In a sense, it’s almost too easy to engage in this piling on.   Then I say to myself, “Oh, why not?”  So here it is.  Jim Henley is a very funny blogger.

Success Is Never Final 

Islamists see the currents of history flowing their way. They reign in Iran, installed Hamastan in Gaza by putsch, threaten Lebanon’s government and crow that they brought down the Soviet Union. ~Steven Huntley

One might say the same thing about democratists, c. 2005.  They saw the currents of history flowing their way.  They reigned in Ukraine (and allegedly in Lebanon), installed a new oligarch in power in Bishkek by putsch, threatened Syria’s government and crowed that they brought down the Soviet Union.  Usually, people who think they see the “currents of history flowing their way” don’t know what they’re talking about and find themselves getting swept away by unexpected flash floods of contrary events.  As Olivares said, “The first rule of all is to be for ever on the lookout for the unforeseen and the accidental.”

Yes, the Iraq turmoil often resembles a civil war, which was of course the goal of al-Qaida’s attacks on Shiite mosques and civilians. And, yes, the Iraqi leadership has failed to make the compromises vital to hopes of political reconciliation and failed to build security forces strong and competent enough to shoulder a fair share of the burden of the fight. 

But none of these nuances, analyses and complications will matter a wit with the Islamist radicals or with the rest of the Islamic world watching this conflict between modern Western values and 7th century fundamentalism. ~Steven Huntley

In other words, Huntley concedes almost everything critics of the war have been saying about the reality of the situation and feels satisfied striking a pose all the same.  One other thing: we are pretty clearly not seeing a “conflict between Western values and 7th century fundamentalism.”  All the time war supporters talk about the 7th century.  They have never studied the 7th century.  They don’t know Constantine IV from Constantine Porphyrogennitos, but they are going to tell us about “7th century fundamentalism.”  This is ridiculous.  If the conflict were between Western values and “7th century fundamentalism,” Western values would win without a fight, because 7th century fundamentalists, if they ever existed, are all dead.  The problem, obviously, is with 21st century fundamentalists.  If war supporters cannot get even these small things right, why should we trust them to understand weightier matters?

Many, maybe even most, Americans have come to believe that Iraq is a diversion from the war on terror, that the primary battlefield against Islamist radicals is in Afghanistan. But the “insurgents” — led by al-Qaida in Iraq — have been very clear that for them Iraq is the central front in the war against America. ~Steve Huntley

Three objections occur to me.  One is that “the insurgents,” broadly defined are not led by anybody.  They are a diverse and contentious bunch gathered into a number of groups, some of which actively try to kill members of the other groups.  Connected to that is the observation that many of the insurgents and even the once-and-future insurgents of Anbar are decidedly not led by Al Qaeda in Iraq.  Thus there has been much crowing about the Sunni tribes’ turn against Al Qaeda, since this has transformed the uneasy tensions between Sunni insurgents and Al Qaeda into full-blown hostility.  Another objection is that Iraqi insurgents would see their insurgency as the central front in the “war against America,” since the only war against America with which they are concerned is the one they are fighting.  A third objection requires me to ignore for the moment the rather glaring flaws pointed out by the first two objections and say this: if Al Qaeda says that such-and-such a place is their central front in the “war against America,” they could be a) wrong or b) lying for their own advantage.  Even if they are not exactly wrong, it might make more sense to choose ground more advantageous to us in any case.  Think of it this way: if an enemy chooses a place as his central front, he may have miscaculated in his estimation of the strategic importance of that place.  

Japanese high command believed that it was a good move to attack Pearl Harbor (on the assumption that it would destroy the entirety of the Pacific Fleet) and enter into a Pacific war with the United States–they were spectacuarly wrong.  German high command resumed unrestricted submarine warfare, despite the near-certainty that it would bring America into the war to their tremendous disadvantage–this was a less obviously stupid move, but still ultimately a mistake.  In Iraq, Al Qaeda has not been playing to their strengths with other Muslims.  Their reputation as a supposed scourge of infidel invaders has been significantly qualified by their attacks on other Muslims, particularly on other Sunnis.  Meanwhile, they continue togain strength and allies in Pakistan.  Arguably, the Afghanistan-Pakistan border is even more important today to anti-jihadism than it was in 2001-02, and Iraq remains a secondary concern at best.  If Al Qaeda actually believes that Iraq is a “central front” and is not just gulling another empire into playing the game according to their rules, it seems clear to me that they have rather badly misunderstood their own position, as has the government in Washington.  It’s a bit like the Confederates thinking that sending a detachment to capture New Mexico would make it possible for them to take California; the official Washingtonian response today is a bit like thinking that the victory of the Colorado volunteers at Glorieta represented the turning point in the Civil War.  These were basically errors in judgement and a waste of resources on fruitless gambles.  Much like our own invasion of Iraq.  The thing about two sets of foreign interlopers fighting each other in someone else’s country is that, sooner or later, the locals are going to get sick of both sets of foreigners and try to force them out.  They may be unsuccessful, but they will try.  The hostility to our presence is caused by the same resentment at foreign meddling and occupation that Iraqis would have for the operatives of other outside forces.

