Michael J. Totten and Claire Berlinski discuss Trump and Foreign Policy

Trump Making a Point

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In "The Closing of the Conservative Mind," posted among Michael J. Totten's Dispatches for World Affairs (February 20, 2017), he and Claire Berlinski talk about Trump. Some of the talk is overreaction, but their basic concern about Trump's ignorance of foreign policy is precisely the concern that has also occupied my mind:

Michael J. Totten: I want to start with a quote from retired general and former CIA director David Petraeus:

"Americans should not take the current international order for granted. It did not will itself into existence. We created it. Likewise, it is not naturally self-sustaining. We have sustained it. If we stop doing so, it will fray and, eventually, collapse."

That is an excellent rebuttal to the Obama administration's limp foreign policy of managed American decline overseas, and we heard a version of Petraeus' critique from conservatives for eight years during the previous president's term. But Petraeus said that two weeks ago while chastising the Trump administration. Donald Trump doing worse than doubling-down on Obamaism rather than reversing it as John McCain or Mitt Romney would have done. He seems to be willing to set the entire American-made international order on fire, as if everything from 1945 onward is suddenly on the table, not just NAFTA and the Trans-Pacific Partnership but even Japan's demilitarization and NATO. He is consistently friendlier to Vladimir Putin's Russia than he is to Europe. The Republican Party would have a stress-induced heart attack if a Democratic president were doing these things, wouldn't it?

Claire Berlinski: Yeah, on Twitter David Frum wrote:

"It's as if a hostile foreign power has seized the US government and is by remote control steering it toward the maximum possible catastrophe."

Which it really is. I mean, what more would you do?

Did you see that CNN piece about what happened at a Mar-a-Lago dinner party after they got news of the North Korean missile launch? "Trump and [Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo] Abe's evening meal quickly morphed into a strategy session, the decision-making on full view to fellow diners, who described it in detail to CNN."

You're there, I'm not — I can't tell if people are slowly beginning to realize just what an insane catastrophe we've got ourselves into, as in, we could all die from this kind of incompetence and from his species of mental illness — or are the people who voted for him still mostly stuck in cognitive dissonance and confirmation bias, minimizing reports like that as, yeah, overwrought, pearl-clutchers' Lügenpresse?

Doesn't sound good . . . but mental illness? Is this a case of Berlinski suffering from 'Trump Derangement Syndrome'? I suppose she's referring to his narcissism, but I don't think he's insane. Anyway, if you can get past the exaggeration about Trump's mental and emotional state, you'll find that Berlinski and Totten make some important points about Trump's limitations. What matters now is whether Trump gets good advice on foreign policy and is willing to listen to it. Read more here.

A Few Words on Resurrection: A Zombie Novel, by Michael J. Totten

Resurrection: A Zombie Novel

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I don't read horror fiction for the simple fact that it terrifies me due to my vivid imagination, so I was faced with a dilemma when Michael Totten announced the publication of his very own 'zombie' novel, for I've been reading his journalism several years now, and I like his writing on the Middle East, North Africa, and Eastern Europe, various places where the West dwindles and ends.

Totten's zombie novel is the same sort of story -- as I discovered when I finally manned up and read the thing -- the end of Western Civilization, world civilization, for that matter, and the emergence of barbarism in the form of zombies who spread like a plague and attack like jihadis hyped up on angel dust, for they create nothing, preserve nothing, and destroy everything, whether through intent or inadvertence, as a hardy crew of human survivors see from a sailboat they've manned in an attempt to find safety by sailing to an island:

They couldn't see Seattle yet. Vashon Island stood in the way. They'd have to clear that before they could see the big city. The glow on the clouds above the city, though, was clearly visible above the dark hills in the distance.

But the power wasn't on. The glow was flickering. And the color was off. It wasn't yellow or white. It was orange.

"That's not city light we're looking at," Hughes said.

And that wasn't a cloud over the city. It was a column of smoke the size of a mountain. (p. 177)

With the breakdown of civilization, everything goes to hell. Seattle is experiencing a firestorm, and zombies are undoubtedly frying to a crisp (not that that's a bad thing). But nature, in all its dreadful mystery, goes on:

The Olympic Peninsula produced the only true temperate rain forest on earth. Not even the other lush forests of Washington and Oregon are like the forests in the Olympics. Everything's wet all the time. Baby trees grow from the sides of fallen dead trees, sucking nutrients from their predecessors like cannibals. Curtains of moss the size of houses hang from the canopy . . . . [in a forest of] midnight . . . darkness . . . . [without] even stars[,] . . . . [a] world . . . shrouded in pitch . . . . [and thick with] hungry, 350-pound [creatures] . . . just waiting . . . [to tear] to pieces by claws and by teeth. (p. 38-39)

Totten's point, in part, is that the zombies are as natural as those cannibalizing 'Baby trees' and those lurking hungry teeth, and that if you're going to survive the collapse of civilization, you've got to recognize that nature isn't always benign. Neither are people. This is the collapse of civilization . . .

