Timothy J. Colton. Yeltsin. A Life. New York: Basic Books, 2008.
"The bitter truth is better than the sweet lie."--Boris N. Yeltsin
On April 23, 2007, Boris Yeltsin, first president of the ethnic Russia that was born following international Caesarian midwifery, died. One year later Timothy J. Colton has fathered a 550 page biography, dedicated to the conservative publicist Samuel L. Huntington. It was published by a subsidiary of the Perseus publishing consortium headed by David Steinberg, which had previously purchased the Harvard Business School Press in 2005.
The final two years of Yeltsin's second term were endured in a kind of agony, both political and physical. He underwent nine hospitalizations from November, 1996 to December, 1999. Professor Colton writes, "...he was not dying, was not a shut-in, and had not lost cognitive capacity." Just as clearly, he was not wholly functional. His final presidential years closely mimicked the declining years of Leonid Brezhnev, for his motorcade always included an ambulance. How and when did this one strong physique succumb to the burdens of office, and what was the state of the nation upon his hasty retirement on December 31, 1999?
Raised in the Ural mountain chain, as Colton's impressive collection of family photos illustrates, young Boris Nikolaevich graduated from the Ural State University in 1955 with a reputation as a hooligan and an instigator. But he received immediate employment by the construction department of the Sverdlovsk municipality. He became a Party member in 1961. After meeting Brezhnev in 1976 he became one of the youngest regional First Secretaries, managing Sverdlovsk until 1984. He brought a local quarrel to the attention of Yuri Andropov, then chief of the KGB. The Defense Ministry made him a Colonel in 1978. Colton writes, "Yeltsin's rise was meritocratic, made without the windfall of a well-connected parent, spouse or friend." This assertion may be regarded as questionable, for the author often, although not always, appears to accept sycophantic memoirs at face value. After a subordinate committed suicide and secret documents were lost, Yeltsin was elected to the CPSU Central Committee. He was decorated with the Order of Lenin in 1981, Then, in a sudden concession to free-marketeers, he opposed imposing price controls on selected foodstuffs. In this rising period of his career, he could knock back three tumblers of vodka without visible aftereffects.
Yeltsin's meteoric ascent, in the manner of a typical Party protege, was not unaccompanied by temporary missteps. Yuri Andropov, the KGB leader kept alive on American dialysis machines, nominated Yeltsin to the construction (or reconstruction) department of the CPSU in 1984. Thereafter Gorbachev and Yeltsin operated as a smychka, two hunting dogs linked in tandem by a horizontal harness, unique to rural Russia. Forty years after Franklin D. Roosevelt's death, Yeltsin began to specialize in capital investment, and on December 25, 1985, he advanced to the position of First Secretary of the Moscow Central Committee. According to the pious formulation of Colton,"/Moscow/ stood for all that was amiss with Communism and for its potential for redemption through reform." For the next two years Yeltsin conducted an unremitting purge of the Moscow apparatus, acting an an exemplary "udarnik," or "hitter," in a manner consistent with Bolshevik tradition. In 1987 he was interviewed by Diane Sawyer of CBS , achieving thereby a sort of imprimatur from an arm of the American news mechanism. In the summer of 1988 Yeltsin wrangled a mandate from the Karelian Republic, Andropov's former political base, to appear at the 19th CPSU Party Conference. But in October, 1987, he attacked Gorbachev before a television audience, asserting that the Russian nation was losing faith in the Party, and offered to resign his seat in the Politburo. Afterward, he stabbed his stomach with a pair of office scissors. Following subsequent acrimonious controversy, he was voted off the Politburo.
Nevertheless, he rebounded quickly. After a flying visit to London to be welcomed by Margaret Thatcher, Yeltsin spearheaded an ostensibly populist campaign against the ruling Communist Party, and harvested 50% of the ballots to become speaker of the Supreme Soviet. His goals were to withdraw Soviet troops from bases abroad, to decolonize Russia's overland conquest of national minorities, and to foster the marketization of Soviet state assets. His radical program elicited 54% of the ballots cast by an enthusiastic electorate for the presidency. In June, 1989, the Russian Parliament declared Russia's "sovreignty," seceding (on paper) from the all-embracing USSR. Colton suggests a motive for Western support when he writes, "...Russia's mammoth reserves of hydrocarbons and minerals looked increasingly like a pot of gold...", while conceding that Yeltsin's concept of global economics was "sketchy' and "wacky."
