But the man has a fundamentally different view of what the United States government should and should not do [bold mine-DL]. I imagine that, had Paul been in the Senate when Jefferson presented the Louisiana Purchase to it, he would have heartily declared, “Nay! Where in our Constitution does it grant the federal government the authority to purchase land?” ~Jay Cost

Um, okay.  Paul believes that the government should be limited to its enumerated powers, which must mean that the GOP wants unlimited powers for the federal government.  Those would be two fundamentally different views. 

If Paul had been around in 1803, he presumably would have said that about the Purchase, because that is the correct view of the matter.  Several Federalists, including my distant cousin William Plumer of New Hampshire, actively opposed the Purchase and tried to organise the secession of New England to separate their states from the Union.  To them it was not only illegal, but it was also aimed to pave the way for the expansion of slavery (which, as it happens, did end up expanding into at least some part of the Louisiana Territory).  They were right on the constitutional question, and Jefferson was wrong (and a traitor to his own best principles).   

This is supposed to discredit Ron Paul and make the GOP look good?  This sort of talk will remind the few remaining constitutionalists in the party that the Red Republicans secured their hold on power by gutting the constitutional republic, spitting on the Constitution and destroying the voluntary Union of states.  Mr. Cost is basically saying that the GOP has no place for people who actually believe in strict construction or the limits that the Constitution placed on government.  He might as well say, “Libertarians and constitutionalists, ‘raus!”  That’s fine by me, Mr. Cost.  I have never entered the big circus tent of the GOP, and with attitudes like those of Mr. Cost I certainly never will. 

Cost is saying that modern Republicanism and constitutionalism are basically mutually exclusive.  I suppose he’s obviously right, given what I’ve seen over the last six years, but I’m not clear on why a Republican would want to advertise to his fellows that their party is a gigantic, shambolic fraud against its conservative supporters (a few of whom still operate on the assumption that judicial activism is bad because it’s unconstitutional, and not just because they don’t like point-headed judges).  I’m not sure why a Republican would want to declare, in no uncertain terms, that the past Republican defenses of constitutionalism and the Tenth Amendment and the rhetoric of limited government and judicial restraint are essentially worthless–they belong to a “fundamentally different view of what the United States government should and should not do” from that of today’s Republican Party.  It doesn’t make any sense, but I appreciate Mr. Cost’s work in clearing up any confusion that constitutionalists might have had about whether they should support the GOP.

There is absolutely no question at all that in the South Carolina debate this week, Paul said that America invited 9/11. ~John Tabin

Actually, there is quite a lot of questioning of this very wrong assessment of Rep. Paul’s words.  Most people not already apparently predisposed to loathe non-interventionist arguments don’t think Paul was saying this, nor do they think he was “blaming America.”  To blameAmerica would be to blame the American people or the country as a whole or even the government, and it would involve accusing one or all of these of being culpable for 9/11.  Strictly speaking, virtually no one in America does this, and certainly no conservative or libertarian non-interventionists do this.     

Note that the whole language of “inviting” was Goler’s.  Paul ignored the drift of the tendentious, leading question and tried to provide a substantive answer about the negative consequences of policy instead.  Paul advocated understanding; he wasn’t using the language of blaming and excusing.  In any case, that is typically the language of the left.  If I could have told him what to say, I would have told him that he should have said, “No, of course America didn’t invite 9/11–what a stupid thing to ask!  I’m here to talk about substantive policy issues and our broken foreign policy, and all you can do is waste our time with pathetic rhetorical games.  No wonder the media failed us in the months prior to the invasion–you’re not even asking the right questions!”  But Dr. Paul is more longsuffering and generous than I am.  

Mr. Tabin refers to Paul’s position as one of “radical pacifism,” which is utterly false and, I’m sorry to say, all together too typical of critics of non-interventionists.  If someone doesn’t support unconstitutional wars of aggression, he can only take this view out of a rejection of all war!  As do all conservative and libertarian non-interventionists, Ron Paul acknowledges the right of self-defense and believes that wars can be fought for self-defense.  He thinks American wars ought to be declared, as the Constitution requires.  If this is “radical pacifism,” you can count me in. 

