We do not want this war, this violence, and we’re ashamed that the President of the United States is from Texas. – Natalie Maines

I don’t even know the Dixie Chicks, but I find it an insult for all the men and women who fought and died in past wars when almost the majority of America jumped down their throats for voicing an opinion. It was like a verbal witch-hunt and lynching. – Merle Haggard

Last night over dinner the subject of The Dixie Chicks came up, and I got mad all over again. Which is unfortunate, because when you think about artists that talented the last thing on your mind ought to be anger. But still, it’s been six long years now since “the top of the world came crashing down,” and I can’t quite free myself of my rage at the staggering ignorance that led so many Americans to piss on the 1st Amendment by attempting to destroy the careers of Natalie Maines, Martie Maguire and Emily Robinson. Frankly, I don’t know how Natalie can make it through a performance of “The Long Way Around” or “Not Ready to Make Nice” because I can barely listen to the songs without wanting to take a folding chair to every goddamned corporate radio executive and program director in America responsible for driving them from the airwaves.

No doubt that this makes me a lesser man than I should be. I can’t imagine that the Chicks would approve of my violent impulses (which, I have to admit, are a little too literal for my own comfort), given the grace with which they have navigated the turbulence surrounding their lives in recent years. In truth, they haven’t taken the long way around so much as they have taken the high road, and I regret that I’m not quite worthy of the example they have set for those of us trying to lead civilized lives in the midst of so much willful ignorance.

In recognition of their willingness to risk their careers speaking truth to power and for their courage in facing the backlash (which included death threats, let’s remember) that’s all too frequently aimed at uppity women in the less advanced corners of our nation, Scholars & Rogues is proud to honor The Dixie Chicks as our latest Scrogues and accord them a place in our masthead of fame.

And, if it isn’t obvious, then I’ll apologize in advance for not being up to the standards that Natalie, Martie and Emily have set. They’re not to blame for my tribute to them.

What Did the War on The Dixie Chicks Teach Us About Our Freedoms?

Some time back I read a story in the international press about the rise of fundamentalist Islam in one of Europe’s leading nations – I believe it was the Netherlands, but can’t recall for certain. They’re apparently facing the prospect that one day this minority could grow to the point where it could go to the polls and, using the legitimate engines of the democratic system available to it, vote to eradicate the nation’s religious freedoms. A politician was asked what should be done in this case. His answer was that nothing should be done – it must be allowed, since it would be the result of a democratic process.

Quite a conundrum, that. What to do when democracy is used to dispose of democracy? Obviously America is under no immediate threat from organized Islamist voters, but we do have our own Christian Taliban problem, don’t we? What should we, here in the Land of the Free^®, think about those who do not value actual freedom of religion? How many Americans would we send off to die to preserve the free speech rights of those who’d squelch the free speech rights of their fellow citizens? What should a true patriot do when confronted with the reality that the tools of liberty are being used against Lady Liberty herself?

My own code of ethics has always said that you cannot allow a barbarian to use your civilization as a weapon against you. A man who insists on fighting according to a set of honorable rules while his opponent is using a tire iron to liquefy his testicles deserves what happens to him. In my angrier moments I’ve said that no, you don’t fight fire with fire. You fight fire with a flamethrower.

But that’s just me, and you’ll recall from earlier that I’m perhaps not to be taken as a role model. Still, we do live in a nation with many who do not share our respect for Constitutional freedoms. Exactly how many I can’t say, but I feel comfortable with “millions and millions.” It’s certain that without such people we’d not have had to endure eight years of Bush/Cheney thuggery.

I’m Not Ready to Make Nice

I made my bed and I sleep like a baby
With no regrets and I don’t mind sayin’
It’s a sad sad story when a mother will teach her
Daughter that she ought to hate a perfect stranger
And how in the world can the words that I said
Send somebody so over the edge
That they’d write me a letter
Sayin’ that I better shut up and sing
Or my life will be over

I’m not ready to make nice
I’m not ready to back down
I’m still mad as hell and
I don’t have time to go round and round and round
It’s too late to make it right
I probably wouldn’t if I could
‘Cause I’m mad as hell
Can’t bring myself to do what it is you think I should

This was the message – “shut up and sing.” You’re not being paid to think, you mouthy little bitches, you’re being paid to entertain us. Now dance, girlies. God Bless America.

History will validate, with a minimum of controversy, the sentiments Natalie Maines expressed at the Shepherd’s Bush Empire theatre on March 10, 2003. Hopefully the record will point to our present moment and note that already the momentum had shifted and that within a generation people would have an impossible time imagining how such an affront to freedom was ever possible. Hopefully.

For the time being, “mad as hell” doesn’t begin to describe the indignation that those of us working to move this culture forward by promoting genuinely intelligent and pro-human values ought to feel, even now. I won’t tell you how to think and act, of course – you have a conscience and a brain, and you can be trusted to take in the information and perspectives around you and form an opinion that you can live by.

But for my part, I have a message for the “shut up and sing” crowd: I’m not ready to back down and I never will be. Your values are at odds with the principles upon which this nation was founded and true liberty cannot survive if your brand of flag-waving ignorance is allowed to thrive. You will not be allowed to use the freedoms that our founders fought for as weapons to stifle freedom for others.

You have declared a culture war, so here’s where the lines are drawn: I’m on the side of enlightenment, free and informed expression and the power of pro-humanist pursuits to produce a better society where we all enjoy the fruits of our shared accomplishments.

What side are you on?

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

It’s been going on for so long now that we can’t even assign blame anymore. I got pull-off-the-road-and-calm-down furious on Monday when, in an interview on NPR’s All Things Considered Monday afternoon, a Gaza politician claimed that either a) Israeli collaborators had launched the rockets into Israel as a pretext or b) there had been no launches at all and Israel was faking the whole thing. And I got just as furious this morning when I the Israeli ambassador to the U.S. refused to admit that Israeli commandos had been assassinating Hamas leaders during the cease fire in yet another NPR interview.

Hammurabi came up with the first written code of laws – an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. And the result of following that law is that Israelis and Palestinians have each become toothless, blind, deaf, mute, and stupid.

I’ve lost the hope for a negotiated peace I had when I was young and naive – there have just been too many cycles of violence and so-called ceasefires for me to believe that diplomacy is viable at this point. All that’s left is a final solution to the conflict – annihilation. Either the state of Israel will cease to exist or the Palestinians will.

Let’s be frank here: if the international community wanted the conflict to end, it would. Neither Israel nor its neighbors could resist the combined military and economic might of the rest of the world. So if Europe, the U.S., Russia, and the rest of the Middle East was willing to say “enough is enough,” then the conflict would be over within a year, two at the outside (the first year for both parties to realize we’re serious, and a year to negotiate the actual agreement). This means that the rest of the world wants the conflict to continue; other nations find it valuable or useful.

The autocratic governments around the Middle East are the ones whose motivations are easiest to divine. What they get out of the ongoing conflict is a convenient distraction for their own restless population, and especially for their angry youths. Young people who would otherwise be focused on their own government’s failings on human rights, their country’s lack of jobs and services, and so on spew their bile on, and occasionally detonate their bodies in, the state of Israel instead. And in the process the autocrats maintain their own power. So the governments of the Middle East have every reason to keep the conflict going forever – they need to keep Hamas and Islamic Jihad and Hezbollah powerful enough to harass Israel, but weak enough that they can’t actually destroy Israel. And Egypt, Iran, Iraq under Hussein, Saudi Arabia, Syria, et al have become masters at it.

I’m hardly an expert, so I have to make an educated guess about what Europe in general gets out of this, but I think it’s very similar to what the Middle East nations get – a distraction. Europe has massive Arab and Muslim minority communities that are pretty much shat upon by their host nations – just look at the riots by Muslim immigrant youths in France in 2005, or how the Turkish minority claims to be treated in Germany, or the lack of integration of Muslims in Great Britain. All of these communities would be more likely to demand rights and services and integration from their host nations if the conflict didn’t exist. In other words, second-class citizens would start demanding the same rights that all other citizens get automatically, and that not only be economically expensive but would also create unrest throughout the rest of society. And as the gay marriage debate in the U.S. shows, large numbers of people irrationally believe that granting rights and privileges to others somehow denigrates their own rights and privileges.

I’m also not entirely sure what the United States gets out of the conflict, but I know what the U.S. gets out of the existence of Israel, and it’s entirely possible that U.S. politicians have historically viewed the conflict as an unfortunate but tolerable side effect. By supporting Israel, the U.S. gets a ally in a mostly friendly and democratic nation smack in the middle of a region that is vital to our national interest. We need the Middle East’s oil, and it’s possible that prior administrations have considered the oil supply so vital that no disruptions could be permitted. And I can understand the logic of how the devil you know (the al-Saud royal family, for example) may well be better than the devil you don’t (any government that rises up following a hypothetical overthrow of said royal family). So anything that keeps the Saudis stable and in power keeps the oil flowing to American automobiles and trucks, and if that means the deaths of Israelis and Palestinians, then at least it doesn’t mean the deaths of Americans. Or something along those lines, anyway.

So the world has an interest in keeping the conflict going. And that’s why diplomacy won’t work. Stopping the conflict is as simple as the U.S. stopping aid to Israel and the various Middle East governments stopping aid to the Palestinians until a final treaty was negotiated and signed. The economic and social disruption that would result would be so devastating that the two sides would have no choice but come to the table in good faith and with a willingness to compromise. But instead we’ll continue to have European governments bemoaning the carnage in Gaza while the U.S. defends Israel’s right to defend the citizens of Sederot from Katyusha, but since everyone has a vested interest in keeping the carnage going, it’ll never stop via diplomatic means. At least, not until the U.S.’ vested interest in keeping Israel going fades with our dependence on Middle Eastern oil….

Which brings us to the latest cycle of violence in the conflict, the bombing of Gaza and the launching of Katyusha rockets in to southern Israel.

