Iraq and Terrorism

After I read the letter Edward linked to below, I googled Professor Kozloff, and found his web page, with a link to this letter on it. I also read some of his other papers, and discovered that when he describes the version of education he seems to prefer, he repeatedly invokes philosophers to justify it. (He has the fascinating idea of basing an educational philosophy on Plato, Aristotle, and C.S. Peirce, who, last I checked, didn’t have a whole lot in common.) The philosopher he mentioned most often, in the works I read, was Plato, and in particular Plato’s myth of the cave. Thus he writes: “The classical role of teacher is to educate students—from the Latin word educare, to lead forth—out of the cave of ignorance and false belief and into the open air where students, using observation and reasoning strategies (inductive and deductive logic) can come to know how things are.  (See Plato, Republic, 29, 514a-521b.)”

I would ordinarily assume, out of courtesy, that Professor Kozloff is not just using Plato ornamentally — dressing up his pages with him, as though he were a sort of tony festoon — but that he has actually read the Republic. But I can’t, since the letter he has posted is so flatly at odds with Plato generally, and with the myth of the cave in particular, that no one who had actually read and tried to understand Plato, and who agreed with him enough to cite him approvingly, could possibly have written it.

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There’s a reprinted “Letter to Our Enemies” on the blog called Horsefeathers. I’ve only just discovered this blog and so don’t have a good sense of its reputation, but it looks like a LGF sort of place. The author of the letter is Martin Kozloff, Professor of Education at The University of North Carolina at Wilmington (or so Horsefeathers indicates).

Normally I would ignore this sort of thing, but this one is truly out there, or I would respond at the source, but I’m not at all certain I could control what I end up writing there—occassionally I’m a bit of a hot head—so I’m posting my response here, where I have some control over what gets written.

Here’s an excerpt from Professor Kozloff’s letter to a somewhat ill-defined group of Arab-Muslims (one has to assume all of them):

One day soon, our planes and missiles will begin turning your mosques, your madrasses, your hotels, your government offices, your hideouts, and your neighborhoods into rubble.

And then our soldiers will enter your cities and begin the work of killing you, roaches, as you crawl from the debris.

As cowards, you will have your hands in the air and you will get on your knees begging for mercy. And we will instead give you justice. Your actions and your words long ago placed you far from any considerations of mercy. You are not men.

And if you come to this country and harm a child, shoot a mother, hijack a bus, or bomb a mall, we will do what we did in 1775. Millions of us will form militias.

We will burn your mosques.

We will invade the offices of pro-arab-muslim organizations, destroy them, and drag their officers outside.

We will tell the chancellors of universities either to muzzle or remove anti American professors, whose hatred for their own country we have tolerated only because we place a higher value on freedom of speech. But we will no longer tolerate treason. We will muzzle and remove them.

We will transport arab-muslims to our deserts, where they can pray to scorpions under the blazing sun.

Congratulations Professor Kozloff. I am now officially and sincerely more afraid of you than I am the terrorists.

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As I’ve written before, one of my best friends has been covering the war in Iraq for the Chicago Tribune (here’s a letter to the editor about a recent story he wrote [registration required]…you can search for the stories themselves if you like….his name is Mike Dorning). He’s home safe again (thank God), so I don’t feel I’m tempting fate anymore by writing about him. I suspect his girlfriend and family and friends will testify to have him committed if he agrees to return again, for what would be an obnoxiously overachieving 5th stint.

Mike has covered wars before and been kidnapped or carjacked more times than I care to remember. He doesn’t always write stories about those parts of his job either, and he sees the fear and anger in our eyes when he tells us some of those adventures, so I wouldn’t be surprised to learn he was often in more danger than he admits to.

In Iraq he saw some of the worst of it. From being blindfolded and led off to the secret hideaway of the PKK to travelling embeded with troops fighting in the cities who he’d get to know and like and then have to describe their deaths, Mike has gone, as best he can, where the harder story is. He’s very smart, trained, and careful, but I’ve known him for 20 years and have been worried sick waiting for the KGB to release him in the Soviet Union when we went and, more harrowing perhaps, have been kicked out of Irish bars in New York with him (not an easy thing to achieve), so I know he’s not invincible.

I was thinking about Mike and what he’s seen in Iraq when I read this piece on photojournalists in the NYTimes today. The writer is arguing that the “defining photographic images of Iraq were taken by amateurs in the prison at Abu Ghraib” not the professional photojournalists (who in Vietnam captured the sort of images that inspired the belief that “all great war photography is essentially antiwar photography”) and tries to explains why he believes this is:

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Allawi gave a very good speech before Congress today. There are many things in it to praise, including his forceful commitment to holding elections in January and his spirited testament to the hope, pride, and faith of Iraqis:

Iraq is still a nation with an inspiring culture and the tradition and an educated and civilized people. And Iraq is still a land made strong by a faith which teaches us tolerance, love, respect and duty.