Mr. Tabin’s article is titled, “Will Libertarianism Survive Ron Paul?”  Mr. Tabin may not have chosen this title, so the question may not be his, but about this title let me just say that if libertarianism survived because libertarians went around denouncing Ron Paul it wouldn’t be worth very much.

Is he anything beyond a standard Republican conservative? Will he have anything beyond a Mideast policy that consists of win in Iraq, support the surge, and oppose any timetable? Does he stand for any strategic thinking apart from what John McCain unconsciously but aptly characterized as “Bomb-bomb-bomb, bomb-bomb Iran”? On domestic issues, can Mr. Thompson go beyond standard conservative thought? I happen to be standard conservative myself [sic], but sometimes old things need to be made new, the obvious needs to be made fresh. ~Peggy Noonan

Well, his views on these things aren’t exactly secrets.  He has been giving interviews in which he states very bluntly what he thinks about all sorts of things, and he has been either writing articles for National Review or giving speeches that National Review has turned into articles on a regular basis for several months.  The things we seem to know about him are that he supports the war and the surge and wants no timetables, he seems intent on pushing for conflict with Iran (it seems likely that he would go along with McCain’s little ditty) and thinks that Scooter Libby got a really raw deal.  He’s for the 2nd Amendment, he’s pro-life and he likes Sarkozy.  Oh, and he allegedly drives a red pickup truck.  That about sums it up.  Who’s excited?

A bit late to the D’Souza-bashing party, Cathy Young reviews The Enemy at Home and concludes (as everyone already had four months ago) that…Andrew Sullivan is wrong about people on the right in general and the reaction to D’Souza’s book in particular.  In the course of a review that ends with the (terribly surprising) conclusion that a contributor to Reason supports freedom, she gets really carried away and says something strikingly similar to what Kevin Drum had said about a remark by Glenn Beck, which had echoed part of D’Souza’s thesis:

In effect, D’Souza, Colson, Buchanan and company agree with the familiar sentiment that the terrorists “hate us for our freedoms.”

It is a strange article indeed that can use the phrase, “D’Souza, Colson, Buchanan and company” without a powerful sense of irony.  It would be like a conservative saying, “Lindsey, Sager, Rockwell and company,” as if these people were really all part of the same group of “libertarians” who were arguing for a common position.  As I argued at some length back in February, saying that Muslims “hate us for our freedoms” is almost completely the opposite of saying that they object to Western cultural decadence.  Everything hinges on the implications of the two different statements: one implies that we are virtuous and innocent and have been inexplicably wronged because we carry the torch of liberty, while the other says that we are a sinful, wretched lot who have been chastised by the secular equivalent of God sending the Assyrians against us.  The former assumes that there is nothing wrong with us at all, their response is wholly without cause and irrational (or is essential to who they are and therefore unchangeable and also not worth trying to understand in any depth) and “they” react violently against “us” because “we” are the embodiment of more or less pure secular good and “they” are the embodiment of pure secular evil.  The latter view assumes not only that “we” are capable of error and corruption, but that this moral corruption has additional consequences beyond social disorder, family disruption and degeneracy at home.  With these two responses you can begin to discern the difference between nationalists and conservatives.  According to the latter view, one of the other consequences to cultural decadence is the outraged reaction of traditional societies subjected to the fruits of that decadence by way of globalisation.  There is some validity to this line of argument, but it hardly explains everything (and D’Souza is the only one who is trying to use it to explain everything vis-a-vis the Islamic world). 