Totten's novel is genuinely a page-turner, something I rarely experience, and the novel is not so much horror fiction as it is post-apocalyptic fiction. I recommend it as a good read and an interesting 'thought-experiment' as to what happens when civilization collapses.

POTENTIAL PLOT SPOILER!

The story did leave me with a few puzzles. Here was a brow-wrinkler for me: One character suffers two month's amnesia, yet turns out to have been ill for merely three days, whereas another character who falls ill for three days has trouble recalling only those three days. Odd.

PLOT SPOILER OVER!

Anyway, while everybody wants to write a novel, Totten has written a good one!

Defeating Islamism: Education . . . or Not?

Ayaan Hirsi Ali

Photograph by Olivier Hoslet

European Pressphoto Agency

(Image from New York Times)

In "The Gadfly," written for the New York Times (May 20, 2010), Nicholas Kristof reviews Ayaan Hirsi Ali's new book, Nomad. From Islam to America: A Personal Journey Through the Clash of Civilizations, and he finds her brilliant though too harsh on Islam but agrees with her on the way to fight Islamism:

Where Hirsi Ali is exactly right, I think, is in her focus on education as a remedy. It's the best way to open minds, promote economic development and suppress violence. In the long run education is a more effective weapon against terrorists than bombs are.

Well, maybe so . . . but there's always the other possibility, that Islamism is more of an educated man's ideology, as Paul Berman suggests in an interview with Michael Totten in discussing how Sayyid Qutb contributed to the suicidal fanaticism of current-day Islamism:

The news media always seem shocked to discover that the latest suicide bomber is an educated guy from a privileged background, but why? I understand it perfectly. An ordinary uneducated person would never get lost reading the dozens of volumes by Sayyid Qutb, but an educated person might. And the next thing they know they've lost their moral bearings, and there they are, ready to pull the plug.

So . . . which is it? What'll defeat Islamism? Education . . . or not?

A likely answer is modern education, the sort that teaches critical thinking, not the sort of rote learning, beaten into kids in madrasahs, that only serves to rot the mind.

Though I wonder if that sort of madrasah education would produce anyone even capable of reading Qutb anyway . . .

Michael J. Totten on Alitalia

Alitalia

(Distorted from Wikipedia)

Anyone who's flown on Alitalia has probably wondered how the Italians could successfully manage the powerful and efficient Roman Empire for hundreds of years but cannot run a measly airline for even one day.

Well, perhaps you haven't wondered about that, and I hadn't either until just now, but it's a valid question.

My worst experience flying was with Alitalia. I flew with my wife and daughter from Sydney to Rome, then on to Tel Aviv for a year in Israel as a Golda Meir Fellow at Hebrew University, but our luggage stopped in Rome and stayed there for several weeks while we made do with what we had in our carry-on bags. When our belongings finally arrived, several items were missing, though nothing especially valuable.

We were told by a fellow with a lot of flying experience that a normal airline would have provided money for clothing and new luggage as recompense . . . "but Alitalia isn't a normal airline."

After reading Michael Totten's recent experience in Rome while flying Alitalia, "The Worst Airline Company in the World" (March 13, 2009), I thank the airline deities for allowing us to fly on a good day with Alitalia. This is a man who works as a journalist in the Middle East, particularly in Lebanon and Iraq, and he has reported a lot on the painful events there, but his Alitalia experience sounds far worse:

After spending several weeks each in Iraq and Lebanon at the end of 2008, I bought a plane ticket to the U.S. from Beirut on December 22 and figured I had plenty of time to get home for Christmas. I had no idea, though, that I had purchased my ticket from the worst airline company in the world -- Italy's national carrier Alitalia -- and that a two-hour layover in Rome would turn into an ordeal that lasted longer than a week.