Officially, Israel is seeking a military solution to the problem of the Katyusha rockets. No military solution exists. In the sphere of military conflict, when one side loses the ability to continue fighting, the other wins. The problem in Gaza is that the conflict is military vs. insurgent/terrorist, and the only way to destroy Hamas’ and the Palestinians’ ability to fight is to convince the people to turn against the insurgents and terrorists hiding among them and to stop producing more insurgents/terrorists. You can do that a number of ways – economic reconstruction, improved human rights and greater freedoms, bribry – but you can’t do it by bombing neighborhoods or destroying government buildings. Bombing neighborhoods injures so many innocent people (who’s only crime is to be Palestinian) that it creates more new Hamas members than it destroys and thus increases Hamas’ ability to fight. And destroying government buildings hurts Hamas’ command, control, or communications infrastructure not at bit.

Actually, I was wrong – there is a military solution to the conflict, but just one – ethnic cleansing via the forced relocation or mass murder of all 4 million Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza and probably the million or so Israeli Arabs too. Israel almost certainly has the military might to do this, especially if the U.S. didn’t cut off military assistance in the process – the Gaza Strip, home to about 1.5 million Palestinians, is only 139 square miles, or about 1/11th the size of the state of Rhode Island. The other 2.5 million Palestinians live in the West Bank, in an area about 20% larger than Rhode Island. The Israeli Defense Force (IDF) normally has only a couple hundred thousand active soldiers, and 200,000 soldiers against four million Palestinians means the Palestinians win. But the IDF is composed of conscripts – nearly every physically able man and woman enters the IDF at the age of 18, resulting in upwards of three million available soldiers. So when you’re putting three million Israeli soldiers against four million Palestinian civilians, the Israelis win. And with the overwhelming technological superiority of the IDF, the IDF wins against a guaranteed Egyptian, Syrian, Iraqi, etc. assault to protect their fellow Arabs too.

But let us assume that the state of Israel is unwilling to become like the very monster that nearly destroyed them during World War II. It’s a pretty good assumption, after all. Israel won’t be committing genocide against the Palestinians any time soon. As harsh as the Israeli governments tactics are, they’re not as bad as gas chambers. But Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and, to a lesser extent, Hezbollah have no such historical moral restrictions. In fact, they’ve called for the destruction of Israel and actively work toward it. And with Israel’s counterproductive military tactics of punishing families and entire communities backfiring and creating more terrorists, Hamas et al will ultimately gather enough force to existentially threaten Israel. Not this year or next, but given the demographic advantages the Palestinians have over Israelis, it’s only a matter of time. And if Israel thinks that they’re facing an existential threat today, imagine how bad it’ll be when they’re facing not 10,000 Palestinian terrorists hiding among four million civilians, but rather a million Palestinian terrorists hiding among 10 million civilians.

Three million IDF soldiers against 10 million Palestinian civilians and one million Palestinian terrorists isn’t a guaranteed win for Israel by any stretch.

Of course, the state of Israel could be destroyed by peaceful means instead of by Palestinian pogrom. It was created by international fiat, it could be dissolved and the citizens spread throughout the world in another diaspora by another international fiat backed by international military might. Not that this is likely, of course – it’s more likely that the international community would force a negotiated settlement, and you know how likely I think that is.

So what will be the final solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict? More conflict. More rockets and suicide bombings. More airstrikes and assassinations. And the conflict will last until the developed world no longer relies on dictators and monarchs who rely on oil wealth to fuel their economies instead of freedom and education.

When the world doesn’t need or can’t afford Middle Eastern oil any more, it won’t need or enable the Israeli-Palestinian conflict either.

All images from AFP

John Heileman, New York magazine, The Next New Deal:

“Personally, I think the depth of the Obama realignment is being underestimated,” says the Republican media savant Stuart Stevens, who helped elect Bush twice. “They have basically invented their own party that is compatible with the Democratic Party but is bigger than the Democratic Party. Their e-mail list is more powerful than the DNC or RNC. In essence, Obama [was] elected as an Independent with Democratic backing — like Bernie Sanders on steroids.”

In other words, the Democratic party is but a brigade of the Obama juggernaut.

James Kunstler, The Long Road Ahead:

Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson found himself in the dock to answer how come, when he ran Goldman Sachs, there was a special unit in the company dedicated to short-selling the very mortgage-backed securities that another unit in the company was so busy pawning off to every pension fund on God’s green earth.The mind reels at the scale of the cynical opportunism.

David Remnick, New Yorker editor, speaking with William Ayers, just before he repaired to Grant Park for Obama’s acceptance speech:

This is an achingly exciting moment.

Alexander Cockburn, Counterpunch, interviewing Ralph Nader, on Obama:

He campaigned for two years, promised blacks nothing, Latinos nothing, women’s groups nothing, labor nothing. Contrast the lack of demands on the liberal progressive side to what the Limbaugh crowd exacted from McCain.

He might seem like a figure of ridicule. But he still makes sense.

Gail Collins, New York Times, on Sarah Palin in A Political Manners Manual:

But the worst part is that if these people get any meaner, we’re going to wind up feeling sorry for her. This is not something we are looking forward to, Republicans, and we will resent you for it.

Anna Marie Cox, the Daily Beast, interviewing Steve Schmidt, McCain’s, chief strategist:

But if the party does not figure out a way to appeal to Latino voters, it will become increasingly difficult, and maybe impossible, to ever again win a national election.

In The Messiah is amongst us Steven Pollard of Britain’s Spectator asks himself:

What is your single biggest hope for Barack Obama?

I can’t make up my mind between curing cancer or turning water into wine.

Melissa Biggs Bradley, Huffington Post, Why Being Nouveau Pauvre Cheers Britain:

“We should not underestimate the pleasure that discomfort brings to the British,” [British commentator A.N. Wilson] wrote. “All their ‘finest hours’ and ‘happy memories’ tend to be of wars, family holidays on rainswept Welsh beaches or periods at boarding school. … Already we look back on the past twenty years with disgust — the wastefulness of it seems nauseating. There will be positive pleasure in the cold mornings, before we don our darned and mended garments and eat our austere meals.”

Diane Tucker, Huffington Post, Voting Expert William Jacoby Knows How You’re Going To Vote:

Racism still permeates a large component of white America, but today it’s a different kind of racism. … A majority of whites do not believe they’re inherently superior. Research indicates they believe “we are all the same,” but that certain demographic groups “aren’t living up to their potential.”

Fred Kaplan on our Syria raid:

Finally, at a time when some members of the Bush administration have begun to see the merits of reaching out to Syria — as an inducement to pry it away from Iran, sever its ties with Hezbollah, stabilize Lebanon, and secure the borders of Iraq — the air raid, a deliberate violation of Syrian sovereignty, pushes those goals further out of reach.

Cinque Henderson, New Republic’s blog, the Plank:

However, I’m not looking forward to his speech, so much as his official swearing in. … will Obama say, “I, Barack Hussein Obama, do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the office of President of the United States.” The first four words. . . “I, Barack Hussein Obama”–may well outstrip, for sheer bravura, any inaugural address he could possibly give.

George Monbiot:

Like most people on my side of the Atlantic, I have for many years been mystified by American politics. The US has the world’s best universities and attracts the world’s finest minds. It dominates discoveries in science and medicine. Its wealth and power depend on the application of knowledge. Yet, uniquely among the developed nations (with the possible exception of Australia), learning is a grave political disadvantage.

Sports

Ralph Vacchiano, the New York Daily News:

[New York Giants running back] Brandon Jacobs was impressed with how the Giants held Cowboys RB Marion Barber to just 54 yards on 19 carries (2.8 yards per rush). … “If I was a running back against our defense today,” Jacobs said, “I would’ve said, ‘Stop giving me the ball. You’re bringing my average down.’”

Right you are, Ms. Palin, but help doesn’t always mean military help, else the NATO countries would have chosen up sides and embroiled themselves in war when Greece and Turkey went at it over Cyprus. You are technically correct, though, because the defense clause of the treaty reads:

The Parties agree that an armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all and consequently they agree that, if such an armed attack occurs, each of them, in exercise of the right of individual or collective self-defence recognised by Article 51 of the Charter of the United Nations, will assist the Party or Parties so attacked by taking forthwith, individually and in concert with the other Parties, such action as it deems necessary, including the use of armed force, to restore and maintain the security of the North Atlantic area (emphasis mine).

As you can see, the NATO treaty doesn’t require armed intervention. It requires “assistance.” Palin’s comment seems to indicate that it would likely be war between the US and Russia if she were president. Here are some follow-up questions about that statement, Ms. Palin, if you’d be so good as to answer.

1. If we were to go to war with Russia over Georgia or, say, the Ukraine, how would we go about winning that war with so many of our units in Iraq and Afghanistan? If you intend to pull our forces out of those countries, how would you go about transporting them, and how long would it take? What would you do about the security situation in Iraq and Afghanistan in the meantime? What if, say, Pakistan and/or Iran started harboring and equipping terrorists. What units would we use to attack Pakistan if they’re tied up fighting Russia?

2. Since our forces in Europe are scheduled to be drawn down to only four brigades (two heavy, one cavalry, and one airborne), which specific units would you use against the Russians? Would the ones in Europe now be sufficient to counter Russian military power until help arrives? How would you go about supporting the lightly equipped US Army Stryker Cavalry brigade and the airborne brigade so they can stand up to heavy Soviet divisions?

3. Would you launch a full-out, thermonuclear strike immediately, or would you wait until the Russians use nukes?

4. Given the fact that US and NATO supply depots were positioned to supply units along the now-defunct East German border, and given the fact that a front with Russia in the Urkraine could be as much as 1,200 miles from those supplies, the number of transport vehicles available to us, and the road and rail systems in Eastern Europe, how would you go about supplying our heavy forces there with fuel, spare parts, food, water, and all the other supplies a modern army needs in order to function? If we fought in Georgia, would we have sufficient sea lift capacity to support the troops? How would you protect our roll-on, roll-off and merchant marine ships from Russian anti-ship missiles that would tend to send massive amounts of supplies to the bottom?