As I said before, where D’Souza goes badly wrong–because he is desperately covering up for interventionist foreign policy–is to pin the blame entirely on the export of cultural liberalism, rather than seeing this as an aggravating factor that simply intensifies the hostility generated by other things, such as U.S. foreign policy, and he then gets even more ridiculous when he proposes the solution that we team up with “traditional Muslims” for ecumenical jihad against the godless pagans and the supposedly distinct “radical Muslims.”  This issue becomes timely, since we are once again debating the absurd charge of “blaming America” that has been aimed at Ron Paul, because he insists on recognising that bad, provocative policies have bad (albeit unintended) consequences.  Giuliani’s response to Ron Paul is very similar to the general response to D’Souza in the common thread of Republicans’ objecting to “blaming America,” but notably D’Souza has continued to enjoy the support and benefit of the doubt of many conservatives, even those who think he is deeply mistaken.  D’Souza enjoys this relatively better treatment because he does not pin 9/11 in any way on U.S. foreign policy, which means that the Republicans who have contributed to the errors of this foreign policy are off the hook.  D’Souza “blames America first,” but the America he blames is that of the coastal megalopoleis, “Blue” America, which is a relatively more acceptable target for the conservatives who are trashing his book.  Of course, GOP orthodoxy is that you should never “blame America” in any way, by which they mean you should never engage in criticial thinking or criticism with respect to anything to do with the U.S. government or American culture in relation to the rest of the world, so that it is still in poor taste to trace 9/11’s causes back to cultural liberals (even though all of the D’Souza critics would otherwise be happy to trash these people all day long as traitors and the like).  At other times, it may be acceptable to bash cultural liberals in the most vehement ways, but that is something that “we” keep in the family.  The idea seems to me: don’t argue in front of the Muslims, but maintain a front of unity and solidarity to the outside world.

Again, this is a good thing, not only for the healing of the Church but also of Russia. Whatever is in Putin’s heart, he’s allowing this to happen, and that can’t be taken away from him. Although the whiff of Caesaropapism stings my Western nostrils. It struck me as telling that Alexy praised Putin’s essential quality, the thing that won over the ROCOR holdouts, as devotion to Russia, not to Christ. ~Rod Dreher

I would take issue with two points in Rod’s otherwise good post on the reconciliation with Moscow.  First, he refers to it as ROCOR’s schism with Moscow, as if the Russian Orthodox in exile had chosen to break away from Moscow out of some sort of pique rather than principled resistance to collusion with an anti-Christian regime.  On the contrary, the Church Abroad had gone out of communion with Moscow because the Patriarchate had begun colluding with what was remembered in Synodal service books until the early ’90s as “the godless authority.”  It was a question of conscientious refusal to participate in that error, an error that fortunately was brought to an end with the collapse of that authority.  It is now in the past, slava Christe Bozhe, but it is important to remember that the Russian Orthodox outside Russia were doing the only thing that they could have done when the Soviets were in power.  There is, incidentally, something slightly inconsistent in hitting ROCOR for schism while at the same time complaining about “Caesaropapism” because of Putin’s involvement in helping to facilitate the reconciliation.

The other thing I would say is that Caesaropapism is not evident here.  This is mainly because Caesaropapism does not exist, at least not in the Orthodox world.  What people think of when they hear that term is the emperor or sovereign governing the church as if he were in a position of authority akin to that of the Pope.  Hence the name.  Caesaropapism in that form found its first real expressions in…England under Henry VIII and various Lutheran and other Protestant states in the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries.  When Otto of Bavaria became King of Greece after independence, the relations between the sovereign and the Church of Greece were organised along the traditions inherited from the post-Augsburg German context (cuius regio, eius religio) rather than anything resembling either the idealised Byzantine symphoneia or the more basic, mundane distinction of secular and religious authorities that prevailed in Byzantium and again in Muscovy.  This German and Protestant Caesaropapism served as the model for the Petrine reforms, including ther introduction of Caesaropapism into Russia along with advance of Western-style absolutism.  Obviously, the subjection of the Church to the Soviet state was a more extreme example of this relationship, which outsiders have routinely and wrongly assumed to be the norm of church-state relations in Orthodox countries.   If there was or still is any Caesaropapist tendency in Russia, it came there by way of Westernising and modernising reforms that aimed to exalt the state and diminish any institutions that might pose a challenge to the centrality of the state. 