During August 19-21, self-selected Party and Army elements walked through an ostensible cooup, taking Gorbachev prisoner, but the troops melted away as did Kornilov's attack on Kerensky's Provisional Government in August, 1917. George H.W. Bush ordered secret signal intelligence to be communicated to Boris Nikolaevich. Yeltsin, the Colonel, climbed on a convenient tank to read a ghost-written appeal to the public, a la Lenin, rejecting isolation from the (mythical) "world community." His bold appearance constituted a televised coup de theatre. Subsequently the Ukrainian regime resolved to separate from Russia, and in 1990 he signed a ten-year treaty of cooperation with the now-disgraced Leonid Kravchuk. Following Lenin's precedent of 1922, Russia, Ukraine and Belorus signed a treaty making the three Slavic republis the core group of a new Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS). After declaring that dismemberment was a political error, President Gorbachev retired, as Yeltsin's decolonization drive stalled. With the enthusiastic support of Western financial interests, Yeltsin next pursued the course of "creative destruction" attributed to Joseph Schumpeter, an emigre economist at Harvard, with all the resources of his prodigious energy.
As the former Soviet military forces withdrew from the periphery, trading space for time, Yeltsin began his assault on the regulated economic system. He resisted subsidizing regional economic structures with revenues from the center, thus negating the equivalent of regional equalization payments by which Ottawa subsidizes weaker provincial economies. The result was chaos, scarcely concealed by the impsition of martial law in Chechnya. Consumer prices rose 300%, the GDP fell 96% and inflation attained the unheard-of level of 2,520%. Correspondingly, Yeltsin's popularity fell from 40% in 1991 to 20% in 1992 and 17% in 1993. These figures make manifest the contradiction between claims of "populism" and "democratization" and actual public sendiment. In practice the touted reform process had a greater similiarity to a Hollywood reality show extolling "virtual democracy."
Nevertheless, Colton's terse summary of the Yeltsin style of implementing irregular reforms, fostering a fractious administrative mechanism and leaping to unpredictable decisions must be credited. In desperation Yeltsin turned to a veteran Soviet administrator, Victor Chernomyrdin, the former Soviet Minister for Gas (1985-89), to regularize and rationalize his tempestuous and convulsive assaults on the previous socialist "normalcy." The Consttutional Court prohibited the persecution of former Party members. Motivated by a spontaneous "truth and reconciliation" sentiment, some 4.2 millin Soviet citizens were exonerated, or posthumously rehabilitated, from frudulent accusations. As did the Castro government in Havana, Yeltsin attempted overtures to Russian exile communities, but without offering financial compensation. The KGB was not abolished as the imperial Okhrana had been, but was trimmed down into a leaner, meaner government organ and rechristened the Federal Security Bureau (FSB). Plus ca change, plus ca la meme chose. It was, however, significant that on two counts Yeltsin deviated from Western advice. He did not form a mass party around a personality cult, as de Gaulle had done, and he refrained from inundating his bewildered public with a tsunami of electronic propaganda, as the Fuehrer and the Duce had done. It is unquestionable, as Colton writes, that Yeltsin combined ideological eclecticism with a fascination for history. And he was made sufficiently aware of the potential dangers in following European precedents to renounce that path.
Subsequently he abandoned his administrative metier to become an energetic partisan for enforcing a tectonic shift in Russian economic structures. In the ensuing earthquake, to Western applause from financially interested Western investors, state property was sold off at fire-sale prices to speculators who had amassed government-issued purchase vouchers. Petroleum reserves were offered as collatoral for bank loans. This collateral was swiftly auctioned off, and just as swiftly purchased by the auctioneers themselves. In short, the Yeltsin re-structuring (or right perestroika) implemented the counsel of the right Communist Nikolai Bukharin who, imitating the counterrevolutionary French leader Adolphe Thiers, once wrote in Pravda, "Enrichez-vous!" Throughout this convulsive period violent crime doubled, the newly wealthy evaded taxes, and the government was too bankrupt to pay the military rankers.
This reviewer must dissent from Colton's regret that a new security architecture for Europe and Asia did not suck Russia into an elephantine NATO bureaucracy extending from the English Channel to the Yellow Sea. It is illogical to celebrate the disintegration of a traditional overland empire in Chapter 8, if it be Turkish, only to advocated a grossly expanded empire of the same genre, if it be controlled by Anglo-Saxons. In this regard the author's objectivity and sense of proportion may justly be challenged.