Palmer is surely smart enough to know that fascism is a more complicated subject than he makes it sound. “I know John Mackey, John Mackey is a friend of mine, and he’s no fascist,” is a pretty vapid argument, to the extent it’s an argument at all. It’s even dumber as a retort to a book Palmer’s never read. Indeed, one gets the sense reading his post or some of my libertarian-reader email, that because Mackey is a libertarian, and perhaps because he’s a libertarian sugar daddy, anything having to do with him, Whole Foods or the organic food fetish is beyond criticism. Palmer might want to read, for starters, the writings of Ludwig Klages, Hitler’s Table Talk, TheNazi War on Cancer or How Green Were the Nazisbefore he flies off the handle like that. ~Jonah Goldberg 

The Goldberg syllogism: 1) Fascists were concerned about conservation; 2) modern conservationists are concerned about conservation; 3) Therefore, there is a meaningful substantive connection between fascism and modern conservationists that goes beyond this incidental agreement.  Sam Brownback is against cancer and wants to “eliminate” it in ten years–is he a liberal fascist too?  Shouldn’t it be significant that everyone who knows anything about John Mackey says that he is definitely a libertarian and not a fascist?  That doesn’t seem to be an “argument,” but a statement of easily-checked fact.  If it is not really disputable, Palmer doesn’t need an “argument” to prove that Mackey isn’t a fascist–he needs only take seriously the meaning of words and recognise that the terms libertarian and fascist are not equivalent.  Wouldn’t that settle this apparently puzzling riddle of Mackey’s potential fascism?

Of course, Goldberg is right about one thing: no one has any idea what he has written in his book.  (At the rate he’s going, no one will ever know what he has written, because people will be so annoyed by the stupid subtitle that they won’t even buy it.)  All that we do know about it is the title, the subtitle and the blurb from the publisher.  There is wisdom in the saying that we shouldn’t judge a book by its cover, and likewise we shouldn’t judge it (and consequently simply dismiss it) by its title alone.  That’s a fair objection. 

When the new subtitle was proposed, didn’t someone point out that mentioning Whole Foods in the context of fascism sounded crazy?  Did Goldberg think that he had actually improved the book with such a goofy title?

What does this mean?  First, let’s consider idaafa.  Idaafa is a construction that expresses the possessive relationship between two nouns in Arabic.  The other day I likened it to the German genitive, and the more I learn about idaafa, the more I think that this is a very good analogy.  It is a very useful way to understand this idea, at least for those who have studied German.  For example, das Buch des Vaters is a genitive construction in German.  Arabic will have the exact same construction with kitab-u al-waalidi.  Like anything in a German genitive construction, the idaafa must take genitive case endings.  Tanween, meanwhile, is the concept of doubling the last vowel in a word.  To have the nominative indefinite, you double the damma, which is equivalent to our short ‘u’, but if you have the tanween al-fatha (this phrase is itself idaafa) you double the fatha (equivalent to a short ‘a’).  This has the effect of making the noun accusative, and you cannot have a random accusative floating around in a genitive construction.  At least, that’s what I’ve managed to understand so far.  Now admit it–you really wanted to know that.  

If I haven’t lost you yet and you have gone on to read this part, you should know that the rest of this post, like its predecessor, will be about something entirely different.  A few years ago a book came out called Crossroads to Islam.  To call it a revisionist history is to state the case too weakly.  It would also tend to give revisionist history a very, very bad name.  In the future, I will probably have more extended remarks about this book, but for the moment I will focus mainly on the book’s claims about Byzantine religious policy, as that is my main interest in the book.      