I generally try to offer some perspective on why Putin does what he does and why he is not quite the villain the Western media make him out to be (which is not to say that he is a particularly good or just President), and I certainly don’t and wouldn’t dispute Putin’s profession of Orthodoxy, but he has been a major booster of reconciliation at least partly as a way to encourage Diasporan Russians, including second and third generation Diasporans, to either come home to help or to do more to reinvest in Russia.  It is not so much a question of Putin “allowing” this–since he does not actually control the Church–as it is a question of Patriarch Alexei permitting him to receive some of the credit for the fruits of what have been the labours of Orthodox bishops from Russia and throughout the Diaspora.  The disunity among Russian Orthodox presented some practical obstacles to rallying ethnic Russians around the world to support Russia more than they have done.  There is also some small truth to the charge that some Diasporans have wanted the reconciliation for both nationalist and patriotic reasons: they wish all Russians to be (at least theoretically) joined together, and they also believe this will be good for Russia.  If these were the overwhelming or primary reasons for the reconciliation, that would be more of a problem, but I am of the opinion that these are contributing, mostly harmless factors that have added impetus to the fundamental drive to restore the unity of Russian Orthodox Christians.

Blogging has been light today, as we have a mostly interesting Caucasus conference going on here at Chicago and I am trying to get other things ready for the final weeks of the quarter.  The conference began yesterday, and most of the more relevant medieval and late antique talks were yesterday afternoon, so I have been learning a good deal about contemporary Georgian folk customs and Daghestani Islam, but I don’t have much to add to these discussions.  I am continually fascinated by the perpetuation of animal sacrifice in Caucasian Christian countries.  Obviously, animal sacrifice in the Islamic world continues as part of customary celebrations, but it remains intriguing that ancient Armenian matagh ceremonies and similar Georgian rites of sacrifice persist.  It has reached the point in Georgia that, according to one speaker today, the Georgian Orthodox Church has banned the practice at Alaverdi.     

So, moving swiftly from the sublime to the ridiculous, I give you (via Ross) E.J. Dionne:

It isn’t always easy to notice, but this year’s Republican presidential campaign has become the occasion for the collapse of conservative orthodoxy.   

I agree with Christopher Orr that it must be difficult to come up with fresh and interesting arguments for columns twice a week on a regular basis, but surely that doesn’t excuse recycling the exact same “new insight” that Dionne had back in August 2006 and then acting as if that recycled “insight” was something as yet unknown.  It’s true that the “is conservatism finished?” column and the “conservative orthodoxy is collapsing” column are not exactly the same, but they make the same argument: conservatism can be said to be falling apart because there are big policy arguments among Republicans, of which the “dissenting” views of presidential candidates are but the most prominent.  This is tempting, but it gets things a bit backwards.  What has happened is that conservatives have hollowed out conservatism and filled the empty shell with Republican policy priorities over the years; these priorities have changed as time has gone by, which has created various rival constituencies of the different policy sets who are now squabbling in the wake of the failures of this or that policy.  The reason why, as Orr notes, the only “plausible” candidates the party can find are “former heretics” is very simply that the “orthodoxy” has shifted and narrowed to such a degree that at least some of the former heresies are apparently no longer the grounds for exclusion or marginalisation that they once were.   

The “collapse” of “conservative orthodoxy” also assumes some general consensus and widely shared agreement about what that “orthodoxy” was in recent years and about what it is today, but such a consensus is something that has not existed among conservatives for years and years.  As different elements of the party coalition and the conservative movement have drifted away from each other over almost everything except foreign policy (we happy few antiwar conservatives being the exception to this last point), the fundamental, non-negotiable things have been reduced again and again for the sake of unity.  It may not be a perfect example, but Hewitt’s statements about the two things where deviation will not be forgiven by his kind of activists are telling for what they say about what “conservative orthodoxy” has become: the appointment of non-activist judges and support for the war are the two things where the Hewitts of the world will tolerate no deviation, no matter how small.  On anything else, they are willing to be flexible and interested in coalition-building.  (To this we might add tax cutting as a core litmus test that threatens to destroy Huckabee’s campaign and which has badly damaged McCain’s–but it is interesting that has not yet destroyed them.)  Giuliani falls within the approved sphere because he has made friendly remarks about John Roberts, while a Hagel or, even worse, Ron Paul is simply too far out there because they are not party-line men on the war.  Thus Hewitt tolerates the pro-abortion candidate, but demands exclusion for the antiwar candidate.  “Conservative orthodoxy” isn’t collapsing so much as it has mutated into something more in line with party priorities.  It is an “orthodoxy” of which people like Dean Barnett are the guardians, which makes it much more like a kakodoxy.  