I'm surprised that that a world traveler such as Totten hadn't heard about Alitalia's 'service' . . . but he was soon to find out. His initial indication of trouble, though he didn't yet realize this, came as he was checking his bags:

I placed my most critical and expensive items in my carry-on bag so they wouldn't get damaged or lost. Yet the woman at the Alitalia check-in counter in Beirut's international airport said my bag was too large and would have to be checked. I wasn't happy about that, but I did as I was told and surrendered my luggage. She neglected to tell me that Alitalia's baggage handlers were on strike and that it would be a very long time before I would see my property again -- if I ever would see it again.

Only upon his arrival in Rome did he learn of the baggage handlers' strike:

A few moments passed before I absorbed what that meant. My laptop was in my carry-on bag that Alitalia had forced me to check. My work from Iraq and Lebanon was on that machine. My Nikon camera was in that bag. I didn't want to hand it over, but the airline forced me to hand it over and didn't tell me what was happening in the bowels of the company.

After countless lies from the Alitalia staff, reported in a way that simultaneously enrages and entertains, Totten -- along with fellow 'passengers' Sofocles and Tatiana -- takes on the responsibility of warning other would-be passengers not to hand over their baggage:

"Excuse me, sir" I said. "You might not want to check your luggage. The baggage handlers are on strike. The planes aren't flying, and once you check your luggage, they won’t give it back."

"How dare you!" said the Alitalia woman working the counter.

"You aren't warning this man," I said. "So I'm warning him. Somebody should have warned me before I gave you my luggage . . ."

"He's checking in!" she said.

Sofocles and Tatiana laughed out loud.

"He's checking in?" I said. "He's not going anywhere. Nobody's going anywhere." I turned around and made an announcement to everybody in line behind us. "They're on strike. You aren't flying today, and if you get them your luggage they won't give it back."

"That's not true!" the Alitalia woman said. "How can you say that?"

"How can you stand there and lie to these people?" Tatiana said.

Passengers in line behind us with luggage shifted and murmured to each other. They had no idea what they were getting themselves into until I told them.

"It's not my job to warn people," I said to the woman behind the counter. "It's yours. Have a little decency, will you?"

She angrily stabbed her keyboard with her fingers as she rebooked me on another Alitalia flight that was supposed to leave on Christmas Eve the next day. But it did not leave the next day. When I arrived the airport, my flight to Chicago wasn't even on the Departures board. It was cancelled before I even got there, as I figured it would be.

Perhaps making the Alitalia clerk angry wasn't a good strategy when rebooking, but from Totten's story, I suspect that the 'rebooking' was the airline's method of dealing with irate customers. In effect, the Alitalia staff was simply transfering the problem to other staff members at different counters or on other shifts. No real rebooking was done.

The story gets even worse. Go and read (and support his journalism financially if you can).

Al Qaeda reads my blog!

Slytherin House Crest

"You knew I was a snake

when you took me in!"

(Image from Wikipedia)

Some folks say that blogging is bad for your health. Ted Olsen, writing for Christianity Today in an article ominously titled "The Death of Blogs" (9/25/2007), quotes Michael Parsons on the rigors of blogging:

"Good bloggers work like dogs," says Michael Parsons, editor of the tech site CNet.co.uk. "You can't expect readers to show up unless you show up. And the Internet never closes.... Every successful blogger I've come across is the same. Eat, sleep, and drink the work. No time out; no holidays."

As Olsen notes, "That's not a recipe for healthy living, especially if you're working a day job that's not paying you to blog."

Blogging about Islamists probably isn't a recipe for healthy living either, no matter what one's day job might be.

Recently, I posted an entry on "Islamists: Mismanagement of Savagery?" in which I noted Michael Totten's report that Al Qaeda's savagery in Iraq's large western, Anbar Province had turned the insurgent tribes there against Islamists and into cooperation with the American military.

This morning, I found the following comment by a certain 'Donald':

Very funny ! ! How could someone well educated like you still bleive U.S.A media ! ! Al Qaeda or ABU NAJI never said People couldn't shave or smoke. never did action for that. The most of what you said are from G Bush media witch is made for stupid American People.

My friend 'Donald' linked his name to "Jihad Watch," in irony (I suppose) since that site is antijihadist. Anyway, I replied:

'Donald', I don't know what a "G Bush media witch" is, but your entire comment sounds rather 'occult' and therefore hard to understand. Anyway, I was reading Michael Totten, not George Bush.

Not smoke or shave? The smoking ban was news to me in Totten's report, but the shaving ban wherever Islamists come to power is well-known.

