The American Conservative

In an important column, Justin Raimondo explores further the Chechen connection, which is not only the path to the older Tsarnaev brother’s radicalization but a Cold War leftover inside the Beltway and a cause dear to many neoconservatives. Because the Chechens are anti-Russian, they have many friends in Washington. Enough perhaps to influence the FBI to take Russian warnings of Tamarlan Tsarnaev’s terrorist connections with a grain of salt.

Raimondo:

The problem is that the Chechen “freedom fighters” are US allies, along with their ideological compatriots in Libya and Syria. When the Chechen rebel “foreign minister,” Ilyas Akmadov,” applied for political asylum in the US, the Department of Homeland Security nixed the idea – but were overruled by a bipartisan coalition of political heavyweights, including Madeleine Albright, Alexander Haig, Frank Carlucci, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Ted Kennedy, and John McCain. In a letter of endorsement, Albright gushed that Akhmadov is “devoted to peace, not terrorism.” McCain wrote: “I have found him to be a proponent of peace and human rights in Chechnya.”

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Although support for the Chechen independence movement is bipartisan, that troublesome little sect known as the neoconservatives has actively backed the Chechen cause from the get-go: an impressive list of prominent neocons, including Bill Kristol, sits on the board of the Chechens’ principal US propaganda outfit, the American Committee for Peace in the Caucasus (formerly the American Committee for Peace in Chechnya). According to Glen Howard, head of the Jamestown Foundation, a neocon outfit focused on Central Asia, the Chechens aren’t Islamist terrorists, they’re just cuddly “nationalists” rebelling against a Russia that has gone “fascist.” “The Russians are trying to treat Chechen separatism through the prism of 9/11 and terror rather than as a nationalist movement that has been defying Kremlin rule for 200 years,” says Howard. This analytical premise, however, doesn’t seem to apply to, say, Afghanistan.

This may explain why the FBI didn’t put Tamarlan Tsarnaev under surveillance after Russian intelligence informed them that he held six(!) meetings with a Chechen Salafist militant during his trip to Dagestan. There may well be  a lot of  opportunities for self-radicalization via the Internet for alienated young Sunni Muslims, but in this case there is also a real trail to leading to established foreign groups with a record of terrorism. The trouble seems to be that the FBI ignored it, despite specific warnings. Why?

Regardless of what we find about Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s stay in Dagestan, the Boston Marathon case illustrates that we will not soon be done with terrorism inspired by Sunni Salafist doctrines. The Tsarnaevs had no understandable grievances, were not avenging the deaths of  relatives, were fighting for no territory. They were apparently young men having trouble finding a place of psychic belonging in the world, and they had access to the internet and found the doctrine of Salafist jihad. Under such circumstances, there may always be some takers. Police work will help, and so will limiting immigration.  But unlike that large portion of  terrorism connected to concrete and plausible political goals, from the Stern Gang to the IRA, the FLN to the Tamil Tigers to the Kurds to various Palestinian groups, this phenomenon seems truly mindless.

Andrew Sullivan wrote last week about the Tsarnaevs:

A little lost in modernity; finding meaning in the most extreme forms of religion; in many ways assimilated by the West but finding new ways to feel deeply, internally alienated by it: this is a classic profile of an Internet Jihadist. And there is nothing traditional about this religion. It’s hyper-modern, spread online and combustible with any other personal dramas.

We will probably have no choice but to  live with it, just as the United States seems prepared  to live with  homegrown mentally ill loner gunman having access to automatic weapons.

The same week the Tsarnaevs took over the news cycle, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee approved  the so-called “back door to war” resolution, described by Paul Pillar as “an open invitation to Israel to start a war with Iran and to drag the United States into that war.” Read More…

Among Iran hawks, present Beltway-speak for a war is “the kinetic option.” I first heard this phrase a couple of years ago at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and thought it was just a neocon thing. Jeffrey Goldberg, I believe, deployed it, along with another one—”depriving Iran of the labor of its nuclear scientists” by which he meant (hee, hee) Israel’s policy of assassinating them in the street. Yesterday the term was pushed around at the more centrist Center for the National Interest (formerly the Nixon Center) in a interesting discussion about the consequences of starting a war with Iran.

Kinetic, according to my dictionary, means “related to the motion of material bodies and the forces and energy associated therewith.” In other words, it’s a physics term whose meaning could include massive bombardment. Hiroshima was very kinetic. Less so, but also kinetic, was this year’s Boston Marathon. But “kinetic” as a euphemism for war is not only fairly bloodless and technical, it also has a kind of wink-wink ironic ring to it. Some dictionary synonyms are “active, airy, animated, bouncing, brisk, energetic, gay, and frisky.” This is the way Beltway insiders talk  about preemptive war now. It’s not awkward and plodding like other Washington euphemisms “collateral damage” or “enhanced interrogation.” It sounds almost hip. It’s a phrase used by those supremely confident they and their families will never be on the receiving end of bombs themselves.