After two yers of economic maladministration and administrative muddle, 617 deputies in the Supreme Soviet voted to impeach the President, but fell short of a two-thirds majority. En revanche, Yeltsin abolished the Supreme Soviet on September 21, 1993, and replaced it with a two-house legislature, following the American model. Colton pussyfoots around this executive coup, characterizing it as merely of "debatable legality" and partaking of "extraconstiitutionality." Early in October the "superpresident" ordered 1300 soldiers to attack the Parliament skyscraper ( or so-called "White House") in a dramatic televised Putsch. He then introduced a cumersome constitution of 137 articles. Colton approvingly salutes this political solution achieved through "partially democratic means." Yeltin himself, in rhetoric resembling Mussolini's, thundered to the quailing public, "...Do you want to bet only or mostly on a parliament? If you did, within a half-year, if not sooner, people would demand a dictator." One could only imagine how history would have changed, if King Charles I had had the benefit of Yeltsin's speechwriters! But despite the frightening rhetoric , the elected deputies voted amnesty for their former leaders, and Yeltsin, perhaps responding to undocumented hints from former Party apparatchiki, did not venture to counter their defiance. As a "legitimized" democratic despot he proceeded to rule by decree, issuing above twenty decrees per month, while the impotent parliamentary body adopted only 6 laws throughout all of 1994.
Although the "hitter" (udarnik) with the bullyingmicrophone had hoped to retire after one term because of health considerations,he was impelled by the pressures of incumbancy to reconsider, despite his near total lack of public approval. In February, 1996, he betook himself and an entourage of 70 to the World Economc Forum in Davos, Switzerland. On March 19 he launched a new publicity campaign, appealing to three separate privileged castes: the military, the clergy, and the corporate elite, in a Third World pattern more familiarly exemplified in Latin America. Through his campaign, guided by an American advertising firm, Yeltsin overcame the handicap of his single-digit popularity. His ambitions were furthered by a windfall investment of $10 billion from the IMF, and the World Bank gilded his lily with another $500 million. Inhis campaign swings, Yeltsin distributed bouquets and benefits like a Canadian prime minister campaigning through French Quebec, even allocating a generous contribution to a Muslim cultural center. The German Chancellor, Helmut Kohl, offered him political asyllum if he lost. Through foreign gold and advertising guile he raised his vote total to 35% in the first round of balloting, and strenuously levered himself up to 54% to defeat the Communist candidate, who had increased his own popularity from 32% to 41%. This rebound, however, was to be short-lived. As Colton writes, "Yeltsin had rejuvenated himself politically just as he was failing corporeally."
He endured a fourth heart attack in August, and in September had his heart function improved by an operation to attach five grafts to his weakened heart muscle. The Russian surgical procedure was observed by a celebrated American heart specialist from Houston, Texas, the homeland of America's oil elite. IBy May he had recuperated sufficiently to journey to Paris, where he signed a diplomatic capitulation agreeing to NATO's long-planned Drang nach Osten. As his health failed, so did his intermittent administrative hammer blows. Because the treasury had been scraped clean (perhaps to increase his vote total), the total arrears of unpaid wages and old age pensions rose to $8 billion in 1998. In May, 1997, he was compelled par la force des choses to sign a treaty with Chechen authorities, promising to withdraw Russian troops from te Caucasian Muslim republic. And in the same tempestuous month he fired both the Defense Minister and the Chief of the General Staff, ostensibly because they demurred from his public commitment to end conscription. (It still exists.) Finally, having triumphed with Western financial assistance over the vanquished state ideology (vae victis!) he commenced to lament the want of a unifying "national idea" or "national ideology." (The latter appears still to represent a condition sine qua non for state ideological specialists.)
Yeltsin's decllining health required hospitalization on eight separate occasions between November, 1996 and December, 1999. As he became progressively separated from administrative responsibilities, cabined discipline disintegrated as ever more caustic press criticism echoed an earlier characterization of Yeltsin's family association withthe emergent business elite as constituting a "collective Rasputin." In August, 1996, Chernomyrdin was confirmed again by the Duma, only to be dumped by the following year. His replacement lasted from April to August, before he was replaced by Evgenii Primakov, the former KGB chief , professional diplomat, and fluent Arab speaker. Another KGB veteran was embedded as chief of the Kremlin administration. A former director of the new FSB was nmed as first deputy prime minister in a chess player's move to conceal the forthcoming nomination of Vladimir Putin as prime minister. The actor-president, Boris Yeltsin, executed a carefully scripted retirement on December 31, 1999. It coud be argued that while Yeltsin menaced or enthralled the inexperienced voting public like a dancing bear at the Moscow Circus, the responsibilities for actual executive implementation remained firmly in the hands of experienced Soviet apparatchiki like Chernomyrdin and Primakov, with the ostensibly disgraced Mikhail Gorbachev arguably active behind the scenes.
The catastrophic financial collapse of 1997 brought with it yet another request from the Parliament for Yeltsin to resign. The exchange value of the ruble-to-dollar ratio fell from 6:1 to 21:1, and inflation rose 40% throughout his last year in office. An unpredictable rise in oil prices rescued corporate Russia, but not the ordinary Russian family. "And this all was accomplished," Colton enthuses," in the new, post-communist economy."