Crossroads to Islam has many controversial interpretations of early Islam and 6th and 7th century Byzantium.  In fact, to call them controversial once again fails to capture how bizarre they are.  One of the its principal claims is that Islam as anything like the distinctive monotheistic religion that it was later did not exist in the seventh century in any way.  This is not just a claim that Islam developed over time or borrowed heavily from Jewish and Christian sources, both of which are familiar and more or less defensible arguments.  The book’s claim is that Muhammad never existed, the entire tradition about him was invented substantially later, at the end of the seventh century under Caliph Abd al-Malik, and that Islam as its own religion is a product of the eighth and ninth centuries.  Again, this is not merely a claim that Christians initially believed Islam to be a new Christian heresy (which they did), but that everything distinctive about Islam was only created much later.  Oh, yes, and Mu’awiya was the first caliph.  All of this allegedly comes from rock inscriptions, archaeological research and recourse to “contemporary sources.”  However, “contemporary sources” on the Muslim side are essentially non-existent as far as literary records go, and on the Byzantine side every piece of evidence suggests that this revisionism is dead wrong.

I trust that there are Islamicists more competent than I am in early Islamic history who have and will continue to make the necessary arguments to refute these claims.  The claims about Byzantine policy are equally odd, if less inherently offensive to hundreds of millions of people, and they are no more defensible.  The main claim is that Byzantine religious policy from the late sixth century onwards was a deliberate effort to alienate the Near Eastern, non-Chalcedonian populations of the empire with increasingly confrontational religious policies.  I am certainly sympathetic to revision of Byzantine religious history, but this is ridiculous.  Besides being based mainly on conjecture derived from secondary sources, such as Aziz Atiya’s History of Eastern Christianity, most of which are not even the standard references for Byzantinists, the evidence for a planned Byzantine withdrawal from some of its richest territories is that the Byzantines used the Ghassanids as foederati.  This supposedly proves that the Byzantines were giving up on the Near East, even though most of their subjects and tax revenues came from the provinces they were apparently in a hurry to cast off.   

There are obvious reasons why this is completely unpersuasive.  States are not in the business of hiving off their richest territories and actively pursuing policies that they know and hope will cause their subjects to welcome the end of their rule.  States may be indifferent to their subjects’ attitudes towards the rulers, but they are definitely not indifferent to a decline in revenues and power.  On the religious side, without giving away too much of my dissertation, I will simply say that the authors of Crossroads to Islam do not understand some of the most basic theological questions involved in the religious disputes of the sixth and seventh century in the Christian Near East.  They say, for instance, that the “result of the religious policy which Byzantium pursued during these crucial years was to remove the remaining vestiges of Chalcedonianism from the eastern provinces, by unifying both churches, Orthodox and Monophysite, in acceptance  of a non-Chalcedonian position.” (p. 61)  This would be interesting, if there were any truth to it.  The problem with monotheletism was not that it was non-Chalcedonian, but that it was Chalcedonian while also trying to sound ever-more extremely Cyrilline.  Chalcedonianism did not cease to exist in the eastern provinces, but split into two factions over this very question, while the non-Chalcedonians went on their merry way, being largely quite indifferent to a dispute between “Synodites.”  There are additional problems with the book’s treatment of monotheletism (and virtually everything else), but this gives a basic sense of the kind of mistakes that the authors make. 

Cross-posted at The American Scene, Cliopatria and WWWTW

Thou desired the Kingdom of God, pleasing Him in thy earthly life, especially in increasing Thy God–Given talent for good deeds, for which Thou dedicated all Thy life: Therefore, Christ God rewarded thee with the painful prize of martyrdom, to Whom we pray for salvation, singing the name of Lazar. ~Troparion for Tsar-Martyr Lazar of Serbia

Overlooked in my earlier remarks on Hanson and Kurdistan was this slightly puzzling claim:

Israel lost some of its precious capital of deterrence in the last war, but ultimately the real loser was a bankrupt Iran who lost far more materially than did a far wealthier Israel.

I call this puzzling for two reasons.  One reason is that the “real loser” of the war in Lebanon last year was, um, Lebanon, which had its infrastructure severely damaged, 1,000 of its people killed, hundreds of thousands made into refugees and its political life thrown into ever greater convulsions.  The next biggest loser in material terms was Hizbullah, which lost many of its men and expended much of the armament the Iranians had provided them in the latter’s expectation that Hizbullah would use those weapons for Iranian ends.  Materially, the third biggest loser was Israel, which did, after all, suffer a smaller but not inconsiderable number of civilian and military casualties, in addition to having the northern reaches of their country more or less paralysed by random bombardment.  Iran takes fourth place, so to say, in a war in which there were basically four parties (plus, I suppose, Syria and, a little more indirectly, the U.S.). 