The serious foreign-policy types at the Nixon Center were discussing the useful new book War With Iran, by Geoffrey Kemp and John Allen Gay. The authors sift carefully through the many military options and try to game out the consequences. I shouldn’t try to summarize, but their bottom line is that they can’t foresee the consequences of a war, though they conclude that the U.S. and probably even Israel could do very substantial short- and medium-term damage to Iran’s nuclear reactors. They don’t try to address larger political or moral questions, such as very good one one raised at the seminar by Marvin Weinbaum, who asked what would be the broader psychological effect on our position in the Muslim world if the United States or Israel bombed Iran and killed a lot of Iranians simply because their government was enriching uranium. The authors conclude that after the strike, the problem of a Iran with nuclear aspirations would still be with us.

The word kinetic, with its aura of ironic distancing, seems designed  to suppress these kind of questions, to render them as somehow unserious. I didn’t like hearing it the first time at FDD, still less now that it has migrated to the Center for the National Interest.

In the wake of the Boston Marathon terror attack, the punditocracy seems dumbstruck.  We have come to expect after these things some good indications about perpetrators: old style terrorists would advertise their actions, and in the major recent cases, — 9/11, London subway,  Norway — the killers were discovered quickly.  As of this writing we the general public don’t seem to know much.

I agree with Charles Krauthammer that this has an Al Qaeda feel to it, the urban setting, the quest for dramatic photographs. But we  don’t know yet. A smaller probability seems to me a right wing domestic terrorist, perhaps on the Breivik model. Smaller still, Shi’ite (Iran sponsored) terror, or some some kind of false flag operation designed to implicate Iran and jumpstart an American-Iran war. But I’m no insider, I just read the blogs and the papers.

Eleven plus years ago, my wife called me from Wall Street to tell me she was okay. Okay about what I wondered. She explained. That afternoon I wrote a blog post for Justin Raimondo’s antiwar.com, saying that Mideast resentment of US policy towards Israel and Palestine was at an all time high, and unless we did something about it, we could expect a lot more of same.  David Frum, in an essay attacking antiwar conservatives, wondered whether it was Robert Novak or I who “blamed” Israel first. I think it was pretty much a tie.

At the time, in several subsequent pieces, I would argue that the best way for the United States to protect its own freedoms would be to have as little as possible to do with the Mideast– to cut loose our allies, limit immigration. Trade with that part of the world, but otherwise have as little as possible to do with it. We would of course have to punish the folks who did this to us, but after that, bye bye.

No one took this advice.  Instead, we (the United States) have since 9/11 killed, wounded, droned, imprisoned, tortured, made refugees of millions of Muslims. We have fought the endless war, the forever war. Electing Obama barely changed the situation. Whether this has made us any more secure is highly doubtful, but it surely has created more enemies than friends.

To be continued, obviously, when we know more about who perpetrated the Boston atrocity.

“Inch’Allah,” Anais Barbeau-Lavalette’s feature about Israel-Palestine, may be the strongest effort yet to convey the emotions of the supercharged struggle over land and dignity in the present period. For nearly a half-century, those who wanted justice in Palestine hoped that some representation of their narrative could reach the screen. They lived in the shadow, of course, of the epochal power of  “Exodus,” probably the most effective propaganda film in world history.  A great many years ago I recall Andrew Sarris telling a Columbia film class that the Palestinians were enthused when Jean-Luc Godard got funding to make a movie about their struggle, but were disappointed by the results.  What they had in mind was something like a modern western, with the fedayeen in the role of heroic good guys, a project which was never really in the French auteur’s wheelhouse.

Numerous films have sought to convey  something of the moral ambiguity of the struggle, including Steven Spielberg’s “Munich.” I haven’t seen Julian Schnabel’s “Miral,” based on the novel/memoir by Rula Jabreal, the story of an orphanage for Palestinian  girls whose parents were killed at Deir Yassin.  Many had high hopes for the film, perhaps because of the widely acknowledged talent, warmth, and celebrity of Schnabel, but for one reason or another the movie never really took off.

“Inch’Allah” can’t boast the star power of Jean-Luc Godard or Julian Schnabel; its director, Barbeau-Lavalette, is young and highly regarded in the Quebec film world, but not any sort of household name. But her movie deserves the hopes and access to screens granted to “Miral,” and more. It is a tough, gritty, and intense portrayal of Palestinian life under the occupation and the moral dilemmas faced by those—like the Canadian doctor played by the gorgeous Evelyne Brochu—who get involved trying to help them. The Palestinians, three generations ago a rural and pacific people, have been ghettoized and hardened. More than any movie I’ve seen, “Inch’Allah” conveys the something of the feel of Palestinian life, sarcastic and bitter in the younger generations, old-fashioned in the older ones, trying cope under a system of domination and control far more sophisticated than anything South Africans could dream up.