Boris Nikolaevich Yeltsin projected a larger-than-life image. Permitting neither smoking nor swearing, he presented nearly as abstemious a private image as Adolf Hitler. But his immoderate inebriation before 1996 attractd freqent criticism. Further, it was observed that he exhibited suicidal behabior, and one one occasion opened his veins to share his blood with that of a bodyguard in an ancient pagan gesture. (Colton does not remind his readers that the Russian word for the numeral "one" is "odin".) Colton describes Yeltsin's administrative style as "arrythmic," oscillating between aggressive activism and somnolent acquiescence, more or less like a bicycle racer after testosterone injections. Gorbachev commented that Yeltsin fitted better into a Sturm und Drang atmosphere than seated behind a bureacratic desk. Indeed, the irregularity of his manner finally stimulated some of his emboldened underlings to write an acidulous rebuke, known to their initimates as the "Letter of the Aides to the Sutan." As in previous epochs, the Russian intelligentsia fell back to deploy Russia's most powerful civic weapon--satire. One television network prominently featured a puppet show in which the obese and unstable presidential figure was known as "Boriska," or "Dirty Little Boris." Verbal orders were given priority over written procedures. Colton attributes this practice to Soviet tradition, but the practice of oral "guidance" to interpret (or frustrate) written orders exists throughout the American military, and was even adopted by Japanese banks during the American Occupation ("window guidance"). The charisma of the "superpresident" was so pronouonced that persons in his immediate vicinity felt themselves ensnared in a personal electronic field.
But this phenomenon, however magnified, is typical of the leadership cult of traditional Russian male culture. Further, the President's Club of political insiders, influence peddlers, business elites and family members meeting at an expanded sportsmen's club might legitimately be viewed as a twentieth century derivative of Peter the Great's "All-Russian Congregation of Fools, Rogues and Drunkards," with its ritual catechism commencing with the query, "Do you drink?" If Professor Colton had imbibed a sympthetic appreciation of Russian cultural patterns, he might have commented on the similarity.
In sum, Colton's biography displays both large merits and, regrettably, significent blemishes. The Harvard professor deserves applause for undertaking so swiftly to complete so daunting a task. He is to be commended for recommending that Russian academics follow his lead in cultivating the plants in their biographical gardens. Colton's garden is very generously manured with documentation, indeed.
On the other hand, the reviewer must note several large debits. To rely on pop social psychology to define Yeltsin as an "event-shaping man" is superficial at best--not the conclusion, which is correct, but the pop author from whom this categorization is derived. Comparing Yeltsin the expansive Slavic drunk with the constipated German cleric Martin Luther is staggering in its chutzpah. Moreover, the cognoscenti will note several significant lacunae. It is inexcusable to ignore the fate of Marshal Sergei Akhromayev, close to Western military leaders such as Admiral William Crowe, Jr. Akhromayev allegedly committed suicide in his Kremlin office after the dramatic failure of the televised coup of August, 1991. The second is the downing of Korean Air Line Flight 007, resulting in the death of Congresman Larry McDonald (R-VA), a founder of the ultra-conservative John Birch Society , and a critic of the Rockefeller family, whom he accused of participating in secret negotiations with the Russians behind the back of the Washington authorities. Similarly ignored in the Jackson-Vanik Amendment of 1974, authored by Richard Perle, that linked American trade concessions to Jewish emigration. Colton similarly ignores the the Harvard connection to Moscow, evidenced by the repeated participation of West-oriented Russian politicians such as Gregorii Yavlinskii and Yegor Gaidar at the Russian Center 's public seminars, often chaired by Professor Marshall Goldman, his predecessor as director. Nor does he cite any of Professor Goldman's broadcasts from Russia on National Public Radio for some twenty years. Neither does he refer to any of the rich European journalistic commentary or the memoirs of non-English-speaking eyewitnesses. To a bemused public raised on tales of unremitting hostility between the KGB and FBI, it may come as a surprise to learn that throughout the Cold War, the call-sign for the FBI short-wave station in Washington was KGB 793. It is hard to pass this off as an accidental oversight. Finally, Colton demonstrates insufficient familiarity with the permanence of Muslim civilization throughout the Central Asian successor republics, symbolized in the career of the Cechen leader Imam Shamil' (1797-1877) who died in Mecca.