The other reason it is puzzling is that if Iran is “bankrupt,” this would also remind us of Iran’s economic difficulties and its energy crunch.  Namely, Iran has to import refined oil because it cannot process it on its own on account of the feeble and run-down state of its industry, and it is no longer able to translate vast reserves of natural resources into resources to offset the economic disorder that has been plaguing the country for decades.  If we remember all this, the Iranian claim to be pursuing a nuclear program for the purposes of generating power seems plausible.  That doesn’t rule out additional Iranian nuclear weapons programs, but it makes their stated reason that much more plausible.

This is undeniably kinder, gentler, and less political. ~Timothy Noah on Goldberg’s re-subtitled Liberal Fascism: The Totalitarian Temptation From Hegel to Whole Foods

Timothy Noah has a knack for making me make mild, quasi-defenses of Jonah Goldberg.  Does he have any idea how wrong he has to be for this to happen?  When Goldberg says that his book has been delayed because it had yet to be finished, one does not need to work overtime to concoct an elaborate marketing damage-control theory to make sense of it.  Sometimes the simplest explanation is the one that is also true.

While Mr. Noah envisions Goldberg hastily deleting all references to Hillary in his desire not to appear too “Coulterish,” he fails to persuade even Goldberg’s most inveterate critics (i.e., people like me).  Now that the subtitle (the subtitle, for crying out loud!) has been changed, Noah declares victory, apparently not realising that the new subtitle makes the book sound even more ridiculous and bizarre than the old one.  If they were aiming to move away from Coulter, they need a new rhetorical compass. 

Whether you agree with the thesis about some actual historical and philosophical points of contact between liberalism and fascism or you don’t, Liberal Fascism: The Totalitarian Temptation From Mussolini to Clinton made a certain amount of sense for reasons I have outlined before.  Next, the original proposed subtitle had some recognisable relationship to the title.  For marketing purposes, this connection needs to be clear.  In my amateur opinion, to change a subtitle in such a way as to introduce new layers of confusion and ambiguity is not the way to sell a book.  The subtitle has to make the subject of the book more clear than the necessarily shorter, genuinely more marketing-driven decision on the title.  These range from the simple (Jefferson Davis: A Biography) to the baroque (see the original subtitle of Crunchy Cons).  Informing us that a book will investigate the relationship between liberalism and fascism by referring in the subtitle to Hegel and Whole Foods as the bookends for the discussion makes nothing clear and rightly invites chortles of laughter. 

Removing from the subtitle the man who was essentially the first historic Fascist and the one who actually gave us the modern word fascisti (something for which I hope Mussolini is paying dearly right now) and replacing him with Hegel may make Popperians everywhere shout for joy, but it actually makes the book appear even less serious.  This purports to impute to Hegel, who was a moderately liberal constitutional monarchist, the seeds of totalitarian thought.  This is still a popular opinion and is most widely held by those who have not read much Hegel.  This view of Hegel is rather like the view that holds Strauss ultimately responsible for various neoconservative preoccupations.  It bears a faint resemblance to the kinds of arguments that claim to show deep affinities between Counter-Enlightenment reactionaries and radical minority identitarians or deconstructionists, which is to say bad, misinformed arguments like this one.  Because you can trace an intellectual lineage of Hegelians down through the Marxists and into the modern communists, there is the idea–popularised by Popper–that Hegel is at the root of totalitarian politics and utopian historicism.  To be brief, Popper was wrong. 

As otherworldly as including it surely is, I can imagine how Whole Foods comes into this.  Goldberg is the would-be scourge of anything that purports to have found meaning and purpose in ordinary life.  He wants a “partial philosophy of life” and would find the claims of people who shop at Whole Foods, if they actually made any explicit claims, redolent of a totalising politics.  The very name threatens Goldberg’s partial philosophy with the possibility of organicity and wholeness and the idea that there is more to political life broadly understood than quibbling over pensions.  Themes that are as basic to European and British conservatism as these should not threaten any American conservative, but when you have no particular vision of order anyone who claims to have such a vision has to be shouted down as a lunatic…or a fascist in waiting.

At the Scene, I have some new posts on Kurdistan, the continuing diversity debate, and finally one in which I attempt (apparently to no good effect) a joke about trite political rhetoric.