If “conservative orthodoxy” was already rather muddled last summer (it was) and all the tendencies now on display in the presidential race were fully present (they were), the presidential race may merely confirm the irrelevance of the older, more extensive “conservative orthodoxy” for policymaking while reminding us that all of the candidates feel obliged, most of the time, to pay lip service to most of the tenets of the much-rediced “orthodoxy.”  Another problem with the Dionne piece seems to me to be that “conservative orthodoxy” is taken as a given and its content is supposedly well known to all, when the “torture plank,” if you will, is an entirely new introduction and product of the last five years.  Hey, who said the Republicans couldn’t adopt new positions for changing times?  They just happen to choose the very worst kinds of policies to make themselves adaptable.

James Kirchick defends illegal war and the deaths of hundreds of thousands of civilians.  This is supposed to put non-interventionists on the defensive?

It’s hard to imagine that a President Giuliani, for instance, would have let Osama bin Laden slip away back in 2001, or let the Iraq war drag out for all these years, with our military so ill equipped. Giuliani is that rare political combination: moderate ideologically, but not mushy personally. He has the hard edge of an ideologue, but not the rigidity or extremism. ~Jim Pinkerton

Mr. Pinkerton does good work, and I enjoyed his takedown of Chuck Hagel that matched up with so many of my own objections, but this part of his article arguing that Giuliani is the GOP’s best hope didn’t make a lot of sense to me.  I don’t know how you can be described as “moderate ideologically” when you endorse the killing of the unborn and the torture of detainees.  “Use every method you can think of” sounds like a line designed to provide plausible deniability for something you know is illegal and morally dubious, and that is Giuliani’s view of torture.  It seems to me that the “moderate” position relative to that would be to pick one or the other abomination to support, whereas the opposite “extreme” would be to oppose abortion and torture (apparently a difficult task for most of the candidates).  Also, if Giuliani is the mayor who put the city’s emergency response center inside the World Trade Center, known terrorist target that it was, the man who fired the successful NYPD Commissioner who had effectively brought about a reduction in crime for the sake of his own ambition and popularity, and the man who brought in Bernie Kerik to head the NYPD (when the man was a suspected associate of the mafia), do we really trust his decisionmaking skills and his choices of personnel when it comes to important security-related matters? 

It is also debatable whether having a President Giuliani in 2001 would have made any difference (except that it would have spared us a Mayor Giuliani being built into a cult hero).  It is not clear that it was up to the President to “let” anyone go, since it was the very nature of our deployment in Afghanistan (once again, Rummy’s “get in, get out, a man alone” approach to warfare saves the day!), which made us rely on Afghans to secure parts of the border on account of a lack of our own manpower, and the mistakes of Gen. Franks and Rumsfeld during the fighting at Tora Bora that allowed for Bin Laden’s escape.  The failures in 2001 come back to questions of the President’s judgement and personnel decisions.  Does Giuliani really have a very good record here on those things when they are most specifically tied to security?  The record seems spotty at best, which is why it is perplexing that conventional wisdom holds that this guy from Brooklyn, because he railroaded Michael Milken, persecuted the squeegee men squeegeefascists and insulted ferret-owners, among other things, has what it takes to head the executive branch of our government.   

It is even more unlikely that Giuliani would have proven to be somehow more realistic and sensible than Bush on Iraq.  What is Giuliani’s position on Iraq?  He thinks they should have sent more troops, and he supports the sending of more troops now.  He repeats classic War Party canards about “if we leave there, they’ll follow us here,” and he seems to be just as hopelessly committed to persisting in the Iraq war as any other leading Republican.  If he had been President for all this time, would the Iraq war still be dragging on?  The answer would seem to be yes, with the qualification that it might have had to be called off to prepare for the invasion of Iran.  The third leg in Giuliani’s “moderate” tripod would be support for interventionist wars.