The protagonist, Chloe, represents an element that has become a significant  part of the struggle for Palestine, the Westerners who have gotten  involved, often putting their lives on the line because however they might have felt about the establishment of Israel, they refuse to accept that this should mean Western complicity in Israel’s stamping on the Palestinians, forever. As Margaret Thatcher put it with precision, while Israel deserves to live in peace with secure borders, one must also work to fulfill legitimate Palestinian aspirations  “because you cannot demand for yourself what you deny to other people.” Read More…

The most surprising exploration of Margaret Thatcher’s legacy comes from Ali Gharib, writing in Open Zion here. It is well known that the lady was well thought of by Britain’s Jews, particularly those of conservative tendency. Commentary was fond of her, as was Paul Johnson: she was, with her no-nonsense unapologetic bourgeois conservatism, her toughness and work ethic, a figure American neoconservatives considered an exemplary politician. They admired her far more than Reagan—something I recall from my days among that group and which could probably be documented without difficulty.

Given this, Gharib’s account of her positions on Israel and Palestine comes as a surprise. For here, Thatcher was not particualrly a neocon, but instead a partisan of international law and fairness. She was a Zionist in the sense that she believed in the justice of establishing a Jewish state in the Mideast, but—and here the distinction is critical—with the provision that Palestinians receive meaningful self-determination or statehood as well. And her belief in the sanctity of international law—to be enforced without remorse  against land grabs by Argentinian generals or Saddam Hussein—she believed should apply to Israel as well, though of course as America’s junior partner she recognized that this was something which could only be talked about, not implemented.

For instance, Thatcher was quite clear that the Palestinians should have a full state along the ’67 borders once they recognized Israel. She thought Menachem Begin, with his aggressive settlement plans in “Judea and Samaria” was pursuing an “absurd” vision. She implicitly criticized Israel for its refusal to sign the nuclear non-proliferation treaty, and opposed Israel’s unilateral attack on the Iraqi reactor at Osirak. In a 1988 interview in the Times, she hoped Israel “might at last live in peace within secure borders, giving the Palestinian people their legitimate aspirations, because you cannot demand for yourself what you deny to other people.”

These last words, reflecting as they do the moral essence of the peace process, are critical. It is hard to improve on them. Shortly after Thatcher spoke, Israel would accelerate its settlement building under Shamir, a program designed to deny Palestinian aspirations for a state—and one that seems to have succeeded.

Can one imagine what would happen if a prominent American politician used words like Thatcher’s in an interview about Israel? What treatment they would get from National Review, the Weekly Standard, Fox, and Commentary (cf. Chuck Hagel)? What smears would be inflicted in prominent op-ed pages by Michael Gerson, Charles Krauthammer,  Elliott Abrams, the varied minions of Bill Kristol? Something to contemplate this week as one reads the Thatcher panegyrics emanating from conservatives.

The so called P5+1 nuclear negotiations with Iran are apparently going nowhere. One can find small signs of optimism: there was, for instance, some serious give and take at the last session between negotiators. But right now what the West is offering—limited sanctions relief in return for Iran dismantling its major hard-to-destroy reactor—hasn’t impressed the current batch of Iranian negotiators. As I read the accounts—which are highly technical for non-experts—it appears that the Iranians believe that if they’re going to accept limits and more intrusive inspections on their program, they want full sanctions relief, an end to all “regime change” talk and actions, and formal recognition of their right to enrich uranium. Right now the U.S. is offering limited sanctions relief and little else. The sides are far apart.

What seems obvious is why Iran would feel it would want a nuclear deterrent. It is surrounded by other nuclear powers, and has seen Iraq—which lacked a nuclear program—invaded on the basis of a packet of lies and its government destroyed. It has seen the West act like the most prudent of realists when dealing with a nuclear North Korea, which behaves like a crazy and aggressive state in ways Iran does not. It has observed the world’s passivity as Israel built up a massive nuclear arsenal, and its silence while Israel shared its nuclear expertise with apartheid South Africa, then considered a rogue state. It would be hard to imagine that Iranians—who began their nuclear pursuit under the Shah—would hear Western proclamations about the sanctity of nuclear non-proliferation as anything but rank hypocrisy.

The real reasons for the obsession with Iran’s nuclear program are not vocalized, and perhaps—resting as they do under layers of self-deception and sublimated power drives—are not even fully  comprehended  this country’s leaders. Wiliam Pfaff makes the point here: Read More…

I’ve been under the weather for a few days, and resurface to find the world spinning out of control. North Korea, the boy-king with nukes. Syria now filled with foreign fighters, many from Europe, and Damascus University under mortar fire. And what, for instance, do people think about these photos ?  (Nudity, NSFW, and all that.) They do get one’s attention.

