sleeping bag and grabbed the sailor by the seat of the pants and heaved him over the rail. Other members of the crew charged me, the surrounding Muslim passengers swarmed to my defense, and a brawl broke out.
By then I was waking up. I didn't like the odds, so I pulled my stuff together and climbed up onto the upper deck and watched the melee below. After a few minutes I felt something tugging my sleeve. It was the little Greek sailor, who had climbed the rigging and pulled himself aboard. Smiling, we watched the mob below fighting over our honor.
It was a different world; Americans throughout the Mid-East were respected, even venerated. Our wars of overseas empire really hadn't begun. If we really want to figure out why we are feared and detested in so much of the Arab world these days, perhaps we had better look beyond the Koran, or at least read it intelligently.
Next time from The Granite State,
Burton Hersh
Again, again. It has been several weeks, and it will be several weeks, since we are on the brink of our semiannual Drang nach Norden, up to our ancestral fortification in hardcore New Hampshire ("Live Free or Die!"). Packing the elderly Mercedes.
This dispatch was triggered by one of those send-arounds the politically or culturally motivated release on their acquaintanceships, with instructions to forward to ten or twenty like-minded friends. A cousin of mine, a devoted and very capable fellow, put me on the distribution list.
The title on the circular was: "CAN MUSLIMS BE GOOD AMERICANS/CANADIANS?" The answer was, resoundingly, NO! Because -- I am selecting a number of the source's one-line responses at random -- "Geographically--no...Because his allegiance is to Mecca, to which he turns in prayer five times a day.... Socially-- no. Because his allegiance to Islam forbids him to make friends with Christians or Jews.... Politically --no... Because he must submit to the mullahs (spiritual leaders) who teach annihilation of Israel and destruction of America, the great Satan. Domestically -- no...Because he is instructed to marry four Women and beat his wife when she disobeys him. Intellectually -- no, Because he cannot accept the American Constitution since it is based on Biblical principles and he believes the Bible to be corrupt."
And on in this vein, ending with the admonition: "THE Armed Forces WANT THIS EMAIL TO ROLL ALL OVER THE U.S. & CANADA. Please don't delete this until you send it on."
I wrote my cousin immediately: "I don't know where you picked up this drivel, but it is historically inaccurate and philosophically toxic. For a thousand years, when Europe was confining Jews in ghettos and worse, the Muslim world, from Cordova to Alexandria, was supporting and encouraging its Jewish and Christian communities and permitting Jews to flourish and survive the Crusaders and the Inquisitors who were attempting to destroy them. My own personal acquaintance includes a prominent imam and a member of the Saudi royal family; when I was young I hitchhiked all over much of the Arab world, from Istanbul to North Africa, and several times my life was saved by kindly, well disposed natives. Any responsible reading of the Koran reduces the statements you are propagating to gibberish. Like Christinaity, Islam is a direct outgrowth of Jewish thought -- take a look at Leviticus if you have any doubt of this. Both the Jewish and Christian bibles are holy books within Islam. All three Abrahamic religions share the same patriarch, the same spiritual roots.
Don't spread this poison. You are much too civilized to lead people to believe you are an ignorant hate-monger."
The whole exchange jogged some memories. There was that unforgetable incident in a lamplit alley in the Cahsbah in Tangier, when -- I was in my early twenties, and cheaper and even less likely to show signs of common sense than today -- a big Moorish bouncer with a knife attempted to collect the bar bill for a B-girl I had engaged in casual conversation. Ugly, almost suicidal
There was the morning, early, when I was sleeping steerage, on the deck of a Greek freighter bound for Crete among a crowd of Muslim peasants crossing from the Piraeus for Ramadan -- I remember how loud the poultry, trussed upside down, was clucking -- and a little Greek sailor decided to pull the plug out of my air mattress. I never have thought very clearly before breakfast. Deeply irritated, I crawled out of my sleeping bag and grabbed the sailor by the seat of the pants and heaved him over the rail. Other members of the crew charged me, the surrounding Muslim passengers swarmed to my defense, and a brawl broke out.
By then I was waking up. I didn't like the odds, so I pulled my stuff together and climbed up onto the upper deck and watched the melee below. After a few minutes I felt something tugging my sleeve. It was the little Greek sailor, who had climbed the rigging and pulled himself aboard. Smiling, we watched the mob below fighting over our honor.
It was a different world; Americans throughout the Mid-East were respected, even venerated. Our wars of overseas empire really hadn't begun. If we really want to figure out why we are feared and detested in so much of the Arab world these days, perhaps we had better look beyond the Koran, or at least read it intelligently.
Next time from The Granite State,
Burton Hersh
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