5. How could we fight Russia for the long-term without reinstituting the draft?

6. Any attack against Russia would, of course, immediately shut down the gas pipelines from Russia that Europe has to have to meet its energy needs. How would you cope with a sudden energy crisis among our European allies, supply their armies with fuel as well as ours, and deal with the sudden economic crisis such a shutdown would cause in both Europe and among its trading partners in the US?

7. We’re already spending half a trillion dollars more per year than we bring in in revenues. How much extra would a war with Russia cost, and how would you pay for it? More tax cuts?

8. Do you suppose there’s any wisdom in being very careful about the countries we admit to NATO, considering our response options and capabilities, before admitting them?

Naturally, I know you’d rather get these questions from mainstream media outlets but, oddly, they haven’t asked. So, the scrogues eagerly await your response, below.

Happy campaigning!

In “Ahmadinejad gets a crucial boost” on Asia Times Online, Golnaz Esfandiari writes that “On August 24, Khamenei, who has the last word on all matters related to the Islamic republic, was quoted as saying that President Mahmud Ahmadinejad should plan on remaining in power for a second term.”

Ahmadinejad, a loose cannon, has been known to set Khameini’s teeth on edge. “The problem Ahmadinejad’s government is facing … is that gradually, significant numbers of hard-liners have turned into Ahmadinejad’s critics because of his economic policies and his performance on the international scene, which has put Iran under the shadow of sanctions, isolation and even military attack,” [Tehran analyst Sadegh] Zibakalam says.”

Also, this past January, wrote Nazila Fathi in the New York Times, Khameini, “in what appeared to be his first public dispute with President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, sided with Parliament … in a conflict over energy policy. [He] intervened after Mr. Ahmadinejad had refused to carry out a measure that required his government to supply gas to remote villages during this year’s exceptionally cold winter.”

But Esfandiari writes that Khameini reportedly told Ahmadinejad “to work in his last year as if it were his first year” and “that the president should plan for another term: ‘In other words, imagine that in addition to this year, another four years will be under your management. Work with this in mind; act and plan accordingly.’”

Ahmadinejad called the comments a “medal of honor” from the man he alternately seems to flaunt and whose approval he courts.

Why does Khameini seem to have finally given Ahamadinejad his imprimatur? After his phrase above about “the problem Ahmadinejad’s government is facing,” Esfandiari writes, “and to a certain degree, Khamenei.” In other words, the ruling mullahs already suffer from low approval ratings.

In 2007 a poll taken by Ken Ballen’s Terror Free Tomorrow showed that “61% of Iranians were willing to tell our pollsters over the phone that they oppose the current Iranian system of government, where the Supreme Leader rules according to religious principles and cannot be chosen or replaced by direct vote of the people.”

There’s no imminent threat of a new revolution against the old (Islamic) revolution, unless you count the US-supported terrorist organization MEK, which is more of a nuisance than a threat. But supporting an unpopular president can only increase the strains between Khomeini and the Iranian people.

Esfandiari explains. “Despite such problems, Khamenei praised Ahmadinejad for his handling of the nuclear issue, saying that the president and government had stood up to the ‘excessive demands’ of ‘bullying and brazen countries’.”

Fathers always seem to love their most willful sons the most.

For more on Iran-US relations. . .

Iran attack not a problem, say war wonks
By Russ Wellen

Attack Iran? Why not just pain targets on the backs of kids like those on PBS’s “Carrier”?
By Russ Wellen

New rules: McCain is a walking Tom Clancy action figure who’s going to get us all killed
By Dr. Slammy

Laptop of mass destruction
By Russ Wellen

Back from Bamyan; the sewing program; village dominance

by Connor O’Steen

I have now been on the road between Kabul and Bamyan for a total of 32 hours, and it’s safe to say that that’s 32 hours too many for my taste. The road is roughly the quality of a rural mountain road in the United States, but the fact that it feels endless makes it much worse. Going to Bamyan, you cross a number of mountain ranges with valleys nestled between, and beyond each steep ridge I hold out the hope that the next section will be smoother. This, of course, just makes it more frustrating when the sections get progressively rougher, and I have to tighten my white-knuckled grip on the car’s overhead handles. The up and down turbulence is unsurprising, it’s the occasional side to side rocking that’s hard to stomach. This last ride back to Kabul was made worse by the presence of a dog and her eight puppies in our trunk. Just like in Kabul, we take in dogs in our regional offices, and through gross oversight one of them was left unspayed. She also acquired the skill of escaping the compound. 2+2= eight puppies to take care of.

For obvious reasons, no one in the trunk was happy (by extension, no one in the car was happy): not the endlessly mewling puppies with their eyes still closed, and not the mother who tried to jump into the backseat every 15 minutes or so. Every 15 minutes, for eight hours, I fought a running battle with this dog, shoving her back into the trunk every time she tried to jump out. The combination of this with the bumpy road, the crying puppies, and the Dari music blasting from the radio only intensified the fight. By the end of the trip I had bite marks and scratch marks up and down my arms, and had completely lost my temper. I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve ever been that angry and upset.

Other than this, we had a successful but difficult trip to Bamyan. We spent all our time working in Jawzareen valley, starting a women’s sewing program and a scholarship program for exceptionally poor and disadvantaged families. Men from the villages and I lugged heavy sewing machines up hills and across rivers, laying them (more or less) gently in various houses where the program would be conducted. Right around this time, the difficulties began.

I should backtrack: living in villages here makes people very hard, very fast. You can see the stages of development in the children. From 0-3 years old, children don’t have responsibilities and they run or crawl around with smiles on their faces, chasing livestock. From about 4-9, you see a kind of early bitterness. It’s something that I see in their eyes and in the way they frown, almost like they’re asking, “Is this it? Is my life going to be filled with herding animals and working the fields?” By around 10, that bitterness has given way to acceptance, people are engaged with you but they seem calmer and almost resigned. Working hard from sunrise to sunset has become second nature, and the consequences of not playing along are demonstrably dire.

Although I haven’t seen it myself, I’ve been told that villagers will casually mention which child, or whose family, froze to death the previous winter because they couldn’t afford heating material. It’s something we don’t often think about, but we have a tremendous safety net in the United States. Our government may be all right with the very poor being very uncomfortable and very hungry, but (for the most part, of course) we as a country aren’t all right with people dying from starvation or exposure. We have food stamps, homeless shelters, rehab clinics, and even credit cards for when someone needs to stretch out the money. In Afghanistan, none of that exists. If your parents die, or more commonly if one of your parents die and the other one remarries and leaves you behind, maybe you’ll be lucky enough to be taken in by an uncle. If not, you fend for yourself or you don’t make it through the winter. We work in a series of villages about a one-hour drive out of Bamyan. If the situation is this unforgiving here, the interior villages that are more isolated from NGO and government programs are suffering more.

So, people are very hard, because kindness isn’t a contributing factor to survival. In we come with our limited number of sewing machines, and the problems spring up. As we sat in a small room sipping green tea and sucking on small, sweet pieces of candy, the women from Urgash came in threes and fours and filled the space. Soon they were shouting, really shouting, at our shell-shocked program coordinator, Aisha. Aisha valiantly held her ground, and eventually we left a more-or-less pacified crowd. I only got the full story later that night: the elder woman of the village (all of the elders are relatively very wealthy) showed up at the meeting, and demanded that four of the eight sewing machines be given to her and her family. She said that if we refused to give her these machines, she would make sure that no one used them. The other women in the room were clearly afraid of this woman. The 14 year old girl, Rukiya, who was hosting the machines in her house, was visibly shaking. Aisha responded to this by threatening to take all of the machines back, and really this was the only step she could take. If she had attempted to reach a compromise with the elder, the program would’ve been completely out of her hands. Everyone would boss her around if she didn’t hold her ground.

Starting the sewing machine project was a good lesson in the raw and unabashed power imbalance in Jawzareen. The elder in Urgash was one example, the mullah in Sar-e-Jawzari is another. As we came out of the sewing house in the latter village, we were confronted by three men. Again, there was an angry exchange in Dari and they stormed off. I found out later that they had come from the local mullah, who told them that it was haram to accept money or help from infidels, and that we were “polluting” the area with our sewing machines. Aisha responded by saying that this was “Taliban talk,” a clever but potentially volatile statement. Claiming that anyone is like the Taliban in a Hazara area, where most people have lost at least one family member to the Taliban, is bound to make some angry. Aisha was unafraid, “I know the Quran,” she said. “Let him come here and tell me where it says that in the Quran.”

And of course, she was right. It isn’t in the Quran, and if the mullah actually knows Arabic and can read it in addition to reciting it (a slim chance, for mullahs in rural areas), then he knows that too. In fact, his statements had nothing to do with Islam, and had everything to do with power. The mullah is a very wealthy and influential man.  By bringing in our programs and providing a source of income for others, we undermine his standing in the village. Islam in this scenario, like many other religions at many other times, serves a means to a self-serving end. He attempted to maintain his own position by making the villagers feel morally ashamed of working with us. I’m happy to report that, at least for the time being, his efforts haven’t been successful.

What was most shocking about this for me wasn’t that it occurred. I’m not so gullible as to believe that the villages in Jawzareen are one big happy socialist Utopia. The surprising thing is that no one in positions of power felt the need to justify their own underhanded attempts at acquisition. What I had expected was justification: “We work harder than they do, that’s why we’re richer,” or, “Their family is no good,” or, “They’ll only waste the money.” But the reason didn’t seem to interest anyone. The elder woman asked for machines because she wanted them; she made no claim that she deserved them more than the other girls (all of whom were the sole providers for their families), she just expected them as the spoils of her social position. The mullah didn’t care what benefit came from our program; he was only interested in how we might affect him.

In an ideal Afghan village (so I’m told), the elders and the leaders look out for everyone. If people are destitute, they are cared for, if someone is hurt or abandoned, he or she is supported. I wonder if this society ever existed, if war has destroyed it, or if it was always just a pleasant fantasy.

