I have already done most of the commenting on Mormonism that I am going to do, but since the topic has come up again in Ross’ latest bloggingheads and prompted a reply to Ross’ request for a clarification from Prof. Fox, a longtime friend of Eunomia, I thought I might add a few comments.  Prof. Fox writes:

For example: Matt Yglesias claims in the Bloggingheads video that the Mormon church teaches that “the New World, in pre–Columbian times, was dominated by two vast rival empires.” (Those would be “the Nephites,” the people who carried on the family name and traditions of an early prophet named Nephi, and “the Lamanites,” a group named after his brother and enemy, Laman.) While the history of Book of Mormon interpretation over the past 180 years is actually pretty complicated, the basic facts are that Matt here is correctly describing what most Mormons who read the book believed…up until about 20-30 years ago, that is. The Book of Mormon itself never suggests the existence of massive, continent-wide, roaming empires; rather, serious readers have come to recognize that in fact the book talks about a couple (or actually more than a couple) pretty densely populated yet nonetheless localized tribes, and nearly everything presented in the book as fact takes place, according to its own narrative, within an area that a person on foot could cross within week, if not less. This is what we Mormons called the “limited geography” thesis: specifically, that the book isn’t telling us the whole history of the Native Americans (which many Mormons admittedly thought the primary purpose of the book was for decades), but rather telling the story of some relatively restricted groups, whose story God thought important enough to make certain it would be preserved and brought forth in our day.

However, the official LDS version of the Book of Mormon has this passage (Helaman 3:8):

And it came to pass that they did multiply and spread, and did go forth from the land southward to the land northward, and did spread insomuch that they began to cover the face of the whole earth, from the sea south to the sea north, from the sea ^awest to the sea east.

And again, Helaman 11:20:

And thus it did come to pass that the people of Nephi began to prosper again in the land, and began to build up their waste places, and began to multiply and spread, even until they did ^acover the whole face of the land, both on the northward and on the southward, from the sea west to the sea east.

There may be ways to reconcile this language with the “limited geography” thesis (perhaps the land between the two seas is exceedingly small?), and I won’t pretend that I am anything close to being thoroughly versed in these matters, but it appears at first glance that the earlier prevailing view of vast territories is one that seems to have some direct support in a central LDS scriptural text. 

Incidentally, there are other things that will leap out at the reader of the online version of the Book of Mormon (especially since they are hyperlinked).  For instance, there are several references to weapons made of steel.  Leaving aside the technological question, this creates another problem.  The official site does the cross-referencing work for you, pointing you to citations from the Bible that (in the traditional King James language) also refer to steel.  This seems a strange thing to draw attention to, since these passages about steel weapons from the Bible are English mistranslations of the adjective for a bow made of bronze (toxon chalkoun in the Septuagint versions of 2 Sam. 22:35 and Ps. 18:34/LXX 17:34), which tends to confirm that the language was taken directly from the King James mistranslation rather than echoing the content of the Old Testament books to which it is being compared. 

These are probably familiar arguments to Prof. Fox and others, and they may therefore be as tiresome to them as shocked secularist discoveries of contradictions between the Gospel accounts are to me.  Nonetheless, if a Mormon defense of the historicity of their scriptures’ claims is to persuade anyone, it will need to sort out these contradictions.

Until this week I thought we were entering the last stages of the Iraq war.  Roughly 40 percent to 60 percent of Republican senators have privately given up on the war. Senior G.O.P. officials have told President Bush that they are unwilling to see their party destroyed by this issue. ~David Brooks

The latter have a funny way of showing their unwillingness.  Had these officials actually been unwilling to let this happen at a time when their unwillingness might have counted for something, they could have started impressing on Mr. Bush and the Congressional GOP that the war was breaking the party last year or even the year before.  This was already happening, but it was vehemently denied by the “we are winning” crowd.  However, as far as much of the GOP was concerned, 2005 was the year of purple thumbs and impending victory (not to mention all those Iraqi cell phone users) and 2006 was an election year where it usually did not do to campaign against the President (even if few wanted him to campaign on their behalf).  Now that they are faced with the equivalent of either Stevensonian failure or Wilsonian meltdown, no wonder these officials have become so “unwilling.”  Last year, the official party message was that the public was not against the war, but the mismanagement of the war.  The official line was that a Democratic majority that pushed for the end of the war would be repudiated by The Land Formerly Known As Bush Country.  Last year party officials were certainly anxious about the war, but most didn’t actually believe that the war would destroy the GOP.  They also believed that they would suffer only a mild rebuke at the polls (and there were more than a few people who cited the 1998 elections, in which Democrats unusually gained seats, as the model they half-expected 2006 to follow).  They have not had a good track record recently.