Of course, if it is true that the GOP’s best hope is the goombah part-time transvestite, Republicans had better start drinking heavily–starting now.  By the time they wake up, it will already be 2015, just in time to get ready for the next open election (following the impeachment and removal of Vice President Richardson on corruption charges).

The Russian Orthodox Church today formally ended an 80-year global schism triggered when exiles refused to accept the domestic church’s subservience to the Soviet state.

In a ceremony at Christ the Savior Cathedral, which was rebuilt in the 1990s after being torn down by Soviet dictator Josef Stalin, the top leaders of the domestic and overseas Russian Orthodox hierarchies signed an act of “canonical communion.”

The document provides for the full restoration of religious unity under the Moscow patriarchate while maintaining autonomy for the church abroad in organizational and economic matters. ~The Los Angeles Times

As many of you know, I am a convert to the Orthodox Church, and I was baptised in the Russian Orthodox Church Abroad.  I remain at a Synod parish here in the Chicago area, and I intend to remain there.  The reconciliation between the two parts of the Russian Orthodox Church has now been formally realised and completed, and I believe this is very good.  I understand the reservations of some of our brethren about the potential pitfalls that this might entail, and I respect the Traditionalist Orthodox who rightly guard against the evils of ecumenism, but there was no longer any real impediment to the reconciliation with Moscow.  There was no longer anything that really justified the continuation of the Russian Church Abroad outside of communion with Moscow.  As of today, the Russian Orthodox around the world will be united, and, what is more, on account of his reconciliation all Russian Orthodox everywhere are in communion with all other main Orthodox jurisdictions.  I understand that this is a point of concern for those skeptical about the reconciliation with Moscow, but it seems to me in this case that the great good of restoring full unity among the Orthodox is worth risking those dangers that may lie ahead.

During the Cold War, two things came to be known and generally recognized in the Middle East concerning the two rival superpowers. If you did anything to annoy the Russians, punishment would be swift and dire. If you said or did anything against the Americans, not only would there be no punishment; there might even be some possibility of reward, as the usual anxious procession of diplomats and politicians, journalists and scholars and miscellaneous others came with their usual pleading inquiries: “What have we done to offend you? What can we do to put it right?” ~Bernard Lewis 

The other thing, though, is Russia has been deploying brutal measures against subjugated Muslim populations for at least two hundred years. The Czars fought Muslim guerillas [sic] in the Caucasus, the Soviets fought Muslim guerillas [sic]in the Caucasus, and Vladimir Putin has done the same thing. Relations between Russians and the Muslims who live to the south of the Russians is a big, long, giant example of Lewis-favored conservative policy prescriptions not working — the fighting just keeps going on and on and on and on. ~Matt Yglesias

Some may wondering why Bernard Lewis is bringing up this comparison, since I believe most people are agreed that the Soviet Union lost the Cold War and ceased to exist shortly thereafter, yes?  In other words, as the other “ideological nation” of Irving Kristol’s fantasies, Lewis seems to be proposing that the United States could also help hasten its demise by following the same sorts of policies that the Soviet Union followed vis-a-vis the Islamic world.  Contra Yglesias, these policies sometimes may temporarily “work” in the narrow sense of quelling immediate resistance (at tremendous moral, human, political and economic cost), but they usually require such brutal and heinous methods that civilised people–you know, the sort who regard communists as generally very bad types–would not employ.  The core assumption of the entire article seems to be that Lewis approves of the idea that the Soviets were tougher-minded than we are and that this is somehow meaningful for what we should do today.  Yet again, I would remind the esteemed court servant historian that the Soviets lost and their system collapsed from within, which means that the jihadi estimates of the actual strength of adversaries may be about as good as their ability to appreciate fine Buddhist art. 