Although Colton half-heartedly criticizes Yeltsin's "borderline demagogy," he appears oblivious to the impression created by his own practice of rejoicing in an extended concatenation of pejorative asides directed at individuals who did not, to his taste, demonstrate sufficient subservience to the personality and policies of the putative "superpresident." These individuals, numbered among a "piebald field" of the unfortunate defeated, are portrayed variously as indulging in "finger-pointing," acting "brazenly," mouthing "claptrap," manifestly "featherbrained," whose activities "fizzle" in the pursuit of "faddish populism" espoused by "eggheads" who "generate hoopla" from thir position in the "spongy middle" typically inhabited by "queasy intellectuals" who sometimes dispense "socialistic proclivities" among "refactory subordinates" whose oppositional activities are doomed to "crash and burn" after "a kick in the groin." The acidity of an academic martinet does little to reinforce any confidence in the writer's ability to reach a balanced judgment. A more sophisticated conclusion regarding the relationship between the "superpresident" and the "superparty" of professional apparatchiki will recall the image of the smychka, for such a constellation of political forces is reminiscent of a now-forgotten political formula describing the contrasting roles of Marshal Petain and General de Gaulle during the Vichy period, when one theory alleged that Petain was the shield and de Gaulle the sword of the French nation under Nazi occupation. Les bouts se touchent.
In conclusion, Colton's assiduous perseverance has produced a very big volume that would achieve wider circulation if it were, like the baby in front of King Solomon, divided in two. For while the Cambridge academic may well proclaim with the poet, "I have erected a monument higher than Alexander's spire," the mountainous documentation relating to narrow political manoeuvering within the fluctuating inner circle would better be separated out for a series of articles in specialized journals. The life of Yeltsin as an individual would better be sundered from the existing text and presented to a general readership in stripped-down chronological order. Surgical deconstruction is necessary because the paragraphs of sperrogatory political detail obscure the development and Lebensweg of the chief subject.
Of Professor Colton's devotion to his sweet mythos there can be no question, for he may be trusted, like faithful Ruslan of the novel, to guide future scholars to a golden horde of documentation that should be employed in a less partisan manner to anchor Yeltsin more firmly in the course of broader historical processes, and to depict Russia not as a mere component elements in Harvard's Weltanschauung of wealth but to resore it to its actual role in the European association of nations.
Commissioned by the Christian Science Monitor for publication in May, 2008.
Rejected by the Christian Science Monitor because the review significantly exceeded the Monitor's 800 word limit.
The writer received a "kill fee."
Friday, August 29, 2008
Thursday, August 28, 2008
REVIEW, RUSSIA'S MILITARY WAY TO THE WEST
When Tsar Aleksei Mikhailovich began the Westernization of his army in 1649 by issuing regulations borrowed from Maurice of Nassau, he could hardly have foreseen that Russian generals after Peter the Great would include Browne, Fermor, Gordon, Keith, Lacy, LeFort, Manstein, Manteuffel, Muennich, Ogilvy and (regrettably) Totleben. Notwithstanding appearances, the 18th century Russian army achieved a distinctive place in the European concert without sacrificing its national identity.
It was the loss of national identity that the conservative aristocracy and Orthodox faithful feared throughout the Petrine era symbolized by the creation of a new capital on the Baltic named Sankt Petir Burk. Peter's collegially administered departments and the Military Code of 1716 continued to influence the armed forces until the early 19th century. Duffy succesfully rehabilitates the reputation of Marshal Muennich as the dominant demiurge of the post-Petrine decades (1725-41). Muennich is credited with scrupulous attention to logistics and pay, broadening the army's educational mission and emphasizing the role of the offence in seeking a "general battle."
The reign of Peter's daughter, Elizabeth (1741-62) was distinguished by the fertile resourcefulness of Peter Shuvalov as Master General of Ordnance and by signal Russian successes over the top-seeded Frederick of Prussia during the Seven Years' War (1765-72). Shuvalov's Wunderwaffen included the unicorn, an all-purpose artillery piece constructed in exact mathematical compromise among the cannon, the howitzer and the mortar. Somewhat less successful was the "secret howitzer," designed to spread a level spray of cannister at a man's height through a bore choked at the muzzle to an oval. It performed adequately, but was slow to reload.
With the surrender of Koenigsberg to William Femor, East Prussia entered a period of Russian occupation during which the St. Petersburg officers fulfilled a mission civilitrice among the rural bears of Brandenburg. The capture of Berlin by General Totleben's corps volant was celebrated until he was exposed as a Prussian mole. Frederick's chief success was attained in dehumanising his victorious rival in propaganda. Elizabeth, however, forbade seeking a general battle as too expensive in lives and East Prussia was returned to Frederick on her death in 1762.
The blitzkreig assaults of Peter III (1762) and Paul (1796-99) on the perceived national identity led to their assassinations by officers of the Guards--exercitus imperator fecit! Duffy's ooutspoken revisionism relative to these two exemplars of regressive Europeanization will be controversial. The best generals of Catherine's reign (1762-96), notably P. Rumiantsev (who adunbrated a theatre concept), M. Kutuzov, G. Potemkin and the nonpareil A. Suvorov restored the traditional emphasis to the offensive. Suvorov, a Russian Patton, was modern in his shrilled emphasis on speed and impact. The consistently poor quality of Tatar ponies and almost undisciplinable Cossack units compelled the best commanders to realise these desiderata through the infantry and artillery.
