During the question session following his talk on his book Napoleon’s Egypt, Prof. Cole makes a brief remark (around 38:40) about Byzantine Egypt that caught my attention, since one of my professional hobbyhorses is the old claim that the dissenting populations of the Near East “welcomed” or did not put up much resistance to the Islamic invasions.  Of course, they didn’t put up much resistance, but this was not a function of their alienation from the empire.  (Indeed, evidence even for the existence of such alienation is very thin.)  In short, I think this idea that imperial religious policy contributed to the loss of the Near East is a myth fostered by modern historians, which I believe began with Gibbon, who were already biased against Byzantine “theocracy” and regarded the Christianisation of Rome to be a civilisational disaster.  Anything that might lend support to the idea that Christianity or Orthodoxy undermined the security of the state would be seized on, and the Christological controversies became favourite examples, since these controversies already seemed bizarre and ridiculous to many modern scholars.  This idea of disaffected religious dissidents yielding to invaders was also mixed up with some very anachronistic ideas about ethnic separatism and heresy functioning as the expression of national consciousness. 

The “evidence” to which Prof. Cole refers comes from, in fact, suppositions about what must have happened as a way of explaining the success of Islamic arms.  Depicting these provinces as ripe fruits waiting to fall into the lap of the Muslims, this view does not give the Muslims very much credit for their own conquests.  

There is not actually much evidence of local collaboration with or even satisfaction about the Islamic conquests, and there is more that tells us that the invasions were viewed very negatively.  Coptic chronicler John of Nikiu recorded the coming of Islam as a disaster for the empire, to which Copts and other non-Chalcedonians retained strong allegiance.  They just didn’t like that their confession wasn’t in control of religious policy and believed that God was punishing the empire because of the government’s Chalcedonianism.  There is some irony that secular historians have been reproducing a charge of anti-imperial disloyalty against religious dissidents in Byzantium that matched some of the official government views of these dissident groups.     

Prof. Cole said:

Towards the end, of course it was the Byzantine Empire, the Eastern Roman Empire that ruled Egypt, there’s some evidence that the Egyptians didn’t really fight to retain that government when the Arab Muslims came in because the Byzantines had attempted to impose Eastern Orthodoxy in Egypt and the Egyptians were Coptic and had their own [sic].  So even with the Romans towards the end, I think they were weakened by their social policies. 

It is perfectly understandable that Prof. Cole would say this, since this was a common view until not all that long ago.  If you are relying on Ostrogorsky’s classic text, you will come away convinced that this interpretation is right, and it does sound rather compelling at first.  If you are thinking about the intersection of political and religious loyalties from a post-Reformation perspective and assume that religious dissidents would mobilise (or fail to mobilise) politically because of their religious sympathies or disagreements with the authorities, you are going to misunderstand the late antique and early medieval worlds rather badly.  Neither Egyptian nor Syrian Byzantine subjects were organised or mobilised in the seventh century, and they would not have had much, if any, tradition of being mobilised for military service.  North Africa has even less supporting evidence for religious alienation, since Carthage fell some time after all religious controversies between Constantinople and the west had been settled, which has led to some very imaginative but rather far-fetched claims of some enduring legacy of Donatism. 

Their “failure” to fight did not signal a lack of loyalty to the empire as such, but rather reveals that antique and medieval imperial polities did not cultivate the kind of conscious political attachment to a state that might very well be expected in later periods.   Particularly in the absence of effective political leadership or organised military support, armed resistance by the population was extremely unlikely as a response to foreign invasion.  Cities would yield to invading armies because they wished to avoid sack and massacre, and not because they secretly wished for a chimerical “liberation” from religious oppression.  The “ease” of the Islamic invasions was facilitated by Byzantine political and military weakness following the Persian War and particularly by specific Byzantine defeats on the battlefield.  There is an understandable desire to find some “deeper” causes for such a momentous change in the history of the Near East, but there are good arguments that this change can be best understood through old-fashioned institutional and military history.     