Past all the blackness of power and who has it, we supported a lot of people who needed it. Five years ago, Habiba’s father died and her mother remarried and left the children on their own. Habiba, who doesn’t know her exact age but is probably 14 or 15, has since taken care of her four brothers and sisters. She is the only one to provide an income for her family, and she’s now hosting our sewing program in her house and receiving a scholarship for starting her own business. Habiba’s story isn’t rare; it’s actually exceptionally common. Of all the women and girls enrolled in the sewing and scholarship program, nearly all of them have lost or been abandoned by both parents, and are now the heads of their households. A few are enrolled because their parents are too old or disabled to work.

This description of the villages might strike some as Hobbesian, and I had some dark moments where I fantasized about preaching the truth of Leviathan from a soapbox, but it’s more complicated than that. I think we would all, deep down, like to feel that, if situations took a turn for the worse, it would illuminate something indomitable and beautiful in us. That, if faced with crisis, we would give our support to those who couldn’t support themselves. Or, to dig up the old question: if you’re a soldier and a commanding officer tells you to open fire on innocent people or be shot for insubordination, what would you do? I think we’d all like to say that we’d sacrifice ourselves for the standards we believe in.

But who knows, if things were a little different, I might be the one fighting over a sewing machine, and the old woman might be looking at me, feeling a mixture of sadness and disappointment.

Ed. note:  You can read more about Connor O’Steen’s experiences in Afghanistan in his prior installments, linked below.  Also, check out Russ Wellen’s take on educating engineers instead of terrorists.]

Installment 1: Dogs, generals and orphans

Installment 2: The hard-working orphans of Chaghcharan

Installment 3: Nasim’s story: making and unmaking terrorists

Installment 4:  Afghanistan, Ghowr Province: an opium village

Installment 5:  Replying to questions and local democracy in Jawzareen

Installment 6:  Having visions with Mohammed

Installment 7: Poisoning dogs; orphan teamwork; getting poisoned

What to do: blow myself up or study engineering at Caltech?

In his blockbuster new book, The Way of the World, Ron Suskind writes about Dick Cheney and “plausible deniability“: “The key was a signaling system, where the president made his wishes broadly known to a sufficiently powerful deputy who could take it from there. If an investigation ensued, or a foreign leader cried foul, the president could shrug.” Doesn’t that sound like how mob bosses have often worked?

Elizabeth Kolbert in the New Yorker: “The past few weeks have seen a change in McCain. He has hired new advisers, and with them he seems to have worked out a new approach. He is no longer telling the sorts of hard truths that people would prefer not to confront, or even half-truths that they might find vaguely discomfiting. Instead, he’s opted out of truth altogether.”

Cenk Uygur on “Obama’s reluctance to attack McCain“: “I don’t know if they know this, but they are running against McCain. He is their opponent. Their job is to defeat him. To beat him. To make him lose, and hence, become a loser.”

Michael Moore in London’s the Guardian: “. . . the Democrats are the masters of blowing it. And they don’t just simply ‘blow it” – they blow it especially when the electorate seems desperate to give it to them.”

In “Know-Nothing Politics” Paul Krugman writes about Republicans, especially their energy polices: “The party’s de facto slogan has become: ‘Real men don’t think things through.’”

George Monbiot: “The permanent members of the UN security council draw a distinction between their ‘responsible’ ownership of nuclear weapons and that of the aspirant powers. . . . In some ways the current nuclear stand-off is more dangerous than the tetchy detente of the cold war.”

At Britain’s Independent Johann Hari writes about, “The WMD that really should be worrying us“: “If al-Qa’ida was unleashing this weather of mass destruction, we would do anything — anything — to stop them. But because the enemy is inside each one of us, we stagger on, building more airports and coal power stations and shrieking for cheaper oil.”

Marc Andreesen, who developed Mosaic, the first Web browser, in “How the Web Was Won: An Oral History of the Internet” at Vanity Fair: “Mosaic was built at the University of Illinois. . . . Federal funding was critical. I tease my libertarian friends — they all think the Internet is the greatest thing. And I’m like, Yeah, thanks to government funding.”

In “Ask a Call Girl” on Salon, Ondine Galsworth writes: “It’s on their terms, and they [the johns] like you to leave when they want you to leave. Basically you get paid to leave.”

Sports

Manny Being Manny Department

Jon Heyman on the trade at Si.com: “Boston’s players and staff showed no real interest in keeping Manny around, anyway. One landmark moment came when Ramirez complained of knee pain but couldn’t recall which knee was hurting him. Red Sox doctors had to take the unusual step of evaluating both the right and left knee in an MRI exam. Neither showed any damage.”

In the Boston Globe, Dan Shaugnessy writes: “Manny Mania is all the rage in Southern California.” But, “The commissioner’s office is investigating the circumstances of Manny’s final hours with the Red Sox. The Globe has learned. . . that [MLB Commissioner] Bud Selig directed [MLB's] executive vice president. . . to contact all parties for an explanation of how things unfolded around last week’s trading deadline.”

Appendix

Cindy Adams in the New York Post: “The Katie/Hillary feminist curse caught Nancy Pelosi. With 247 reviews of her new book on Amazon, 228 rated it one star.”

In a Washington Monthly article, “How many of you want to study in America?,” Kenneth Ballen reports on the extensive polling that his organization, Terror Free Tomorrow, has done around the world. First, he describes a meeting in Jakarta, Indonesia with young Muslims in apparent thrall to bin Laden. Though they didn’t give him credit for 9/ll, which, Ballen writes, they felt was the work of “the CIA and the Israeli intelligence service — how else to explain the fact that there were no Jews in the World Trade Center when it was destroyed?”

The students, however, were surprised to learn that Ballen knew Jews who had been killed in the Twin Towers. Then, after a night of conversation, “their insistent questioning took an unexpected turn: how could they obtain visas to study in the United States?”

The truth comes out.

Ballen continues:

“After that, whenever we had the chance to speak with young radicals in Indonesia, out of the hearing of their leaders and late at night, we’d always ask: How many of you want to study in America? Invariably, almost everyone said yes, and those who still disdained the Great Satan were eager to study in Canada, Australia, or France instead.”

You can’t help but laugh at how quick radical Muslims (those, that is, who are sympathetic to, but not actual members of terrorist organizations) are to sell out. Showing their cards that fast suggests not only a lack of conviction but of pride.

Maybe, but Ballen writes that “stories of upstanding Muslims denied entry to the United States for seemingly arbitrary reasons are a staple of the Muslim press.” Extending to them the right to study in the US and Europe is, instead, a symbol of what they most crave from the West — respect.

“Like most analysts,” he continues, “we had assumed that radical views in the Muslim world were the outgrowth of a deeply held ideology. [Instead] Muslims feel that the United States does not respect their views, values, identity and the right to determine their own affairs.” Extending student, as well as work, visas to Muslims is perceived as a show of respect, as are humanitarian aid and trade agreements.

The trouble is that many in the West believe that any expression of support for bin Laden, no matter how reflexive, is the deepest form of disrespect you can show us. If we make concessions like inviting them into our country to study, they’ll think they can walk all over us (not to mention form terrorist cells while on spring break from Caltech).

In fact, Ballen writes, the next president doesn’t even, as progressives assume, “need to pull all troops out of Iraq right away, or solve the Israel-Palestine conflict overnight.”

Hold on a minute: No problem wants to be solved that easily. All that time and energy spent wrestling with radical Muslim terrorism can’t be swept away just because the answer is staring us in the face. The entire defense establishment — from policy wonks to the military — has too much invested in the concept of an implacable foe.

Dangle a degree in front of your enemy’s face and he’s putty in your hands — where’s the fun in that?

For more on “winning the hearts and minds” of Middle-Easterners, see Connor O’Steen’s stunning “Letters from Afghanistan”:

Installment 1: Dogs, generals and orphans

Installment 2: The hard-working orphans of Chaghcharan

Installment 3: Nasim’s story: making and unmaking terrorists

Has a way been finally found to explain the FISA bill to the public? Glenn Greenwald of Salon quotes an ad attacking a Pennsylvanian congressmen who voted yea on it: “Chris Carney is surrendering to Bush and Cheney the same un-American spying powers they have in Russia and communist China.” We have a winner!

Jim Lobe of Inter Press Service writes about the administration’s decision to include diplomat William Burns in talks with Iran: “The neoconservative Weekly Standard called the move ‘stunningly shameful,’ while former UN Ambassador John Bolton said it was proof of the administration’s ‘complete intellectual collapse.’”

Gareth Porter of Inter Press Service: “Instead of. . . accommodating [al-Maliki's] demand. . . for a timetable for US military withdrawal, the George W. Bush administration and the US military leadership are continuing to pressure their erstwhile client regime to bow to [their] demand for a long-term military presence in the country. The emergence of this defiant US posture. . . underlines just how important long-term access to military bases in Iraq has become to [them].”

Julian Barnes and Peter Spiegel of the Los Angeles Times quoting Fallouja commander Marine Gen. James Mattis: “I think that nation-state and conventional war is in a state of hibernation. [The] most likely threats probably today are not going to be conventional or from another state. . . . I recognize some people want to say: ‘Let’s hold our breath. The irregular world will go away, then we can get back to good old soldiering again.’ . . . Unfortunately, in war, the enemy gets a vote.”

Greenwald again asking “Who is doing the real journalism?“: “So much of the real journalism that is occurring isn’t from TV and magazine stars but largely from severely under-paid advocates at public interest groups and anonymous government whistle-blowers who aren’t even meant to be ‘journalists.’ [The] ACLU and similar groups. . . have been forced first to uncover what the government does, to try. . . to erode the government’s wall of secrecy. . . in order then to engage in their real function of opposing government encroachments and defending the Constitution [emphasis added].”

Jim Spencer in the Columbia Journalism Review writes about being laid off from his reporting job: “Today, more than a year later, I feel like an exile. I still want journalism. Journalism just doesn’t seem to want me — at least not enough to pay me a livable wage with benefits and job security. That pretty much sums up the state of the industry.”