While for the period specialist, Duffy's history consistently requires political supplement, it is a praiseworthy, courageous and well-grounded narrative with numerous incisive judgments. The style is eminently readable. The publisher is to be congratulated on a remarkably well-dressed volume presented in parade-ground order.
--RUSI, Royal United Services Institutes for Defence Studies, (March, 1983)
It was the loss of national identity that the conservative aristocracy and Orthodox faithful feared throughout the Petrine era symbolized by the creation of a new capital on the Baltic named Sankt Petir Burk. Peter's collegially administered departments and the Military Code of 1716 continued to influence the armed forces until the early 19th century. Duffy succesfully rehabilitates the reputation of Marshal Muennich as the dominant demiurge of the post-Petrine decades (1725-41). Muennich is credited with scrupulous attention to logistics and pay, broadening the army's educational mission and emphasizing the role of the offence in seeking a "general battle."
The reign of Peter's daughter, Elizabeth (1741-62) was distinguished by the fertile resourcefulness of Peter Shuvalov as Master General of Ordnance and by signal Russian successes over the top-seeded Frederick of Prussia during the Seven Years' War (1765-72). Shuvalov's Wunderwaffen included the unicorn, an all-purpose artillery piece constructed in exact mathematical compromise among the cannon, the howitzer and the mortar. Somewhat less successful was the "secret howitzer," designed to spread a level spray of cannister at a man's height through a bore choked at the muzzle to an oval. It performed adequately, but was slow to reload.
With the surrender of Koenigsberg to William Femor, East Prussia entered a period of Russian occupation during which the St. Petersburg officers fulfilled a mission civilitrice among the rural bears of Brandenburg. The capture of Berlin by General Totleben's corps volant was celebrated until he was exposed as a Prussian mole. Frederick's chief success was attained in dehumanising his victorious rival in propaganda. Elizabeth, however, forbade seeking a general battle as too expensive in lives and East Prussia was returned to Frederick on her death in 1762.
The blitzkreig assaults of Peter III (1762) and Paul (1796-99) on the perceived national identity led to their assassinations by officers of the Guards--exercitus imperator fecit! Duffy's ooutspoken revisionism relative to these two exemplars of regressive Europeanization will be controversial. The best generals of Catherine's reign (1762-96), notably P. Rumiantsev (who adunbrated a theatre concept), M. Kutuzov, G. Potemkin and the nonpareil A. Suvorov restored the traditional emphasis to the offensive. Suvorov, a Russian Patton, was modern in his shrilled emphasis on speed and impact. The consistently poor quality of Tatar ponies and almost undisciplinable Cossack units compelled the best commanders to realise these desiderata through the infantry and artillery.
While for the period specialist, Duffy's history consistently requires political supplement, it is a praiseworthy, courageous and well-grounded narrative with numerous incisive judgments. The style is eminently readable. The publisher is to be congratulated on a remarkably well-dressed volume presented in parade-ground order.
--RUSI, Royal United Services Institutes for Defence Studies, (March, 1983)
REVIEW, JAMES BILLINGTON
Fire in the Minds of Men: Origins of the Revolutionary Faith. James H. Billington. New York: Basic Books, 1980. $25.00.
James H. Billington, a former Princeton professor and chairman of the Fulbright program, is the current director of the Woodrow Wilson Center for International Studies.
This volume is the project of a "subjective method" in historiography, for, as Billington writes, his method " was to concentrate on old books in the light of insights derived from new students."
He focuses here on revolution, which, like a subsoil forest fire, licked upward repeatedly in Europe from 1789 (France) to 1917 (Russia).
Occultism, he finds, was the tinderbox in which the spark of revolution ignited. Freemasonry and other secret hierarchical organizations provided the model for a series of interlocking political conspiracies.
The Illuminist Order, founded in Bavaria by Adam Weishaupt in 1776, went further than most in molding a conspiracy to overturn the monarchical order in favor of "natural" equality and justice.
The Order influenced political figures close to the House of Orleans on the eve of the French Revolution. It swayed subsequent generations through the writing of Filippo Buonarotti, a participant in the 1796 conspiracy of Gracchus Babeuf to extend the French political revolution with a further social revolt to establish community property.
Throughout the 19th century similar organizational projects attracted intellectuals who influenced the newly literate masses through the first mass medium, journalism.
Born of Europe's struggle against Napoleon, romantic nationalism held sway until the Revolution of 1830 in France. Under Louis-Philippe, concepts of social revolution began to move to the fore. The Revolution of 1848 coincided with Karl Marx's "Communist Manifesto."
