Edward _

The same tired arguments about “When will these Muslims speak out against terror?” are being rehashed over at Tacitus. One of my favorite comments in response to a list of suggested readings I offered for those who think moderate Muslims don’t speak out enough was “Such views should be ringing from the Minarets everywhere!” I wondered, in response, how many minarets this commenter regularly listens to, but you can read that exchange over there.

The worst argument on this topic, and yes, it reared its illogical head over at Tacitus again, has been that if moderate Muslims really despised the violence being conducted under cover of their religion, there would be all kinds of fatwas issued by clerics against bin Laden.

The audacity and lack of thought behind this demand is sickening. The US cannot locate bin Laden. AQ is clearly able to continue to conduct terrorists strikes at will, despite three years of (supposedly [see hilzoy’s post here]) our best efforts to stop them. But these critics keep demanding individual clerics with nowhere near the same resources we have to protect themselves should be speaking out, risking their lives. Maybe they should cut out the middle man and just commit suicide…would that be satisfactory?

Case Example:
Here’s the reality of what it means for clerics to speak out in this day and age:

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I’m making a new thread on a specific issue that arose in Sebastian’s post about a potential civil war in Iraq.

For those who don’t know, I marched against the war, even after it had started, to express my outrage that we were invading a nation that posed no discernible immediate threat to us. Once the Iraqi government was clearly overthrown, however, I agreed with Powell. We had broken it, so now we own it.

In the election campaign, much is being made about which candidate will see through our obligations to the Iraqi people and which is more likely to either cut and run or simply not invest enough in the effort.

This debate is ridiculous to me. We’re racing against the clock, hoping to be able to train the Iraqi army fast enough so that they’ll get killed by the insurgents rather than us, and all we can do is bicker back and forth about whether or not Kerry could convince the French to send troops.

We need more troops in Iraq, different troops, and we need them now. (I know many of my leftwing friends will disagree about this, but I really feel this is our obligation and we can’t disown it).

Two articles out today support this claim.. First via Sullian:

US military officers in Baghdad have warned they cannot guarantee the security of the perimeter around the Green Zone, the headquarters of the Iraqi government and home to the US and British embassies, according to security company employees.

At a briefing earlier this month, a high-ranking US officer in charge of the zone’s perimeter said he had insufficient soldiers to prevent intruders penetrating the compound’s defences.

The US major said it was possible weapons or explosives had already been stashed in the zone, and warned people to move in pairs for their own safety. The Green Zone, in Baghdad’s centre, is one of the most fortified US installations in Iraq. Until now, militants have not been able to penetrate it. (emphasis mine)

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I got a C in chemistry in high school, but I’m not convinced it was my fault. I was otherwise a “straight A” student, more or less, but that chemistry class and me (I?) were not meant for each other. I recalled asking the instructor for a detailed explanation of something that just didn’t make sense to me after class one time, and she—already more than a little frustrated with me—said I would just have to accept some things on faith for the time being until we learned other things later that would make it all clear. She knew my question was valid, but she couldn’t answer it because of the way she was teaching the class, so she asked me to suspend my need to know until a later point.

My brain simply doesn’t work that way. It stops and sits down until it has the answer it wants, like a five year old at the edge of the toy section of a department store.

I know we’ve been all over this WOT thing over the past three years, but dang it, I still can’t get it through my thick skull. And my “resistance” only got worse as I watched the mindlessly Spartan applause to declarations of American will at the conventions (mostly at the RNC, though…in fact, most of the time I watched the RNC, I had this sense that all these folks were privy to [and cheering for] some “Plan” I didn’t know anything about.). And Cheney’s boogeyman rountine last week didn’t clarify anything for me either…so I’m at it once more:

Ask five different people “What is the War on Terror” (i.e., what is our plan, what are our goals) and you’ll get five different, very fuzzy answers.

They’ll range from “we’re hunting down the members of al Qaeda” to “we’re spreading democracy in the Middle East” to “we’re fighting radical Islamism” to “we’re spreading our military throughout the ME to help prevent WMD from being developed there and/or shipped out of there, as well as to have faster access to terrorists groups there” to “we’re doing all of these things.”

Do these things add up to a “war” though?

• Hunting down members of al Qaeda: this is a police action.
• Spreading democracy: this is social engineering.
• Fighting radical Islamism: this is, well, I have no freaking idea what this is actually, but it sounds awfully close to proselytizing to me.
• Spreading our military throughout the ME: this is imperialism.

This last item is the only action that’s necessarily a war-associated activity, and since we won’t admit to wanting to keep our troops there indefinitely, that doesn’t really define the WOT either.

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The events in Beslan have haunted me (as I’m sure they have most of us). As typical for me, though, I can’t seem to get enough information about how, in this day and age, it got to this…how humans (or what must at one time have been humans) could sink into the monsterous mentality that leads them to this sort of horror. David Brooks offers a customarily ill-considered take on this—it can be summarized as “It’s time to get serious about hating them back folks,” but that doesn’t strike me as a task worthy of our best minds, so I’ll leave it to him.

Here’s some of what I’ve been able to learn in my quest for useful information. It’s anything but black-and-white:

Shamil Bassajev is widely suspected of masterminding this attack:

The one-legged, black-bearded Bassajev, by now referred to as “Terrorist Number One” in the language of the Russian intelligence service, serves as an example of the mistakes and confusion that characterize the relationship between the Russian state and Chechen rebels.

Bassajev, trained by Russian military intelligence, of all things, disappeared, allegedly after having lost eleven relatives during the war with Moscow, and developed into the most-feared “Bojevik,” or rebel leader, in Chechnya.

Bassajev has a list of similar attacks credited to him, including “a bloody hostage crisis in which 1100 people were taken hostage at the district hospital in Budjonovsk in 1995” that looks very much like this most recent attack.

My partner, who grew up in the Soviet Union, tells me Chechnyans* hold a place in the Russian consciousness similar to that the Sicilians used to in ours. They are considered the most ruthless of organized criminals, the worst of the worst, scaring even other Russian mafia bosses into submission. About 10 years ago, he believes, this was the muscle behind the separatist movement in Chechnya…a turf battle by criminals to wrestle the region’s resources away from Moscow. (The separatists claim Russia wants to control the Caucasus oilfields and pipeline routes, seemingly unaware that this rationale answers the same question to at least some degree of why they were spurred to fight so desperately and unpreparedly for independence.)

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Because it’s really not emphasized enough in the blogosphere, here are two pieces from the New York Times opinion pages demonstrating why the case for Islamophobia is often overstated. First, in France: Despite disagreeing with the French government’s ban on head scarves in schools, Fouad Alami, secretary general of the Union of French Islamic Organizations, recommended that students observe the ban in response to the kidnappings of French journalists in Iraq:

Major French Islamic groups and the political opposition have rallied behind the government’s defiance of Iraqi kidnappers who seized two French journalists last month and demanded that France revoke its ban on the wearing of Islamic head scarves in state schools. The display of unity was encouraging. The head-scarf ban may be ill conceived and discriminatory, but French education policy should not be set by terrorists. Islamic leaders in France are forcefully making that point, too.

This response undercuts the Iraqi militants’ attempt to divide French society and the continent’s reactionary fears about its immigrant populations. We hope it awakens French society to just how baseless the widespread anti-Muslim prejudices really are.

And here in the US, in one of the most eloquent arguments I’ve read on any topic in a long, long time, Tariq Ramadan answers his critics and explains why the State Department’s sudden, unexplained revoking of his visa to teach at Notre Dame is unfounded. Here’s a powerful passage:

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