Lewis certainly isn’t saying that any of the Soviet policies carried out during these decades were good or wise policies (though the entire article leads you to think that he almost has to be equating the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan with our occupation of Iraq), but simply that Moscow had arranged it in such a way that it would not be criticised by Muslims and Arabs when it engaged in such policies.  In effect, it had intimidated or bought off these countries to such an extent that it remained entirely clueless just how stupid remaining in Afghanistan for all those years really was.  Perhaps if it were not for the Soviet method of smashing foreign critics in the mouth they might have learned a little more directly and bluntly the outrage their invasion had caused in the Islamic world.  So, it’s a good thing for us and the world that the Soviets were as foolish as the neocons now are, but this hardly sounds like a model that we would want to keep imitating. 

What would be on the Soviet check-list, so that we would know whether or not we were doing the “right,” tough things?  Occupy Central Asia!  Partially already done.  Invade Afghanistan!  Check.  They never got around to occupying Iraq, so we’re actually ahead of the game.  Let’s see, we haven’t deported entire nations to distant locations in the frozen tundra, but if we want to get tough and put a stop to all of this Muslim troublemaking we could start there.  Obviously, the reason why Russia is having problems with Chechnya today is that Moscow has lost its killer instinct.  Stalin would never have permitted this sort of thing to go on this long–after all, winning is everything, right? 

Yglesias is partly right about the Caucasus, though Soviet occupation of the Caucasus did not meet with the same kind of sustained Shamil-like resistance of the mid-19th century.  After WWII, any nationality suspected of having collaborated with the Germans or otherwise of dubious loyalty to the USSR met with mass deportation, which is what the Chechens suffered. 

The Soviet re-occupation of Central Asia after the civil war was relatively much more difficult and bloody for the Soviets, since the various Turkic peoples of the region had been stirred up to revolt as the empire began to collapse in WWI and were then encouraged in resistance to the Bolsheviks first by Enver Pasha (still living the Pan-Turanist dream at that time) and then transformed itself a general Islamic resistance movement against godless communism that outlived Enver.  Probably little known Soviet fact: Frunze, the former name of the Kyrgyz capital of Bishkek, was the official who brought an end to the Basmachi.  No wonder the locals didn’t want to keep the name!

Back to the article.  Lewis’ fun with history continues, citing the response of certain Arab states to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan:

Even this anodyne resolution was too much for some of the Arab states. South Yemen voted no; Algeria and Syria abstained; Libya was absent; the nonvoting PLO observer to the Assembly even made a speech defending the Soviets.

It is hardly surprising that South Yemen, which defied the Cold War pattern that the communist part of a divided country would be in the northern half, sided with the Soviets.  Soviet support for the PLO is well known, so it is also not very interesting to note that the group the Soviets supported lent rhetorical aid to Soviet policy.  I would have to guess that Libyan, Algerian and Syrian actions could be explained in much the same way (for instance, Libya was ruled by an Arab nationalist revolutionary with obvious sympathies with the Soviets, and Syria was then, as now, governed by a socialist government friendly to Moscow).  This is not proof that heavy-handed Soviet tactics work better, but that international patronage wins and keeps clients.  We used to understand how that worked.

I’m not sure exactly why Lewis is rehashing this story, since we are all keenly aware that Pakistan and Saudi Arabia (our two Muslim “allies”) were and have remained leading exporters of jihadis.  Soviet treatment of enemies abroad did not somehow cow the Pakistanis and Saudis into acquiescence or inaction, and the occupation of Afghanistan radicalised many Muslims from around the world and caused them to go fight the Soviets there.  Indeed, Lewis includes this in his article:

The Muslim willingness to submit to Soviet authority, though widespread, was not unanimous.

Never mind that many Islamic countries weren’t “submitting to Soviet authority,” but failing to protest a war fought by their great power patron.  We might talk of “the Muslim willingness to submit to American authority” because many of the governments of allied Islamic countries have “failed” to actively work against the war in Iraq.  Lewis doesn’t even acknowledge the role of the Saudis or Pakistanis in any of this.  The mujahideen of the ’80s and the Taliban apparently just emerged from the soil of Afghanistan all on their own.