After Marx, social revolutionaries were divided into two camps: those who felt the chief enemy was capital, as he did, or those who pitted temselves against government itself, as did Proudhon and Bakunin.
In the industrial age the most successful model of a revolutionary machine was offered by the Marxist Social Democratic Party of Germany after 1870.
If Germans were fascinated by machines, Billington argues, Russians were enthralled by dynamite, and redirected it to political ends through assassinations and terror. The ultimate combination of Russian violence and Germanic organization was achieved by Lenin (himself half German and half Russian) who overthrew an unelected government in 1917 with his Bolshevik half of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party and rechristened his instrument the Communist Party.
By exercising his right "to ignore professional debates" and a "willingness to follow seminal figures on leaps of history," Billington argues the descent of Bolshevism from the beginnings of the Illuminist Order a century and a half earlier.
Appealingly simplistic and heavily freighted by citations, Billington's argument isn't really persuasive in demonstrating uninterrupted linkage among conspirators between 1776 and 1917. In the absence of direct evidence, hypotheses about possible influence can only be considered speculative. Complex historical proceses cannot be reduced to organizational fetishism or seductively simplified as representing fragments of a Great Conspiracy.
The mass of footnotes at the end of this magisterial 650 page volume may appear to lend plausibility to Billington's position, but in the end his case seems subjective is not specious.
Christian Science Monitor, vol. 73, no. 49 (Feb. 4, 1981).
James H. Billington, a former Princeton professor and chairman of the Fulbright program, is the current director of the Woodrow Wilson Center for International Studies.
This volume is the project of a "subjective method" in historiography, for, as Billington writes, his method " was to concentrate on old books in the light of insights derived from new students."
He focuses here on revolution, which, like a subsoil forest fire, licked upward repeatedly in Europe from 1789 (France) to 1917 (Russia).
Occultism, he finds, was the tinderbox in which the spark of revolution ignited. Freemasonry and other secret hierarchical organizations provided the model for a series of interlocking political conspiracies.
The Illuminist Order, founded in Bavaria by Adam Weishaupt in 1776, went further than most in molding a conspiracy to overturn the monarchical order in favor of "natural" equality and justice.
The Order influenced political figures close to the House of Orleans on the eve of the French Revolution. It swayed subsequent generations through the writing of Filippo Buonarotti, a participant in the 1796 conspiracy of Gracchus Babeuf to extend the French political revolution with a further social revolt to establish community property.
Throughout the 19th century similar organizational projects attracted intellectuals who influenced the newly literate masses through the first mass medium, journalism.
Born of Europe's struggle against Napoleon, romantic nationalism held sway until the Revolution of 1830 in France. Under Louis-Philippe, concepts of social revolution began to move to the fore. The Revolution of 1848 coincided with Karl Marx's "Communist Manifesto."
After Marx, social revolutionaries were divided into two camps: those who felt the chief enemy was capital, as he did, or those who pitted temselves against government itself, as did Proudhon and Bakunin.
In the industrial age the most successful model of a revolutionary machine was offered by the Marxist Social Democratic Party of Germany after 1870.
If Germans were fascinated by machines, Billington argues, Russians were enthralled by dynamite, and redirected it to political ends through assassinations and terror. The ultimate combination of Russian violence and Germanic organization was achieved by Lenin (himself half German and half Russian) who overthrew an unelected government in 1917 with his Bolshevik half of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party and rechristened his instrument the Communist Party.
By exercising his right "to ignore professional debates" and a "willingness to follow seminal figures on leaps of history," Billington argues the descent of Bolshevism from the beginnings of the Illuminist Order a century and a half earlier.
Appealingly simplistic and heavily freighted by citations, Billington's argument isn't really persuasive in demonstrating uninterrupted linkage among conspirators between 1776 and 1917. In the absence of direct evidence, hypotheses about possible influence can only be considered speculative. Complex historical proceses cannot be reduced to organizational fetishism or seductively simplified as representing fragments of a Great Conspiracy.
The mass of footnotes at the end of this magisterial 650 page volume may appear to lend plausibility to Billington's position, but in the end his case seems subjective is not specious.
Christian Science Monitor, vol. 73, no. 49 (Feb. 4, 1981).
Wednesday, August 27, 2008
BOOK REVIEW; AFGHANISTAN
DIE SOWJETISCHE INTERVENTION IN AFGHANISTAN: ENTSTEHUNG UND HINTERGRUENDE EINER WELTPOLITISCHEN KRISE. Edited by Heinrich Vogel. Osteuropa und der internationale Kommunismus., vol. 8 Baden-Baden: Nomos Verlagsgesellschaft, 1980. 392 pp. Maps. Tables. DM 39, paper.