In “Bad Day for Newsrooms –- and Democracy,” Chris Hedges writes: “Corporations are not in the business of news. They hate news, real news. Real news is not convenient to their rape of the nation.”

In “David Gregory: NBC’s Lame Duck?” Felix Gillette of the New York Observer writes of Gregory’s ratings vis a vis MSNBC predecessor Tucker Carlson’s: “Twice Tucker is a form of damnation by faint praise.” Then he adds, “‘The grass is always greener on the other side of the street until you get there,’ Mr. Friedman said of Mr. Gregory’s anchorman aspirations.”

In 1990 Vanity Fair reporter “Harvard Law Reviewed” Elise O’Shaughnessy interviewed Barack Obama when he was elected first black editor of the Harvard Law Review: “I like to read novels, listen to Miles Davis, he says. ‘I don’t get to do that anymore. I don’t get dates anymore.”

In a piece entitled “All the privileged must have prizes” in the Times of London, John Summers writes about his experience teaching at Harvard: “[Real estate developer Charles] Kushner’s son Jared entered my classroom and promptly took the seat across from mine. . . . I was drawing an annual salary of $15,500. . . and borrowing the remainder for survival. . . . Jared later purchased The New York Observer for $10 million. . . . As publisher, one of his first moves was to reduce pay for the Observer’s stable of book reviewers. I had been writing reviews for the Observer in an effort to pay my debts.

From “John Edwards Love Child” in the National Enquirer: “While his people are not trying to tell him how to live his personal life, this baggage isn’t going to help him convince Obama that he’s the right guy to be his veep.” Talk about an understatement.

Kate Aurthur of the Los Angeles Times quoting Michael Musto on Lindsay Lohan and Samantha Ronson: “Traditionally, the media has been as interested in closeting celebrities as the celebrities themselves have been. . . . I’ve read things in gossip columns that would never go there in the past and realized, ‘Wow, they’re going there now.’ They don’t consider gay a dirty thing anymore. And it’s very cool.”

Sports

Gary Myers of the New York Daily News: “It just won’t be the same without Jeremy Shockey around to throw a fit after Eli Manning bounced one at his feet or sailed one over his head or didn’t feed his ego by throwing him the ball 10 times a game.”

Peter King of Sports Illustrated: “Come on. Whoever hijacked the Red Sox bullpen and subbed the relievers from the Bridgeport Bluefish, please return the real guys immediately. Before more heart attacks are registered.”

“Manny Being Manny” Department

John Shea of the San Francisco Chronicle: “After the Red Sox played Monday night at Safeco Field, Ramirez tried to escape a crowd of fans exiting the ballpark by crossing South Royal Brougham Way. The officer had signaled for the folks to stay at the curb, but Ramirez kept walking, so the officer stopped him and asked for identification. . . completely unaware he was talking to Boston’s cleanup hitter. The officer lectured Ramirez and threatened him with a $500 fine and arrest for disobeying police, but he was let go.”

In the midst of a contract dispute, Manny claimed he had a bad knee and sat out a game. Amalie Benajamin reports for the Boston Globe. “‘This week, you know what, we had some misunderstandings,’ Sox manager Terry Francona said. ‘It doesn’t mean he’s a bad person.‘ [Nor does it] mean that the team’s patience has not been wearing thin when it comes to the mercurial slugger.” Manny Ramirez — ever the “mercurial slugger.”

by Connor O’Steen

It turns out the road between [location excised] and [location excised] is currently held by the Taliban, so until NATO clears things up I’ll be here. Seeing how that’s the case, and I now have some extra time on my hands, I might as well tell you some more about what I’ve seen.

Nasim showed up on our doorstep early in the morning, and when asked what he needed, said that he had been told by some of the other children of Chaghcharan that we ran an orphanage. His face was bruised and slightly purplish, both of his eyes were swollen and there were dark rings underneath.

Nasim is about 14 inches shorter than I am, but he says that he’s fifteen. We’re still unsure whether this is because he’s malnourished or because, like most Afghans, he has no idea when he was born. (As an aside, this is why a number of Afghan passports and ID’s list the date of birth as January 1st, followed by the year. Even the years are often uncertain data). Either way, he didn’t look like he could be older than 12.

Nasim was our guest for about five days as we worked to get him into the orphanage, and in that time, we managed to learn some of his story, the rest of which we gathered through the unique displeasure of visiting his village a few days after that. For the sake of avoiding some tedious explanations and re-explanations of when we learned the chronology of events, I’ll give you the full story rather than the pieces of it.

Nasim’s father and mother divorced about a year and a half ago. Divorce in Afghanistan is a notoriously risky business as it is likely to result in allegations of adultery which, in turn, can result in revenge or honor killings. Still, this one seemed to go all right–Nasim’s mother moved back into the house of her first husband and his father quickly remarried. Nasim found himself left out of both arrangements, however, and had an uneasy existence shuttled back and forth from his mother’s and father’s houses, essentially begging for food and shelter and exchanging labor for meals. A year ago, his father beat him badly and told him that if he ever came back, he would kill him.

After that, Nasim started the 45-mile journey to Chaghcharan. Because he had no money and no food, his progress was painfully slow. As he made his way there, he was exploited for labor, exchanging work for two meals a day. Sitting outside on our porch at night, he told us how he saved up scraps of food so he had something to eat as he jumped from village to village. When we drove to Nasim’s home it took us an hour and a half.

It took Nasim six months to get to Chaghcharan.

His troubles weren’t over there. He found himself excluded from the orphanage because he lacked an ID or an adult to confirm that his parents were unwilling to take care of him. For the following six months, in the harsh winter of Chaghcharan [Ed. note:  Chaghcharan is at around 10,000 feet above sea level], he worked for two meals a day at a tire repair shop and slept in an unheated garage. The bruises under his eyes explain the abuse, and the scabies infecting his arms and legs showed his living conditions.

This isn’t a story designed to ruin your day or make you feel bad about your own life.  In fact, this story isn’t particularly unusual in terms of the way orphans and neglected children are treated here. That’s the point. Labor exploitation has become systematized by three decades of war, hardship, poverty, and the destruction of familial and clan ties. These children, lacking the defense mechanism of parental protection, do hard manual labor to survive. The odds of receiving any kind of money are practically none; most wealth in Afghanistan is inherited, so starting on the bottom is a particular disadvantage. Being an orphan outside of an orphanage is to live a life without any hope for advancement or improvement. You will not be educated, you will not be paid, no one will help you when you get sick or hurt, you’ll only be fed enough to keep you working.

Of course the orphanage isn’t the only option.  You could also do what Nasim’s older brother did. Confronted with the same hopeless situation, he and a group of friends went to Pakistan to study in a madrassa. There’s little doubt in my mind that he’ll be back on Afghan soil soon, working to shape his country into the same frustrated and angry mold that he himself was sculpted into.

There’s a silver lining to this particularly dark cloud. Nasim is in the orphanage now and he says that, for the first time in his life, he has hope for something better. He’s getting an education, and he’s being fed unconditionally. Afghanistan isn’t a doomed country the same way Nasim, by taking his life in his own hands, has never been a doomed child. What our responsibility must be is to make sure that orphanages like these can continue to shelter the children stuck on the bottom rung of the socio-economic ladder.

[Ed. note:  A "madrassa" is simply a school.  The madrassas along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, however, were and are the breeding ground for the Taliban.  During the Soviet-Afghan War, Saudi Arabia funded more than 8,000 madrassas that teach little except the most aggressive, fundamentalist side of Islam - a mixture of Wahhabism and the brand of hatred stemming from the Muslim Brotherhood.]

Editor’s note: Our guest is currently in Afghanistan working for PARSA, a non-governmental organization (NGO) specializing in microeconomic development with an emphasis on women and children. He’s often in rural areas far from Kabul where most other journalists cannot, or will not, go. You’re unlikely to find his insights in the mainstream media. Often, he has no access to the Internet, so excerpts will be sporadic, at best. His correspondence to us is edited for context and to remove information that might put him or his coworkers in danger.

The hard-working orphans of Chaghcharan

Chaghcharan is the largest–essentially only–city in Ghowr province. I use the term “city” lightly, because the “city” part of Chaghcharan is the intersection of two roads around which a number of buildings are clustered. In the plane ride over, (we flew in an aircraft that was roughly three times smaller than any I’d ever ridden in before. There were six seats. Our luggage was piled behind us and held at bay by a shaky canvas netting. It also looked disconcertingly like a toy airplane made proportionally larger) I was shocked by the sheer magnitude of the landscape. I’m not unused to seeing mountains, but they rolled away literally as far as the eye could see. The entire country from Kabul to Chaghcharan was one enormous mountain range, a never ending swell of ridges and draws. Just looking out the window of our comically small plane, it was hard to imagine that anyone had ever decided it would be a good idea to walk over that purgatory of raised stone; it was hard to think that anyone could have truly thought there was something worthwhile on the other side. To say, then, that Chaghcharan is in the middle of nowhere is an understatement. Yassin (the in-country director of PARSA) who has done the 200-mile drive from Bamyan to Chaghcharan, says it took him 15 hours. It wasn’t that the roads were bad; it was that there were no roads.

But enough of that.

Chaghcharan was pleasant and unpleasant in a few very noticeable ways. For one, it’s about 9,000-10,000 feet which makes the weather about 10 degrees cooler, something that I appreciate, although my lower altitude-residing companions have had a harder go of it here and in Kabul because of the elevation. Furthermore, because it lacks the industry and the traffic of Kabul, the air is fresher and the water is cleaner. On the first day we got here, we went to the river some ways out of the city and swam around the wonderfully cool water and I gave myself a terrible sunburn (I also jumped off a 35 foot cliff, and have pictures to prove it). The unpleasant things: most mornings we woke to the smell of burning plastic and garbage, the result of less-than-perfect environmental controls on factories, and the fuel for fires of the desperately poor. More unpleasant than this is the attention you receive from some people here.