Kerry is already calling it “unrealistic” but that’s more or less because Allawi is painting with the same overly optimistic brush Bush uses, and Kerry’s not distinguishing between the two (for more or less the same critique, see his speech at NYU the other day).

For me (being easily swayed as I am), Allawi made a compelling case that patience and commitment could pay off. But, just as when President Bush insisted before the UN the other day—

Since the last meeting of this General Assembly, the people of Iraq have regained sovereignty.

—Allawi lost me with

They warned that there could be no successful handover of sovereignty by the end of June. We proved them wrong. A sovereign Iraqi government took over control two days early.

If anyone in the world knows just how false that last statement is, it’s Allawi. He’s not the leader of a sovereign government. He knows he’s not. He may have simply tried to put an optimistic spin on the fact that he’s less powerful than Negroponte at this point, but there’s a point when listening to someone who’s trying to persuade you at which you begin to mistrust everything they say. That point is often a statement they make you know they don’t believe.

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Stick a fork in it. Iraq is done. At least according to columnist Robert Novak:

Inside the Bush administration policymaking apparatus, there is strong feeling that U.S. troops must leave Iraq next year. This determination is not predicated on success in implanting Iraqi democracy and internal stability. Rather, the officials are saying: Ready or not, here we go.

This prospective policy is based on Iraq’s national elections in late January, but not predicated on ending the insurgency or reaching a national political settlement. Getting out of Iraq would end the neoconservative dream of building democracy in the Arab world. The United States would be content having saved the world from Saddam Hussein’s quest for weapons of mass destruction.

The reality of hard decisions ahead is obscured by blather on both sides in a presidential campaign. Six weeks before the election, Bush cannot be expected to admit even the possibility of a quick withdrawal. Sen. John Kerry’s political aides, still languishing in fantastic speculation about European troops to the rescue, do not even ponder a quick exit. But Kerry supporters with foreign policy experience speculate that if elected, their candidate would take the same escape route.

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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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Catching Osama bin Laden and disrupting al Qaeda, that’s what. From the New York Times:

“Three years after the Sept. 11 attacks on New York and the Pentagon, the Central Intelligence Agency has fewer experienced case officers assigned to its headquarters unit dealing with Osama bin Laden than it did at the time of the attacks, despite repeated pleas from the unit’s leaders for reinforcements, a senior C.I.A. officer with extensive counterterrorism experience has told Congress.

The bin Laden unit is stretched so thin that it relies on inexperienced officers rotated in and out every 60 to 90 days, and they leave before they know enough to be able to perform any meaningful work, according to a letter the C.I.A. officer has written to the House and Senate Intelligence Committees.

“There has been no systematic effort to groom Al Qaeda expertise” among C.I.A. officers since Sept. 11, 2001, according to the letter, written by Michael F. Scheuer, the former chief of the agency’s bin Laden unit and the author of a best-selling book that is critical of the Bush administration’s handling of the war on terror.” (…)

Mr. Scheuer, a 22-year veteran of the C.I.A., served as the first chief of the agency’s bin Laden unit from 1996 until 1999.”

Is there any reason at all why we can’t find a way to adequately fund the CIA unit charged with catching bin Laden? Couldn’t we trim a bit off our agricultural subsidies, or postpone some highway construction, or something? I know I’d be willing to defer my share of the tax cuts for a year or so, if it meant making sure that this unit had enough agents, and that those agents stayed long enough to develop real expertise. I’d even be willing to defer them for two years, just to make sure that the units tracking other terrorists who don’t have bin Laden’s name recognition are fully funded too.

But hey, things could be worse. If John Kerry is elected, we’d go back to a pre-9/11 mindset, and think what a dreadful change that would be.

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On March 2, 2004, when this blog had about a third of the daily readership that it has today, I wrote the following. Watch as it comes back to bite me in the ass:

I have no idea how the average Iraqi feels about his situation, but Kevin Drum, David Adesnik, and Bird Dog at Tacitus all feel pretty darn good about our progress. Here’s a sentence I thought I’d never write: Drum, Adesnik, and Bird Dog are in agreement on Iraq.

All three posted before today’s round of bombings and attacks, so it’s fair to say that they’ve been somewhat upstaged by events. But their claim still holds up. Iraq is getting better. …

(There’s more.)

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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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I want a President who finishes what he starts. (The linked CSIS Report on Iraq is required reading, y’all. Via Sullivan.)

I hate to be shrill on this, and I hate all the more for Obsidian Wings to turn (further) to the left as the election approaches. I am, after all, the putative moderate on this site, and I have an interest in keeping this site (and its commentators) suitably moder-iffic. But, enough is enough. What the Hell does a guy have to do to get fired in this town?

(Yglesias, excerpted and embellished upon by our own Hilzoy, provides the rest of the answer.)

So, Lieberman — aka the Big Lieb, aka the Ninja, aka Joey from the CT — is still running, right? Whew, that’s a relief. I was afraid I was gonna have to vote for some warmed-over, two-faced, flip-floppin’ peacenik — like Kerry.

(Even Dean is preferrable. You reading this, Katherine?*)

von

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