Cross-posted at Cliopatria

The only thing wrong with his [Napoleon’s] theory was that it was 115 years ahead of its time. ~Prof. Juan Cole (at approx. 61:20) on Napoleon’s views of the Ottoman Empire during his lecture on his book, Napoleon’s Egypt

Via Antiwar Blog

If you have the time, watch the whole thing.  Prof. Cole’s video takes about an hour, but it is an interesting topic and of obvious relevance to our present predicament.  I would just add that the Egyptian campaign also follows the model of what was supposed to happen in the Fifth Crusade (capture Egypt to dominate/secure the Levant).

As an aside, it was notable, but not surprising, that our textbook this summer, Al-Kitaab, which incorporates some elements of a northern Egyptian dialect into its lessons, included 1798 in a list of famous dates.  (The list was designed to help us practice reading the eastern Arabic numeral system.) 

Update: Prof. Cole has a brief digression about other colonial episodes, saying, “The Americans could do it [dominate] in the Philippines at the estimated cost of 400,000 Filipino lives, by the way, and it tells you something about the callousness and brutality of the American power elite that they actually instanced the Philippines as a success story of American colonialism on the eve of going into Iraq.”  He isn’t referring directly to this, which I commented on here, but it is the same kind of thinking.

From Dwight D. Eisenhower through Richard M. Nixon, a parade of presidents convinced themselves that defending South Vietnam qualified as a vital U.S. interest. For the free world, a communist takeover of that country would imply an unacceptable defeat.

Yet when South Vietnam did fall, the strategic effect proved to be limited. The falling dominoes never did pose a threat to our shores for one simple reason: The communists of North Vietnam were less interested in promoting world revolution than in unifying their country under socialist rule. We deluded ourselves into thinking that we were defending freedom against totalitarianism. In fact, we had blundered into a civil war.

With regard to Iraq, Bush persists in making an analogous error. In his remarks to the VFW, the president described Iraq as an “ideological struggle.” Our adversary there aims to crush “freedom, tolerance and dissent,” he said, thereby “imposing this ideology across a vital region of the world.” If we don’t fight them “there,” we will surely have to fight them “here.”

Radical Islamists like Osama bin Laden do subscribe to a hateful ideology. But to imagine that Bin Laden and others of his ilk have the capability to control the Middle East, restoring the so-called Caliphate, is absurd, as silly as the vaunted domino theory of the 1950s and 1960s. ~Prof. Andrew Bacevich

John Edwards wants to build a bridge to the 24th and a half century (or something like that), but he would never use the phrase “building a bridge,” because it would involve nostalgic reminiscences of years gone by.  You have to enjoy how he lumps together the “policies of the ’70s, ’80s and ’90s,” which he is not going to follow, as if the policies from all three decades formed a coherent unit. 

That reminds of something Sir Humphrey once said:

Bernard, I have served eleven governments in the past thirty years. If I had believed in all their policies, I would have been passionately committed to keeping out of the Common Market, and passionately committed to going into it. I would have been utterly convinced of the rightness of nationalising steel, and of denationalising it and renationalising it. On capital punishment, I’d have been a fervent retentionist and an ardent abolitionist. I would have been a Keynesian and a Friedmanite, a grammar school preserver and destroyer, a nationalisation freak and a privatisation maniac, but above all, I would have been a stark staring raving schizophrenic!

On a more serious note, people who invoke the future are dangerous, because the future “authorizes every kind of humbug.”

Ross is right that it is undesirable to have dueling groups of pro– and antiwar soldiers wielding some outsized political authority over this or any other debate.  However, it occurs to me that we have already gone through several rounds of this politicisation of the military since the war began, and it has accelerated since February 2006 (right around the time everything in Iraq began to get really bad).  Of course, it was always appropriate to acknowledge that senior generals, such as Gens. Zinni and Shinseki, either advised against the war or recommended much larger numbers of soldiers to fight it, but antiwar enthusiasm for disaffected military men, usually retired officers speaking out against the planning and execution of the war, has been the flip side of this sometimes worrisome deference to the opinion of military officers.  