In Kabul, while most foreigners do not leave their compounds, it’s not unheard of to see some of them in the more affluent parts of town. In Chaghcharan, we were the only foreigners in town. Period. The five of us represented, in its entirety, the international community. This means that we were the center of attention for every single person on the street: every age from 4 to 90 would stop in their tracks and stare until you had passed. This was unsettling enough, to be watched constantly, but what made it worse than Kabul (where the stares, at worse, were of indifference) was that at times there was a distinct impression that we were not welcome. The looks were not always polite; the salaams were not always returned. Chaghcharan is a border town in the full sense of the word. The streets are shared by government supporters and Taliban supporters in roughly equal number, and the protests are frequent and sometimes deadly. At the orphanage, there’s a genuine fight for hearts and minds between a cruel and angry form of Islam and foreigners like us. It’s not too dramatic to say that we are on the front lines of diplomacy, showing by our actions what kind of people we are, rather than the kafirs we’ve been made out to be.

Despite these heavy issues, our time there was great. The orphans in Chaghcharan are tremendously set on learning and improving themselves, despite the difficulties involved. For one thing, few of them are fully orphaned, meaning that in most cases their mothers or disabled fathers are still alive…but unable or unwilling to support them, and in some cases actively abusive to their offspring. Because of this, a number of them walk back to their villages to earn money for their family in the morning (a walk that takes up to three hours one way), and walk back to the orphanage to be supported themselves in the afternoon and evening. These orphans realize how lucky they are–they’re motivated to work, because they know there’s a waiting list for the program, and someone will work to succeed where they stopped trying. To an even greater degree than Kabul, the potential and the motivation is there, it just has to be complemented with opportunities for success.

PARSA has been working hard to get the teachers of the orphanage out of the habit of beating the children and into the habit of caring for them. After a few tense meetings, we made some progress in that direction.

Being back in Kabul is pleasant, although we aren’t currently allowed to leave Marastoon (the headquarters of PARSA and the Afghan Red Crescent) because of the recent bombing of the Indian Embassy. Just driving back from the airport, I could feel the tension in the air…bombs don’t generally come in ones, they usually come in threes, so Kabul might not be done yet with this round of attacks.

In short, it’s probably a good thing I’m going to [destination excised].

Connor O’Steen is the former editor-in-chief of the Shady Dealer, the humor magazine of the University of Chicago, is a Fellow of the International House, and is currently awaiting publication of his policy white paper on the inherent dangers of the Pakistani military’s ownership of private sector companies. He has language skills in Dari, Urdu, and Arabic.

Part 1

In a post titled “Why Johnny Can’t Google,” Rafe Colbun blogs about John McCain’s indifference to computers: “It’s tempting to. . . assume that. . . old guys just aren’t computer users. [But] in 1997 I worked for an IT consulting firm [among whose] clients was the George [H.W.] Bush Presidential library. [Part of our job was] setting up email accounts for President Bush and his friends (folks like Brent Scowcroft), generating PGP keys, and teaching them how to use them. President Bush has a good 12 years on John McCain, and he had his own laptop, email account, and PGP key ten years ago.”

As for blogging in general, Rob Peters at Vancouver’s the Tyee asks “Is Personal Blogging Fast-Fading?” Regarding “musing fatigue,” he writes: “Perhaps we’ve realized that blogging every day isn’t as fun as it sounds. . . . it actually takes work to develop new material on a regular basis. [But] there does appear to be a more realistic version of the blog coming down the fibre optic trunk line. If filling an entire blank page is a little daunting, how does a 200-character text box sound? Enter the microblog. Twitter and Jaiku are the front-runners in this arena.”

When Cheney’s chief of staff David Addington was subpoenaed to appear before the House Judiciary Committee writes Dana Milbank says in a Washington Post column, “When Anonymity Fails, Be Nasty, Brutish and Short,” he answered questions with “unbridled hostility.” As Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-FL) questioned him, “he put his chin in his hand, stroked his beard and cut off the congresswoman with an offer of advice ‘that may be helpful to you in asking your questions.’”

In a post titled “The Real State of Iraq” at Informed Comment, Juan Cole writes: “By now, summer of 2008, excess deaths from violence in Iraq since March of 2003 must be at least a million. . . . There is not much controversy about it in the scientific community. Some 310,000 of those were probably killed by US troops or by the US Air Force, with the bulk dying in bombing raids. [It's comparable to] bombing to death everyone in Pittsburgh, Pa. Or Cincinnati, Oh.” 310,000? Would that Juan Cole weren’t so credible.

In his New York Times column, “Why Obama Should Visit a Mosque,” Roger Cohen writes: “Fear-mongering about Islam is a global industry. It thrives on ignorance. Obama has a unique power to break the cycle, not least by emboldening moderate Muslims to denounce terror. Nothing would do more in the long run for the security of the world.”

From “Torture a Big Problem Worldwide, UN Expert Says” in Deutsche Welle: “Manfred Nowak. . . the United Nation’s Special Rapporteur on Torture, sees reasons for both optimism and concern. A landmark UN anti-torture convention has been signed by 145 countries. Yet despite the official ban [it's] very rare for him to travel to a country where there aren’t substantial allegations of torture.” Except in Denmark, where “I have no allegations of torture,” Nowak said. “That is really an exception.”

In “New Treaty for Iran and Israel,” Marc Gopin at Common Ground News Service writes: “But most experts agree that an Israeli strike will only delay a nuclear Iran while setting in motion a horrific downward spiral in regional violence and in the global economy. There is only one way to forestall this emerging train wreck, and that is new thinking [in the form of] the “No First Introduction Treaty”. Israel has never agreed to “no first use” of nuclear weapons [but it has] reiterated that it will not be the first to introduce nuclear weapons into the Middle East conflict. . . . It would be wise right now for the Supreme Leader of Iran, Khamenei, to draft an Iranian-Israeli treaty of ‘No First Introduction.”

In “Gazillions,” a review in the London Review of Books of McMafia: Crime without Frontiers by Misha Glenny, Neal Ascherson quotes an expert: “Prohibiting a market [like drugs or prostitution] means giving the criminal corporations opportunities and resources for exerting a guiding and controlling influence over whole societies and nations. [The world] has yet to grasp the challenge to. . . civilisation posed by it.”

In a Wired article, “I’ve Seen the Future, and It Has a Kill Switch,” Bruce Schneier writes: “It used to be that just the entertainment industries wanted to control your computers. . . to ensure that you didn’t violate any copyright rules. But now everyone else wants to get their hooks into your gear. OnStar will soon include the ability for the police to shut off your engine remotely. [But this] is really about media companies wanting to. . . control what you do and when you do it, and to charge you repeatedly for the privilege whenever possible.”

Part 2
 

History has returned from the dead. The idyllic future, once considered inevitable by Western leaders in the early 1990s, is dead instead. The dreams of a liberal, all-men-are-created-equal world are dead, too.

So says author Robert Kagan in his new book The Return of History and the End of Dreams, a sober, realistic evaluation of the world today.

But while it may be sober, Kagan’s take on the world is not necessarily sobering—at least not in a slap-in-the-face, really-bad-news-from-the-doctor kind of way. Kagan rationally and dispassionately looks at the world stage and the actors currently playing major roles, as well as the actors who wish they were playing major roles.

Conventional wisdom among political scientists is that the world has one superpower—the U.S.—and many “great powers.” While he doesn’t exactly define what he means by those terms, he does define power: “(t)he ability to get others to do what you want and prevent them from doing what you don’t want.”

Kagan also offer summaries about who the great powers are and what makes them so great. He examines the return of Russia and the rise of China on the world stage. He also examines the appearance of the other great Asian powers, Japan and India.

The resulting dynamics have played out not so much on the geopolitical scale of the 20th Century but on the geoeconomic scale made possible by the ever-intertwining effects of globalization.

Russia, for instance, feels as though it was bullied by the West during its years of weakness following the collapse of the Soviet Union. Russia today feels like post-WWI Germany, despite the obvious breakdown in parallels: the Allies extracted huge sums from post-imperial Germany while the Allies of today have pumped billions into post-Soviet Russia. Yet Russia has an intrinsic belief in what Kagan calls a “special Russian greatness” and the country’s vast oil reserves have given it huge clout to redefine power structures in Europe.

China, which “has never before been as bound up with the rest of the world as it is today,” sees its own economic might, too. As one of history’s most advanced civilizations, China saw itself fall from great heights in the 20th Century. Now, it’s “rebuilding from ruins to wealth faster than any other country has before,” Kagan points out. But it’s also undergoing an unprecedented military build-up, too.

All the while, the Chinese government maintains strict control over the lives of its people. It’s easy for them to control the media, too, Kagan says, “especially with help from foreign corporations eager to do business with the country.”

India sees itself not as a traditional great power but as a moral counterweight to imperial powers of the 20th Century. The country is “deeply dissatisfied with its current great power status,” Kagan says. Once on the opposite side of America during the Cold War, India has become an important ally, just as Japan was on the opposing side during World War Two yet has become an important ally.

The new landscape, Kagan says, is tied together through economic ties that are both strong yet more tenuous that most people would believe because “there is little sense of shared values among the great powers.”

Most dramatically, it’s an article of liberal faith that all men are created equal. The West believed—mistakenly, as it turned out—that democracy was inevitable in the post-Soviet world. The West believed Chinese communism would follow the Soviet example in the wake of the Tiananmen Square protests.

Whoops.

Instead, “For the first time in many years, a real competitive model has emerged on the marketplace of ideas between different value systems and development models,” Kagan says. Democracies face a real and legitimate challenge from autocracies.

The explosive wild card in the mix would be another form of autocracy—or, more specifically, theocracy—the world’s Islamic fundamentalists. According to Kagan, they have a deeply entrenched sense of honor and a yearning for respect combined with what they perceive as a right for their countries to have nuclear weapons. Ironically, those Fundamentalists feel that they are “under siege theologically” by the forces of modernity.