This other figure on Republican Senators is a bit surprising to me, since I’m pretty sure only about 30% of the Senate GOP (no more than maybe 14 members) has given any real indication of dissatisfaction with the administration’s current plan.  They are so few that you can remember them all by name: Warner, Voinovich, Lugar, Hagel, Collins, Snowe, Coleman, Bennett, Smith, Domenici, Alexander, Gregg, Sununu, and (if you are really generous) Brownback.  It seems bizarre to me to give up privately on a war and then go through all the motions and give the speeches required to keep the same war going.  The upper limit of this figure means that for every one Republican Senator speaking out against the current plan and in favour of the ISG recommendations, there could be one who believes more or less the same things but refuses to declare his position.

One reason why there is a “deadlock,” as Brooks puts it, is that the 60 or so members who support redeployment and the ISG report occupy a position that essentially favours the continuation of the war for an indeterminate period of time.  They represent a distinct, but not significantly different, position from the “surge”-supporting McLiebermanites to the extent that they accept every bit of conventional wisdom about Iraq (beginning with the story that “we have vital interests there” and getting worse from there) and actually provide enormous political cover for the “surge” supporters by advancing an argument that the U.S. presence in Iraq must continue in some form.  By disagreeing simply over the how and the where of this continuation of our presence, the “centrist” and “realist” position–which, in my opinion, is neither of these things–effectively empowers the most vehement war supporters to continue in the current course, since the latter can continue to argue that their approach is the better method.  Lacking any substantive disagreement about the importance of Iraq to U.S. interests and in the absence of an alternative that does not revert back to a 2006-style priority of force protection (i.e., the very kind of deployment some of these same people were criticising for its failure to provide security for Iraqis), this ISG-loving “centrism” is in its way as bad and objectionable as the “comprehensive reform” “centrism” was when it came to immigration.  As with the immigration bill, Iraq “centrism” is obnoxious and unsuccessful because it combines what might be called the worst of both worlds: it offers no chance of resolving any of the things that the “surge” is also failing to resolve, but neither does it offer a way out of Iraq for our soldiers.  Instead of “going long” or “going home” (which are, to my mind, the only coherent positions available) this muddled middle embraces “going round and round.”  That the “centrists” on either side of the aisle cannot even manage to work together on their pointless agenda adds just the perfect touch of incompetence.

You might call me a pessimist on the glory of democratic Kurdistan.  Therefore, I am not exactly won over by this sort of talk:

If we rescue Kurdistan, moreover, it does retrieve a sliver of the original hope.

They will be free of Saddam; they will be a Muslim democracy deeply grateful to the United States; they will be a Sunni society that is not hostile to the West; their economy could boom; their freedoms could flourish further. The Turks and the Kurds can become an arc of hope for some Persians who want to live in a free society and lack an obvious regional role model [bold mine-DL]. I fear, alas, that Arab culture is simply immune to modern democratic norms – at least for the foreseeable future. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t discourage democrats or liberals [ed.–so we should discourage them?]; but that we should have no illusions about their viability in Arab society. Mercifully, the Middle East is not all Arab dysfunction. The Turks, the Jews, the Kurds and the Persians offer much hope.

Note that Kurdistan is apparently in need of “rescuing.”  From whom?  Oh, yes, the Turks.  But not just the Turks–it is apparently in need of rescue from its own regional overlords.  That makes all this talk about rescuing Kurdistan seem a bit bizarre–if we must rescue Kurdistan from both Turk and Kurd, the “rescue” mission would appear to be as futile and senseless as the “model of transformation” theory.  The statement quoted above is also riddled with the subjunctive, ever the mood of the optimist: these things might happen and it could lead to something better.  Well, okay, there are always many different possibilities, but are any of these proposed outcomes likely?  Optimists are great ones to talk about possibilities, but seem decidedly less curious about finding out which ones are more probable than others.  Supposing that Turks and Kurds can somehow “work it out” and the massing Turkish forces on the northern Iraqi border are just out for a summer hike, isn’t Turkey (at least according to its boosters) already supposedly something like a “regional role model”?  Wasn’t the point of democratising Iraq that it was a predominantly Arab country and would therefore be a beacon (or whatever they were calling it back then) to reformers in other Arab states?  Wasn’t Turkey considered less suitable as a model for reform because Arabs and other non-Turks remembered with some resentment the Ottoman yoke?  Since we’re pretending that Turkey is some sort of free society–unless you want to, you know, speak freely–I suppose we can also pretend that these previous objections never mattered, and that the rest of the region will take inspiration from Turks (whom the other nations dislike or resent) and the Kurds (whom most of the other nations look down on).  Let the rescue begin! 