Some antiwar writers were thrilled by last year’s “revolt of the generals,” when it always seemed to me that most of these generals (with the exception of Gen. Newbold) just wanted to fight the war more effectively and were undermining the chances of ending the war sooner.  It was amusing to watch war supporters mutter darkly about mutiny and conspiracy and threats to civilian control of the military and then, as if by magic, discover that Gen. Petraeus was endowed with superhuman abilities and foresight.  Trust in Petraeus–this was the new mantra, and it has been dutifully embraced by war supporters.  It was one thing to ridicule Mr. Bush, but any policy endorsed by Petraeus suddenly acquired an aura of untouchable genius.  Now we have groups of soldiers publicly taking this or that side of the debate, and before long I expect we will see bloggers on both sides running up tallies to see which side has more declared military personnel.  This cannot lead anywhere good.

It is telling that the NYT ran the op-ed by the seven Iraq veterans as a not-so-subtle counterbalance to the O’Hanlon/Pollack op-ed that it had run earlier in the month.  Rather than finding someone, anyone, from the foreign policy community that could offer a rebuttal to O’Hanlon and Pollack, they went for the more symbolically charged contribution of war veterans.

Worse, Finer and critics such as Rep. Jack Murtha and Salon columnist Glenn Greenwald have suggested that our analyses are based on a few days of military “dog-and-pony shows.” ~Michael O’Hanlon

Actually, Sen. Jim Webb (at approximately 1:15) was the one to refer most prominently to seeing “the dog-and-pony show” when he was in the military (via ThinkProgress).  Presumably, Rep. Murtha saw the same show when he was in Vietnam, but he is not the one to have said that.  I suppose it’s a minor point, but when writing a rebuttal of critics who accuse your previous op-ed of errors it probably doesn’t help your case that you can’t even properly identify your most prominent critics. 

O’Hanlon’s description of the criticism itself is also inaccurate.  This particular argument against the O’Hanlon/Pollack op-ed (one of many) was not that the analyses are based on the so-called “dog-and-pony show,” but that the evidence of improving conditions that they used to make their analyses was derived from the “dog-and-pony show” that may not have been all together representative of the conditions in the rest of the countryside.  The main problem with the op-ed was that it took a partial, brief, stage-managed visit to Iraq as the source for evidence of improving conditions, just as Finer claimed, and Finer was arguing that everyone, pro- and antiwar alike, should stop making these misleading claims based on such limited experiences.

Both newspapers downplayed the Korea and Japan analogies which Mr. Bush also delivered at the convention. This is more than a little convenient. The president spent much more speech time on Korea and Japan than on Vietnam. Both Korea and Japan stand as rebukes to people who once argued for the purported incompatibility democracy and freedom among peoples who lacked a history thereof. Today we hear it about Middle Eastern peoples instead of Asian ones. Mr. Bush’s point is that each was proven wrong in time and that he expects the same to be true in Iraq. ~The Washington Times

Everyone has been preoccupied with the (admittedly flawed) Vietnam sections of the speech, while dismissing or overlooking the others.  The others are, in their way, far more dishonest and inaccurate.  This is why I focused most of my attention on showing why Bush had no understanding of modern Japanese history, since Japan was his principal example of America creating democracy where none had existed.  The trouble was that some form of it had existed prior to the war, just as it had in Germany for decades prior to Nazism.  

Helping to rebuild a constitutional representative government (which is what we’re actually talking about) in a place that has already had one is immensely easier than laying a foundation on the sand of a political culture unsuited to such government.  The social, political and economic structures of modern Japan made it vastly different from Iraq, c. 2003, and made it much more able to resume its constitutional parliamentary government.  Japan’s cultural and ethnic homogeneity, its long history as a unified state, and the unifying symbol of the emperor all combined to make postwar Japan as unlike Iraq as could be imagined.  So many of the conditions that explain Japan’s success after the war do not exist in Iraq.  It is simple realism to acknowledge that two radically different societies are, in fact, radically different, and the development of democratic institutions in one may be impossible while it is possible in the other.  The simplistic Bush/Times notion is that the critics always underestimate the democratic potential of foreigners, so the right response is to consistently overestimate that potential while striking a pose of moral superiority.  There may have been occasions in the past when doubters were wrong (it is likely that doubters of Japanese democracy were as poorly informed as Mr. Bush about pre-war Japanese politics), but for the same to be true about Iraq the examples being cited would have to bear some remote resemblance to present-day Iraq.

