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Lowry is rocking today. I'm betting you had never heard of Omdurman? Not PC after all. And that nasty Churchill was involved who the modern British PC Gestapo have finally managed to expunge from the history books. Yes, that's right, Churchill has been removed from the British history curriculum in case you missed it... Any more ridiculous arguments that PC is not a problem for the West?
Here's most of the rest of it so you can't go away without this gem of distillation of Barnett's (Pentagon's New Map) "Core" vs "Gap" hypothesis:
In western Pakistan, Gaza, southern and eastern Afghanistan, Somalia, and western Iraq, it has been ungoverned spaces that have created the environment in which terrorists can thrive. Our problem in the war on terror is less the absence of democracy than the absence of strong states. Tribes are inherently difficult to govern because they, as James Kurth writes in The American Interest, “do not see themselves as citizens who enjoy equal rights within one homogeneous nation,” but as “at most a collection of nations in a nation, but not of it.”
This is why even the mind-bogglingly brutal Saddam Hussein had trouble handling the tribes of Iraq. The extraordinary progress we have seen in Iraq in the past six months has less to do with winning new converts to our ideological vision of liberal democracy, and more with how we have — through inspired and very practical work at the local level — turned the tribes in our favor. We have greased palms, stroked egos, and benefited from the excesses of an al Qaeda so savage and dark that it represents a threat even to the not particularly gentle or enlightened way of life of the tribes.
President Bush doesn’t appear to have entirely absorbed this. He still insists that Muslims desire freedom as much as Methodists do. This may well be true of Muslims who are as deracinated as most Methodists are — living in societies that have dissolved traditional ties of clan and sect to make possible the individualism upon which modern liberal democracies are built. Most Muslims in the Middle East don’t live in such societies, of course, and creating them would represent a radical social revolution almost as threatening to tribal sheiks as the vision of al Qaeda.
What we are instead witnessing in Iraq is a necessary American accommodation to people for whom blood and soil mean much more than constitutional rights or democratic procedure. Is that ideal? No, but consider it part of the revenge of the tribes.
Here's most of the rest of it so you can't go away without this gem of distillation of Barnett's (Pentagon's New Map) "Core" vs "Gap" hypothesis:
In western Pakistan, Gaza, southern and eastern Afghanistan, Somalia, and western Iraq, it has been ungoverned spaces that have created the environment in which terrorists can thrive. Our problem in the war on terror is less the absence of democracy than the absence of strong states. Tribes are inherently difficult to govern because they, as James Kurth writes in The American Interest, “do not see themselves as citizens who enjoy equal rights within one homogeneous nation,” but as “at most a collection of nations in a nation, but not of it.”
This is why even the mind-bogglingly brutal Saddam Hussein had trouble handling the tribes of Iraq. The extraordinary progress we have seen in Iraq in the past six months has less to do with winning new converts to our ideological vision of liberal democracy, and more with how we have — through inspired and very practical work at the local level — turned the tribes in our favor. We have greased palms, stroked egos, and benefited from the excesses of an al Qaeda so savage and dark that it represents a threat even to the not particularly gentle or enlightened way of life of the tribes.
President Bush doesn’t appear to have entirely absorbed this. He still insists that Muslims desire freedom as much as Methodists do. This may well be true of Muslims who are as deracinated as most Methodists are — living in societies that have dissolved traditional ties of clan and sect to make possible the individualism upon which modern liberal democracies are built. Most Muslims in the Middle East don’t live in such societies, of course, and creating them would represent a radical social revolution almost as threatening to tribal sheiks as the vision of al Qaeda.
What we are instead witnessing in Iraq is a necessary American accommodation to people for whom blood and soil mean much more than constitutional rights or democratic procedure. Is that ideal? No, but consider it part of the revenge of the tribes.
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