“The hopeless dream of Islamic fundamentalists,” Kagan says, is that it will all just go away. But the world doesn’t work that way; progress doesn’t go backwards. Instead, he advocates speeding up the modernization process. While it might cause short-term turmoil, any period of turmoil always leads to something different. If guided properly, and not left to “inevitability,” the results can be positive and constructive.

Overall, Kagan provides a simply explained discussion of complex current events with enough context to help everything make sense. He peels back issues with clear logic, and his discussion of those issues is even-handed and unhyperbolic.

The Return of History is short, but the entire time I was reading it I felt like I was engaged in a deeply satisfying conversation with Kagan, and I spent more hours reflecting on the content than I spent actually reading. Kagan’s book provides a must-read primer for anyone who plans to watch as the new world order continues to take shape.

Hint: It’s not just upbringing and culture.

Back in 2005 James Wolcott wrote of torture: “Women may take part — though I imagine it’s rare, and under duress — but only men could devise the intricate and cruel tortures and torture devices that have been inflicted over the centuries.”

This is one generalization about women that feminists let slide. Lynndie England of Abu Ghraib fame was a blip on torture’s radar screen and women would like to keep it that way. But what infuses men with the urge to torture?

For starters, never underestimate the impact of a hard-ass father. Then there are the tyrannies under which many live where rule by force is the norm. Meanwhile, for those men who live in a democracy like ours (however putative), our cultural cup runneth over with blood from movies like the “Saw” and “Hostel” series and video games like Mortal Kombat and Gods of War.

Then, of course, there’s “24,” which, in effect, gave license to embrace torture to a whole nation — including West Point cadets and Guantanamo personnel. Philippe Sands reports in the May Vanity Fair: “Jack Bauer had many friends at Guantanamo” said an administration lawyer asked to sign off on enhanced interrogation techniques. “He gave people lots of ideas.”

Wolcott adds: “Only [men] would draw up the blueprints for machines and procedures to exact the maximum amount of pain and humiliation just shy of death.”

At one time, diabolical machines were devised for torture: from the brank, the brazen bull, and the breaking wheel to the heretic’s fork, the instep borer and the iron maiden. Since then, other than the electronics of stun guns, torture implements have become more basic.

Today, a torturer is likely to equip himself with non-specialized, dual-use items like a baseball bats, cables, iron pipes, pliers, sticks, and maybe a hook on the ceiling for the strappado (suspension by the wrists, tied behind the back).

In the US the torturer’s arsenal is even more stripped down. But its effects are maximized by techniques designed by psychologists using, among other things, sequence, duration, and humiliation, not to mention, of course, near-death drowning experiences.

In other words, men who once would have applied themselves to devising the hardware now concentrate on the software, as it were, of the process itself. Men love this kind of brainstorming: Aside from designing software on the job, in their leisure time they play Rotisserie Baseball, Fantasy Football, and games like Dungeons and Dragons.

Speaking of dungeons, torture holds myriad other attractions to men. For instance. . .

What man doesn’t love basements? Actually, torture done in a basement is usually the province of a serial killer, the only form of life lower than a torturer. State or terrorist torture is usually carried out in a basement-like environment such as an interrogation room in a prison. Meanwhile, in some countries, like Pinochet’s Chile, where people were tortured in National Stadium, a sports site is used.

Torture is actually like a sport. In its cruelty it’s comparable to dog or cock fighting. Those are spectator sports, though, while torture is hands-on, though there’s no danger to the participant like, say, in Mixed Martial Arts. Yet you get your ultra-violence rocks off like in no other contact sport, even football. But, in common with spectator sports. . .

It calls for drinking. In fact, only an ideologue, a religious fundamentalist, or a psychopath is likely to torture sober. Though, outside of Abu Ghraib, it’s hard to imagine Americans who torture drinking while on duty. Troubling as that sounds, why should they? It’s not torture, they’re told — only enhanced interrogation techniques.

It lets you play with guns. Not actually, since torture seldom incorporates shooting. But hand-held electro-shock batons and stun guns are used in 20 countries.

Electricity is not all that electrifies. Women are often raped, sometimes by a roomful of torturers. Beyond that, the homo-erotic frisson is to die for. Not just the psycho-sexual thrill of hurting other men, including assaults on their sexual organs. But guys banding together to do work deemed invaluable. In other words. . .

Male bonding to the nth degree. Not just over the shared activity — they’re complicit in double super-secret work verboten under normal conditions. They’re thus bound together in a secret society.

Why get all bent out of shape over torture when it’s just guys being guys? A man has got to let off a little steam, doesn’t he? Sure — as long as he understands that his superiors may offer him up as a sacrificial lamb or turn him into a scapegoat to escape prosecution themselves.

The Guinness Book of World Records has no category for World’s Nicest Man. Imagine trying to create the metrics for that? But its 2000 edition features an entry that points us in the right direction.

Titled “Biggest Volunteer Ambulance Organization,” it reads: “Abdul Sattar Edhi began his ambulance service in 1948 by ferrying injured people to the hospital and has since developed a service that attracts funds of $5 million per year with no government assistance.”

Curious, we did some research. Turns out that Edhi’s ambulance corps is just one of a wealth of services his foundation provides. But his Nobel Peace Prize-caliber work flies below the radar of most in the US.

Not that of the Department of Immigration, though, which detained Edhi when he flew into New York’s JFK Airport this January. An alarm might have been set off by his possession of a green card when he wasn’t a resident (though he makes lengthy stays). Of course, it couldn’t have been his long beard and traditional Muslim dress.

Perhaps Immigration might have been trying to determine if the Edhi Foundation was a front for collecting funds for terrorists. Or maybe it just sought revenge for humiliating the US government when he ran a relief operation in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina.

In any event, Edhi was questioned for eight hours. Guess no one had a Guinness Book of World Records handy — or the brains to call the Pakistani consulate, which could have told them that he may be the most beloved man in Pakistan.

Nor was this the the first time Edhi was subjected to these indignities. In 2006, he was held for 16 hours in Toronto and, in 2007, for eight hours in New York. The latter must have been a dry run for his detention this year, when, adding insult to injury, Immigration confiscated his passport.

Edhi and his wife were forced to remain in the US before the Pakistani consulate was finally able to clear him. “I am a man of emergencies,” he told the BBC. “I need to be. . . where the suffering is, but here I have been sitting idle.”

At 78 years of age, Abdul Edhi is old enough to have been around for the formation of Pakistan in 1947. When he was a child, he helped his mother with community work, but, not entirely his mother’s son, he followed in his father’s footsteps and opened a business.

Involved in a local charity with other businessmen, he called them out over their failure to serve the neediest. On which occasion, he told Contact Pakistan, “shoes, chairs and sticks were hurled at me.”

When Edhi started his own dispensary in 1951, his business sense came in handy. For instance, he advertised in newspapers for donations –- of the skins from goats sacrificed on a religious holiday. In the beginning, he actually slept outside his center on a concrete bench in case anyone needed urgent assistance.

When his mother became seriously ill, the lack of mobility for the sick in Pakistan hit home to Edhi. “The first time I had attempted to get an ambulance to take my mother to a hospital,” he told Contact Pakistan. “I was told that there was only one in the entire city of Karachi.”

During a flu epidemic in 1957, he rented tents on credit and set up camps as if he were capitalizing a new business venture. Observing his work during the crisis, a businessman made the first substantial donation to the dispensary and Edhi was able to buy his first ambulance, a used Hillman van he converted.

Today the Edhi Foundation receives $10 million a year, mostly from private donations, according to an essential article about its workings by Richard Covington. It claims that only ten percent goes to administrative overhead. Edhi himself professes to take no salary, surviving instead on investments.

Fifty years later, a sharply abbreviated list of its free or dirt-cheap services includes:

Four-hundred ambulances (85 cents for a local call) including three planes and a helicopter.

A network of Edhi dispensaries, including a small cancer hospital and the Edhi Free Diagnostic Center.

Shelter for the homeless and disabled, as well as education and training, especially for children.

Edhi Maternity Homes for delivering babies, training nurses, and placing abandoned babies with foster parents. To this day, Covington reports, there is a cradle outside each Edhi center with a sign that reads, “Do not kill.”

Among the more unusual services: 1. Working to secure the release of prisoners who are either innocent or mentally ill and then providing them with shelter. 2. Recovery of drowned bodies by divers.

Finally, dead bodies are prepared according to Muslim traditions. In fact, spurred by the difficulties that Muslims in the US face ensuring that their dead are properly bathed and shrouded, Edhi acquired property in Queens, New York to address this problem.

Even though he’s been called a “mental case” by his wife (who’s almost equally committed) and he’s demanding and impatient, we’re still comfortable dubbing him the World’s Nicest Man.

Edhi may not be comfortable being held up as a standard which American humanitarian efforts are not meeting. His difficulties with Immigration notwithstanding, he still needs to work with us to meet his goals here. But the question begs to be asked: Is there anything comparable to the Edhi Foundation in the US?

What need have we of the services of a foundation like that? Does the US look like a third-world nation? But, after Katrina, and with the state in which we find our economy and the nation’s health-care system, many of us are no longer too proud to beg.

It’s true that our government provides some of these services under programs like Medicare and Medicaid. And there’s always the American Red Cross, but, controversies aside, its mission is mainly responding to disasters, as well as providing blood services.

Once Abdul Edhi picks up that Nobel, perhaps Americans will be shamed into increasing our relief efforts both overseas and on our own soil. In the meantime, let’s hope we keep him off our Terrorist Watch List.

For starters, his thoughts on the history and function of civil religion are spot-on, and as I consider how dramatically our culture is changing, they lead me to an obvious conundrum. On the one hand, Americans clearly need something unifying, some organizing social thread running through our increasingly diverse (and diverging) societal fabric. Something that serves as a new civic religion, if I might put it that way. On the other hand, it seems futile, in our fractured culture, to even hope for a cohering principle around which we can all gather. Yeats might observe, were he around today, that the center has not held, and yet no society can hope to survive (let alone thrive) without a center.