But he is also the man who has declared his eternal friendship with Libya’s Col. Gaddafi, Belorussian dictator Alexander Lukashenko, Iranian leader Ahmadinejad, Zimbabwean tyrant Robert Mugabe, Sandinista commandante Daniel Ortega, imprisoned terrorist Carlos the Jackal, Saddam Hussein and, of course, Fidel Castro. Amongst the gringo masses, this side of Chávez is rather less well-known. ~Michael Moynihan

I understand that there has to be an angle for articles to make them seem more interesting, and the author wants to present his material as if he were revealing something new and previously unknown to you, the audience, but are the “gringo masses” actually unfamiliar with Chavez’s list of friends, assuming they know anything about him at all?  If the gringos know anything about him, they will remember that Chavez called the President a “devil,” routinely visits Cuba and they may know that he has close ties to Morales in Bolivia.  The better-informed gringos will know of his support for Ortega and left-populist candidates around Latin America, and they will also know that there are alarmists in this country who want to make Hugo Chavez out to be one of the great threats of our time.  In fact, the odds are good that most Americans who have heard of Hugo Chavez regard him simply as another member of the ever-shifting list of officially approved enemies.  He probably has his liberal sympathisers (e.g., Danny Glover), but I would assume that Chavez, anti-American friend of Castro and Ahmadinejad and Master of Clock Changes, is much better known than Chavez, the “mildly buffoonish, if delightfully brave, left-wing populist.”

Jason Zengerle at The New Republic has an interesting article on evangelical converts to Orthodoxy (via Rod).  I had not seen it before Rod mentioned it.  It is worth reading (and not because it quotes me), and I think it presents a fair picture of Orthodoxy in America.  Evangelicals may be less pleased with the portrayal they receive, but nothing glaring leaps out at me as an unfair description.  

There is understandably considerable geographical overlap among the people interviewed for the article, but this story is very focused on one very specific region in the west suburbs.  My Scenecolleague Alan Jacobs teaches at Wheaton College, which is literally down the road from my parish, and the Antiochian parish Holy Transfiguration is fairly close nearby.  In fact, several families from Holy Transfiguration have been visiting our parish lately, and I realised with a sudden shock that the priest they have been telling me about is none other than the subject of Mr. Zengerle’s article.

Update: I hadn’t noticed the title of the article: “The Iconoclasts.”  As an eye-catching title, it works, but I wonder if Mr. Zengerle appreciates just how much Orthodox Christians dislike the historic Iconoclasts?  We anathematise them every year.  My guess is that most Orthodox converts would find the title annoying at best.

I had a response to this all worked out, but I will hold my fire this time.  Instead, I will point you all to my colleagues Paul and Zippy at WWWTW, who offer their much more even-tempered responses to recent critics.  They make the right points, and I agree with their remarks entirely.

Following on Zippy’s remarks, I would just include this one section from my unpublished post:

There is, of course, a legitimate hierarchy of loyalties that a professing Christian can and should respect.  One no less than Aquinas has laid out how natural loyalties to kindred, friends, neighbours and fellow citizens appropriately take precedence over loyalties to other, more remotely related people.  Loyalty and obligation to fellow citizens would take precedence over duties owed to foreign citizens, but the duty to treat all men justly in wartime is something owed to God.  As my colleague Zippy is a very serious Catholic (and it is this, I think, that is really what bothers his critics), he would probably have no difficulty acknowledging and affirming such an idea.