Now, I don't know that my friend 'Donald' is really Al Qaeda, but he certainly sounds like an Islamist sympathizer. He's not an American, nor is he a native speaker of English despite the fact that he's based in the U.K. (and I have his IP address). He reached my site through a Google search for "Abu Bakr Naji," author of The Management of Savagery, an Al Qaeda blueprint for ruling over areas conquered through military jihad, and he spent 24 minutes (and one second, but who's counting?) reading my blog, even troubling himself to take five page views. That shows dedication and a desire to judge my blog on its merits rather than an impulse to react in outraged indignation.

Fifty points for Slytherin!

However, given the low quality of my friend's comment -- the conspiratorial worldview, the immature name-calling, the ungrounded claims -- I must, regrettably, deduct 60 points, thereby resulting in a 10-point loss for Slytherin.

Sorry about that, 'Mouthboy'...

Islamists: Mismanagement of Savagery?

Anbar Province

Al Qaeda's Mismanagement of Savagery?

(Image from Wikipedia)

Some readers may recall my post of July 18, 2006, in which I discuss Abu Bakr Naji's plan for seizing territory and establishing Islamic law as a means of establishing the Caliphate.

In that post, I used a translation by William McCants (Fellow with the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point) of Naji's text, The Management of Savagery: The Most Critical Stage Through Which The Umma Will Pass.

Allow me to restate what Naji has written:

[The condition of a region of savagery] is more nebulous than chaos, in view of its corresponding historical precedents and the modern world and in light of wealth, greed, various forces, and human nature, and its form which we will discuss in this study. Before its submission to the administration [i.e., the management of savagery], the region of savagery will be in a situation resembling the situation of Afghanistan before the control of the Taliban, a region submitting to the law of the jungle in its primitive form, whose good people and even the wise among the evildoers yearn for someone to manage this savagery. (page 27)

This Hobbesian state is something that the Islamists themselves first bring about, after which -- as a sort of 'manufactured heroism' -- they provide order:

As for a detailed definition, it differs according to the goals and nature of the individuals in the administration. If we picture its initial form, we find that it consists of the management of peoples' needs with regard to the provision of food and medical treatment, preservation of security and justice among the people who live in the regions of savagery, securing the boarders [sic: "borders"] by means of groups that deter anyone who tries to assault the regions of savagery, as well as setting up defensive fortifications.

(The stage of) managing the people's needs with regard to food and medical treatment may advance to (the stage of) being responsible for offering services like education and so forth. And the preservation of security and securing the borders may advance to working to expand of the region of savagery. (page 26)

On of the things that one does to manage the savagery is:

- Establishing Sharia justice among the people who live in the regions of savagery (page 27)

How well does this 'manufactured heroism' work in practice? Not so well, apparently, as shown through this report by Michael Totten about Al Qaeda's experience in Iraq's Anbar Province:

Al Qaeda was initially welcomed by many Iraqis in Ramadi because they said they were there to fight the Americans. The spirit of resistance against foreign occupiers was strong. But the Iraqis got a lot more in the bargain than simply resistance....

"Market Street [the main street downtown] was completely controlled by Al Qaeda," [Marine] Lieutenant [Jonathan] Welch said. "They rolled down the streets, pointed guns at people, and said we are in charge. They had crazy requirements for the locals. They weren't allowed to cut their hair. Girls were banned from going to school. They couldn't shave or smoke. One guy defiantly lit a cigarette and they shot him four times"....

After Al Qaeda took over Ramadi, the local government was replaced with terrorists who only cared about fighting Americans and violently suppressing Iraqis. Al Qaeda was in charge, but it wouldn't be accurate to say they were the new government. None of the basic city government services functioned. There was no electricity, no running water, no telephone service, and no garbage collection. Every single local business closed down. The city could not have been any more broken....

In October of last year the tribal leaders in the province, including some who previously were against the Americans, formed a movement to reject the savagery Al Qaeda had brought to their region. Some of them were supremely unhappy with the American presence since fighting exploded in the province’s second largest city of Fallujah, but Al Qaeda proved to be even more sinister from their point of view. Al Qaeda did not come as advertised. They were militarily incapable of expelling the American Army and Marines. And they were worse oppressors than even Saddam Hussein. The leaders of Anbar Province saw little choice but to openly declare them enemies and do whatever it took to expunge them. They called their new movement Sahawa al Anbar, or the Anbar Awakening.

The struggle against Al Qaeda in Anbar is far from over, but what Totten's report shows is that the Islamist assumption about manufacturing their own heroism through establishing the savagery from which they then rescue people will not work.

People aren't as stupid as Islamist intellectuals like Abu Bakr Naji seem to think.