Additionally, this is a fascinating distinction between Arabs and everybody else, and it is as close to full-on essentialism as I think I have ever seen Sullivan endorse.  (Ross is appropriately skeptical of the promise of the Kurdish Eden.)  I see that Sullivan is talking about “Arab culture,” but he speaks about “Arab culture” as if it were somehow so thoroughly different from the cultures of other Near Eastern peoples as to have no meaningful relationship with them.  Especially when it comes to other largely Muslim nations, this distinction becomes even more tenuous.  What is there about Kurds that makes their culture more amenable to liberal democracy than Arab culture?  The differences are not as great as one might suppose.  It is easy to see why. 

The Kurds’ “stateless” existence has meant that they, perhaps more than others that have had a national state(s) of their own, have melded and adopted more cultural norms of their neighbours than others.  This is also not simply a question of shared culture among Muslims, but of shared culture among all peoples of the Near East and eastern Mediterranean.  The distinctions between the different nations should certainly not and really cannot be overlooked, but Western observers’ rediscovered confidence in understanding the importance of ethnicity in foreign affairs has become a bit overzealous.  The trouble with Arab culture, as Sullivan seems to be telling it, is that it is the product of Arabs, and there’s simply nothing to be done with Arabs.  The Kurds, on the other hand, well, these are people you can work with….It doesn’t actually make a lot of sense.  Are the structures of Kurdish social and family life so radically different from those of their neighbours that they are not likely to suffer from all of the same political pathologies?  

In the past, certain optimists believed that some of the biggest problems in the Near East were a lack of democracy and the absence of a robust civil society.  Fix those problems, and things would begin going the right way–the region would be transformed!  Now other optimists (haven’t we learned by now to stop being optimistic?) wish to tell us about the Kurdish (or Turkish or “Persian”) exception to the Near Eastern rule.  It turns out, they tell us, that the Near Eastern rule is actually just an Arab rule.  Even though the new proposed “arc of hope” does absolutely nothing to address the original “swamp” question that encouraged all of the original nonsense, and even though it means that the roots of the problem are even deeper and even less easily remedied, if they can be at all, this is supposed to be some consolation.

Sullivan ends his post with a rationale for his position:

It seems to me we should be investing in those places that have a chance, rather than further antagonizing those regions that have yet to develop any politics but violence, paranoia and graft.

Well, all right, but by that standard–at least according to some the latest evidence from Kurdistan–we should be clearing out of Kurdistan.  Indeed, using that standard, we should be investing our resources more heavily in Chile and Thailand than we put into in any country between the Tauros and the Hindu Kush.

Someone writes to Sullivan:

Liberals are instinctively opposed to racial pride, nationalism, religious bigotry, and leader-worship–and we saw it in spades with George Bush and Bushism.

After all, if you don’t count 20th century progressive support for eugenics and sterilisation policies, the French Revolution (or, for that matter, almost any 19th century national movement), 19th and 20th century liberal nationalism, the Kulturkampf in Germany and Austria, WWI, and the adulation bestowed on FDR, John Kennedy, Bobby Kennedy, and Martin Luther King (the last three mostly posthumously), when have liberals ever been associated with any of those things?  Arguably, left-liberals today show fewer signs of some of these past liberal enthusiasms, but that would show this claim of “instinctive” opposition to be rather hollow.

Intensive Arabic has been going pretty well, but as we are now on Day 18 of 45 I have started to feel a little run down.  In fact, after reading a short article about a Dubai Islamic studies graduate student today, I just so happened to find a UAE dirham in my pocket that had been given to me in change for my tea earlier that day.  The single dirham coin is the same shape and colour as a quarter, so it might easily pass for one if the cashier didn’t look closely enough.  When I first saw it, I thought I had started hallucinating Arabic writing on money.  That may give you a sense of my state of mind.  The good news  is that I can make out everything on the coin.

And those were the polite ones, who were otherwise impressed with Obama. “I can’t imagine if he were informed he would come before 10,000 people and say what he said,” says New Jersey Education Association President Joyce Powell. ~Ruth Marcus

This is to misunderstand Obama, as Marcus notes.  It isn’t as if Obama doesn’t know that merit pay is unpopular with teachers’ unions.  He knows full well that it is.  He seems to have a strategy of saying unpopular things to interest groups in the hope of proving that his “transformation” of politics is not just a slogan–not that he otherwise has much more to offer than rhetorical jabs at entrenched interests.  So he goes to Detroit and bashes automakers, and now tells teachers’ unions what they do not want to hear.  No one will say that he is beholden to this or that lobby!  (When he appeared at AIPAC, though, his adherence to the appropriate script was complete–there are some lobbies with which you simply do not play the game of being Mr. Above It All.)  In the end, he will probably find himself not winning a lot of endorsements, either.