I’m curious about the instigators, who are these generally attractive young, white for the most part, women?  How many—if any—are former Muslims, rebel/apostates in the Ayaan Hirsi Ali  sense? How many are more typical young Western feminists, appalled as everyone is by the misogony resurgent during the Arab spring, and wanting to protest it. How many are  hipsters hoping to stir the pot, in the same spirit of young women I’ve heard of trying to “provoke” the Hassidim in Brooklyn by dressing provocatively?  While the targets of the protest certainly make it seem compatible with a purely Islamophobic or neoconservative agenda, it’s beyond my imagination that anyone Pam Geller-inspired could organize anything like this. But then who?

One of the appealing things in modern Islam—which I’ve seen in Cairo and in Damascus seven years ago (certainly not now)—is the blend  of symbols of piety and communal belonging with a studied sex appeal: the headscarf with tight jeans and good eye make-up look. It seems to connote a lot of good things, a sort of  modernism within the tradition, a sensuality compatible with marriage and family,  reverence for learning and education.

I can’t imagine that these protests, which I suspect will be the most widely viewed photographs from Morocco to Pakistan in the days ahead, will convey to men and women in those societies anything beyond antinomianism and anarchy and a sense that the West is hopelessly corrupt and doomed. And I can’t see them doing any good at all for Amina Tyler, the Tunisian nude body artist in whose name they are held.  Still, I’m curious about the mentality and agenda of those who planned and instigated this. Unlike many political phenomena, it’s far from obvious.

It doesn’t seem that long ago that John Cassidy (a former Murdoch empire business editor) penned an essay from the New Yorker predicting that Marx the thinker, the analyst of capitalism, would come into vogue once more.  In fact it was nearly 16 years ago, before Monica Lewinsky, before 9/11, before the Iraq and Afghan wars—two large market crashes ago.  When I first read it, it struck a tiny chord—yes, he may be right—and if I reread it, (which I will when my New Yorker subscription kicks in) I suspect it will resonate a  bit more.

Linked to Marx’s appeal as an analyst of capitalism is the fate of societies which ruled in his name—that is, the largely failed and now defunct communist world.  As I recall, Cassidy separates Marx from those failures, though not completely successfully. There is, of course, a related nostalgia for the USSR in contemporary Russia, and even for Stalin.  It could be rather obviously understood as a longing for order and a fondness for Soviet great power status. But I wonder if there aren’t more subtle sentiments involved in such stirrings as well.

Over the weekend I saw “Barbara” the Christan Petzold film about an East German dissident physician in her thirties who, for unspecified political reasons,  is exiled from Berlin to a provincial hospital.  She has a well-off boyfriend in the West, and is plotting her escape. The tension in the film revolves around her growth of a sense of duty and attachment to her patients, despite continuous  surveillance and harassment from the Stasi, and the quite realistic prospect of much easier, safer, materially richer life on the other side of the wall. Read More…

As a born and bred Yankee fan, I always felt a tinge of envy for the Dodger fans who could wear their politics on their sleeve.  Jackie Robinson—hard to deny his historical importance. And Dodger fans of a certain generation, a bit older than mine, could go through their day-to-day lives feeling virtuous, progressive, suffused with a kind of self-regarding anti-racist glow, in addition to enjoying great baseball. You would hear them boast about it for generations afterward. I’m not being sarcastic.

Sports are only interesting with a rooting interest. Tiger, for or against?  (I’ve always been against, but now am now sliding towards for.) The Williams sisters? No. The Boston Patriots? No. The Miami Heat? No.

The NCAA is a problem because I never have a natural team. Columbia, sorry. So one has to construct artificial rooting interests. I tend to pull for teams with two or three key white players—for integrationist reason perhaps, or because the game would become less interesting if it became solely black, I don’t know. The great Knick teams of my youth had Bradley, Lucas, and DeBusschere as well as the sublime Clyde Frazier and Captain Willis Reed.

So, the Sweet Sixteen. Oregon Ducks. They have the only Iranian in the tournament, and probably in all of Division One basketball. Arselan Kazemi came to the states to play basketball, first at Rice, now with the Ducks. His father is an apparently bourgeois candy-factory owner; his parents learned that in America you could both study and play basketball, and here he is. I root for him for the same reason I rooted last year for “A Separation” to win the Academy Award for best foreign film. It was good movie, true. And it allowed one to observe cultural and moral life in a city (Teheran) in a time and a place that is globally important and not otherwise easily accessible.  But also because it humanized Iranians and made the war the neoconservatives want the United States to launch against them a tiny, tiny bit less likely. Read More…