It seems obvious that the time when a religious trope could fill the need has passed, a point I think Pastor Dan’s analysis makes clear. Historically civil religion could safely stand on generally shared Christian (or Judeo-Christian) ideologies, iconography and imagery because America was overwhelmingly Judeo-Christian. Now, though, these assumptions are challenged at every turn by growing numbers of non-Abrahamic religious adherents, a swelling Islamic population and an increasingly emboldened community of atheists. When I go to a public event and they begin with a prayer, I assure you, they’re not praying to a god who’s cool with Wiccans. (Note how the image above fails to include a pentacle, for instance.) If you take the holy text of the god being prayed to literally, in fact, the prayer is being offered to a deity who’s on record as saying that Wiccans should be killed on the spot.

So if these other groups seem sensitive, consider:

• Polls show the percentage of Americans identifying themselves as Christian ranging as high as 85% or beyond.
• The president is a Christian…
• …as is the VP.
• The Speaker of the House is Catholic…
• …and the Senate Majority Leader is Mormon.
• Well over 90% of our Congressional representatives are Christian, with a majority of the remainder being Jewish.
• The Supreme Court features seven Christians and two Jews.
• All of our major presidential candidates in both major parties.
• Almost all of our past presidents; depending on how you count Unitarians, you have to go all the way back to Lincoln (ironically enough, the founder of the GOP) to even find one to debate over;
• Hell, even sports franchises are starting to build their operations around the evangelical litmus test.
• It seems unlikely that a similar review of the legislatures and courthouses in the 50 states would reveal too much variation from this overpowering Judeo-Christian norm.

As Pastor Dan notes, these dynamics have engendered cynical faith-based power plays by certain of our politicians, and if those on the outside feel a tad paranoid, that’s probably to be expected.

However, even this oversimplifies, because at the same time non-Christians are challenging Christian-based civil expressions, there’s a raging war within Christianity over the soul of the religion. I wish all Christians were like Pastor Dan, but for every one of him there seems to be a dozen Pat Robertsons and maybe even a Fred Phelps or two. So it feels to me (a guy who grew up Southern Baptist in the working-class rural South) that while there have always been significant disagreements from denomination to denomination, our dominant religion is today more fragmented and at odds with itself than I can remember it ever being before.

So let’s acknowledge that whatever center America may have in the future, it’s not likely to be religious in nature. However, at the risk of sounding condescending, I firmly believe that we need a cohering civic “religion” of some sort. Something ennobling, something that calls us to our higher selves, that emphasizes our connection to each other and to our collective identity. In The End of Faith, Sam Harris explains that there’s nothing that can be accomplished through religion that can’t be accomplished without religion, and this is more than true. However, that kind of rationalism can be a hard road for most people. The world is insanely complicated and very few people have the wherwithall to parse even the complexities that lie close to home. We can choose to view people as ignorant sheep, in the manner of Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor, or we can acknowledge the simple fact that even our most brilliant people are usually overrun when they step too far away from their areas of expertise.

In any case, one need only look at recent elections to see that there’s a powerful need for something to believe in. And my question is whether there’s any possibility of us ever evolving (at least in my lifetime) something to replace the dysfunctional civic religion of our past? Civil religion worked better when our culture was more homogenous, but as I argue in a piece I wrote a few years back for Intelligent Agent, the Modernist monolith has fallen, Postmodernism has destroyed all vestiges of universal meaning, and we’re now edging into the opening act of the Network Age.

For better or worse, contemporary culture is network culture, and it’s important to understand that network culture is by nature distributed culture. Modernism was about centralization, but the Network is decentralized – it is ubiquitous and omnipresent, although no less rigorously structured. Our relationships with institutions were once conducted around the site of the monolith – the bank, the church, the school, the county courthouse, these were all physical places and to transact business with the agency in question, you had to transport yourself to the physical address of the institution. In today’s corporate lingo, we might say that these official relationships were “institution-centric.” Networked, distributed culture, though, is “citizen-centric” (though we’d do more justice to the actual character of the relationship with the term “customer-centric”). The locus of these organizational interactions depends less on the address of the building where the offices are and more on our IP addresses. The institution is everywhere there’s a terminal, a critical distinction in understanding that the Network Age is polylithic in nature. This suggests profound implications for the makeup of organizations, because now you can be an active participant in any number of social activities without having to centralize yourself. A congregation of 1000 people can share a worship service from 1000 separate locations, for example.

Put another way, the symbol of the age of civic religion was the monolith. The symbol of the Postmodern was the bulldozer. And now the large, unified central hub with its equally unitary organizing principles (Lyotard’s “metanarratives“) has been replaced by a distributed network of nodes. Not one large thing, but lots of small ones. Homogeneity replaced by rampant, explosive diversity – of race, of creed, of cultural practice, of religion, of everything.

We need a center, but is a center possible? If not, what is to become of us?

My thanks to Pastor Dan, and my apologies for the scattered nature of my thoughts here. Hopefully I have somehow arrived at a worthy question.

More interesting to me are the curious responses from a couple of prominent Christian spokespeople. First, the Archbishop of Canterbury condemns the Sudanese court’s decision:

The spiritual leader of the Anglican Church, Archbishop Rowan Williams, says Sudan’s reaction has been absurd.”I can’t see any justification for this at all,” he said.

“I think that this is an absurdly disproportionate response to what is at best a minor cultural faux pas and I think that it’s done the Sudanese Government no credit whatever.”

Then Dana Perino, speaking on behalf of the United States’ highest-ranking religious leader, President George Bush, weighed in:

“Obviously, it’s an outrage,” White House spokeswoman Dana Perino said after a judicial source in Sudan said Gillian Gibbons, 54, would be jailed for 15 days for insulting Islam and then deported.”We stand with our UK allies in trying to make sure that this woman is protected from the court that says that they want to impose this sentence on her,” said Perino.

“Anyone looking at this on its face would have to conclude that it was outrageous.”

I’m at a loss to understand this criticism, when clearly the West’s Christian leaders ought to be praising the Sudanese. While Islam and Christianity obviously have different ideas about what constitutes heresy, both agree that the consequences should be grave. Deuteronomy commands that heretics should be stoned to death, for instance, and the medieval church for centuries pursued a variety of rather final solutions for all kinds of heretical behaviors. The colonial government of Massachusetts explicitly authorized the death penalty for heresy, as well, and it wouldn’t take long to find any number of traditionally minded Christians even today who’d certainly sympathize with the idea that those who flaunt God’s teachings ought to be killed.

In other words, the holy texts governing the religions of the Archbishop, the President and the White House Press Secretary are even more severe than the Sudanese court, which has apparently exercised a fair measure of mercy in the Gibbons case. As the American writer Sam Harris notes in his controversial The End of Faith, you can criticize fundamentalists all you like, but they do understand what their sacred books say. That apparently can’t be said of those complaining about the events in the Sudan.

So, to the Archbishop, the President and the Press Secretary, I suppose I’d advise silence and reflection. It’s bad form to criticize people merely because their faith is stronger than yours.

In December 2006 Iran President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad kicked off a two-day conference dedicated to examining whether the Holocaust took place.

In October 2008 he addressed the audience the International Congress on the 800th birth anniversary of Rumi.

Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Balkhi-Rumi, of course, was the Sufi teacher whose wildly ecstatic poetry has achieved as profound a resonance in readers and listeners down through the centuries as any poet who ever lived.

Ironic, isn’t it, that, as his most successful translator Coleman Barks pointed out in 2001, an Iranian was America’s bestselling poet. His popularity, especially with those who consider themselves hip, has only grown since.

Does that mean Ahmadinejad has seen the light? Um, maybe not.

Two weeks later, in response to ongoing oppression since the Islamic Revolution of 1979, Sufis in western Iran attacked a Shiite mosque. In response, police and paramilitary troops demolished parts of a Sufi monastery with bulldozers.

There’s no love lost between Shiites, many of whom are prone to intolerance, and the freewheeling Sufis. Ahmadinejad’s appearance at the conference then was probably just a formality.

Still, can you imagine George Bush giving the keynote speech at a Walt Whitman celebration?

Saudi: Why we punished rape victim

I’ll be waiting right here.

His avowed purpose is to show, not that Earth is only 4,000 years old or that The Great Flood accounts for mass extinction at one point in paleontology’s history, but instead argues that creatures haven’t evolved at all.

The principal argument of Atlas of Creation, advanced in page after page of stunning photographs of fossil plants, insects and animals, is that creatures living today are just like creatures that lived in the fossil past. Ergo, Mr. Yahya writes, evolution must be impossible, illusory, a lie, a deception or ‘a theory in crisis.’

Well, at least he’s trying a slightly different tack. Give him some credit for that.

The French, unused to nonsensical creationist arguments as we are here in the USA, took umbrage earlier this year when Yahya shipped French translations of his book to museums, universities, and lycees there. Thanks to scientists who spoke out against the book, the tightly controlled French school system was able to remove copies of the books from lycee and university libraries.

English translations of Yahya’s work, which is a high cost production, have been sent to prominent scientists at colleges and universities all over the United States including Brown, Columbia, Colorado, Chicago, and Brigham Young. American scientists have been less outraged than their French counterparts, used as they are to the culture wars between evangelical fundamentalists and scientists in American education, but they were amazed at the production values for such a handsome tome – full of nonsense though it might be:

If you went into a bookstore and saw a book like this, it would be at least $100. The production costs alone are astronomical. We are talking millions of dollars. – Dr. Kenneth R. Miller, biologist, Brown University

That raises the question – where would Mr. Oktar Yahya get the funds to produce such expensive books – books that he gives away or sells for very modest prices? Well, Yahya says that he seeks no material gain from his works. But they are published by a Turkish firm in Ankara that resists all inquiries and distributed by a leading world wide distributer, SBS Worldwide, which – you guessed it – resists all inquiries (at least about Yahya’s works). So money’s coming from somewhere.

Where that somewhere is puzzles even Dr. Taner Edis of Truman State University, an expert on issues of science and religion, especially Islam. Edis, who is Turkish as is Yahya, says the Turkish press describes Yahya’s activities as supported by “donations.”