First Nussle, then Ravenel, now Vitter: Giuliani’s political touch seems to have the odd side-effect of getting his staff hired (into a collapsing administration), indicted or implicated in scandal.  In other Giuliani news, Norman Podhoretz himself has been named as a “senior foreign policy advisor.”  Now we know what Giuliani means when he says he wants to “keep us on offense.”  He means it quite literally, as in, “let’s have some more offensive wars.” 

And, as everyone except those living in certain remotes of Malawi must know by now, McCain’s campaign is collapsing.

The Vatican text, which restates the controversial document Dominus Iesus issued by then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger in 2000, says the Church wants to stress the point because some Catholic theologians continue to misunderstand it. ~ABC News (via Rod)

Leave it to the press to take something very simple and almost routine and turn it into a scandal.  I suppose the potential for conflict and controversy makes for a better headline than “Vatican Says Catholic Christianity Is True…Yet Again,” but there is no real potential for that, as there is nothing new being contested. 

Was Dominus Iesusreally all that “controversial”?  I have read it, and I found in it the same position towards other Christian confessions that the Catholic Church has stated quite explicitly since Vatican II, which is normally interpreted by otherwise unfriendly Vatican-watchers as a positive, “liberalising” interpretation.  This new document mostly reiterates some of the basic points and makes plain why confessions that lack apostolic succession are not, well, properly apostolic and therefore do not possess all of the proper marks that would make a church a church.  There is nothing in any of this that a non-Catholic should find at all shocking or disturbing.  If he didn’t already know that the Vatican does not believe him to be fully a part of the Church, he hasn’t been paying enough attention to care about it now.  If I did not have an interest in theology, I would say that it is almost a non-story. 

As an Orthodox Christian, I continue to be puzzled by an ecclesiology that says that the Orthodox Church at once has valid sacraments and apostolic succession, but lacks in the fullness of the truth.  This puzzlement is a case of sharply different understandings of catholicity and ecclesiology generally.  As noted here in the past, as I understand the Orthodox teaching, catholicity requires oneness of mind in doctrine, and unity requires unity of faith, bishop and Eucharist.  Catholics and Orthodox share none of these things.  How the Vatican understands the Orthodox to be in communion (but not full communion) with the Catholic Church at the present time will probably never make sense to me.

That’s the thing about equivocal evidence: People read it through the lens of their pre-existing biases, and the pre-Iraq War biases on the Right (and not only on the Right) were similar to the biases that led the Committee on the Present Danger to overestimate Soviet strength in the 1970s – specifically, a belief that dovish analysts elsewhere in the government were underestimating the capabilities of America’s enemies. In both cases, highly intelligent people got things dramatically wrong, by reading into incomplete evidence and drawing unwarranted conclusions that dovetailed with their own political prejudices. In neither case, I think, do you need to assume duplicity to explain what happened. ~Ross Douthat

This makes a certain amount of sense, but I tend to think that when government officials talk about a “reconstituted” nuclear program and warn about the possibility of “mushroom” clouds on the basis of admittedly “equivocal evidence,” they are still engaged in something that is not terribly ethical.  It also occurs to me that the “highly intelligent” bit is part of the problem–many of these people are highly intelligent (albeit often poorly informed or confused about certain things) and this leads them to believe that they, of all people, could not get something like this wrong, which makes them less cautious than thoroughly duller minds might be.  But leave that aside for the moment. 

If this really boils down to pre-existing biases rather than deception (which I don’t entirely accept myself), that would actually be worse in some ways for Cheney and the foreign policy approach he favours.  Okay, maybe not for Cheney personally, since he would implicated in deceiving the public, but for the brand of interventionist policy he supports it would be a boon to admit the administration’s deceit.  If this is all a question of pre-existing biases colouring perceptions of equivocal evidence, it would mean that the reflexively hawkish, suspicious, shoot-first-and-then-keep-shooting sort of foreign policy recommendations that lead to the Committee on the Present Danger and Iraq war hawks getting things so thoroughly wrong have a pretty poor track record over the past 25 years and should not be taken very seriously in future policy debates.  If future conflicts are going to turn on such questions of intelligence, the tendency to exaggerate threats, fear the worst and support pre-emptive strikes will become less and less persuasive and credible.  This will be a good outcome for the country, but I have to wonder whether it might not be in the interests of interventionists to begin agreeing with the rhetoric about administration lying (all in a “good cause,” of course).  The lies could be pinned on the administration, while the interventionists could claim that they, too, had been misled: “We were only responding in the way we believed was responsible given what the government was reporting about the nature of the threat!  Who knew that they would lead us astray?  We have been tricked!”  Who knows?  The people foolish enough to believe Mr. Bush’s whoppers might just believe this bit of revisionism.

My Cliopatria post on David Halberstam’s final article is here.