This hefty chrestomathy of research studies collected by the Bundesinstitut fuer ostwissenschaftliche und internationale Studien in Bonn (March, 1980) should prove invaluable to serious commentators on Eurasian political relations. While certain of its studies would have benefitted from Draconian editorial excisions, the volume as a whole is solid testimony to the continued capability of German scholarship to produce informed and informative materials on short notice, even when restricting itself to previously published sources. A self-denying exclusion of Chinese, Indian, Islamic, and Japanese sources, however, manifests unusual fidelity to the Euroopean Ordnung in a putatively postcolonial world.
Hans Braker's essay depicts the growing economic investment of the Soviets in Afghanistan's natural reserves in the context of regional re-Islamicization. In his view, the Soviet Union had become partially dependent on imported fuels from Iran and Afghanistan. Although Soviet military intervention was the logical consequence of long-term economic penetration, the Islamic Great Awakening has transformed the northern frontier of the Soviet Asian republics into the "front" for a North-South clash of Weltanschauungen. Gerd Linde exposes the multinational character of the old Afghan monarchy (1747-1973), the disputed nature of the Durand Line (1893) between the mountain kingdom and British India, and the evolution of Soviet foreign policy from the presentation of Afghanistan to the world as a model of peaceful coexistence to the military missions in 1979 of Generals Epishev and Pavlovskii. Gerhard Simon ventures a sophisticated analysis of the innner psychological components of Russian expansionism. He locates its dynamic source in an inferiority complex that has grasped historically at colonial expansion as a compensation for internal weaknesses. Analyzing the functional role of various Soviet administrative mechanisms, Astrid von Borcke finds the leitmotif of Kremlin consensus to be "muddling through." Brezhnev's successor will have to continue to appease vested interests, for "Die Alternative zu einer solchen Moeglichkeit waere eine wachsende Macht der Apparate, speziell der Militaers and womoeglich der Sicherheitsorgane: am Ende dieses Weges koennte damit eine Form von Militarisierung des Parteiregimes stehen...(The alternative to such a possibility would be the growing power of the Apparat, especially that of the military and possibly the secret police: this road could eventually lead to a form of militarization of party rule..." (p. 160)
In a sometimes painfully scholastic piece, Helmut Dahm analyzes a new (1975) Soviet military category, the "civil war of liberation" (grazhdanskaia osvoboditel'naia voina). While opposing interstate conflict, Soviet strategy now accepts the possibility of military intervention in civil wars in support of the proletariat. Soviet strategy for the Third World is presented as a Leninist Compelle intrare, ut impleature domus with no trace of an inferiority complex. Gerhard Wettig suggests that the Carter Administration so consistently rebuffed the Soviets that the leadership felt it had little to lose in denying Afghanistan to an encirclement of potential enemies and thereby miscalculated both Afghan military resistance and Third World reactions. Responses among the Warsaw Pact countries were mixed, Christian Meier reports: reactions ranged from dutiful assent (Bulgaria, East Germany and Czechoslovakia), obligatory noises (Hungary), limited support (Poland) and dissociation (Romania). Further, abridgment of Western trade and credits negatively affects East European efforts at economic modernization, which constituted a major justification for detente. With unusual cogency, Heinz Timmermann advocates that Western Europe pursue toward the Third World a "total strategy" of cultural support and economic aid that would complement American efforts while maintaining,if I may suggest, Europe's pretensions to a mission civilatrice.
Simply outstanding on the inner party history of the Democratic People's Party of Afghanistan is Wolfgang Berner's "Der Kampf um Kabul," which discovers in the "Khalq" faction a vehicle for Pashtun nationalism, in the multinational "Parcham" a taint from its former collaboration with the previous Daud regime, and in both factions a political chastity questionable enough to have led to their neglect by Soviet media for over a decade prior to the coup of April 1979. Whether military intervention may serve as a paradigm of Soviet strategy, as Heiinrich Vogel suggests in his introduction, remains problematic. Perhaps the key will be found in New Delhi.
--Slavic Review, vol 41, No. 4
(Winter, 1982), pp. 720-21.
.
This hefty chrestomathy of research studies collected by the Bundesinstitut fuer ostwissenschaftliche und internationale Studien in Bonn (March, 1980) should prove invaluable to serious commentators on Eurasian political relations. While certain of its studies would have benefitted from Draconian editorial excisions, the volume as a whole is solid testimony to the continued capability of German scholarship to produce informed and informative materials on short notice, even when restricting itself to previously published sources. A self-denying exclusion of Chinese, Indian, Islamic, and Japanese sources, however, manifests unusual fidelity to the Euroopean Ordnung in a putatively postcolonial world.
Hans Braker's essay depicts the growing economic investment of the Soviets in Afghanistan's natural reserves in the context of regional re-Islamicization. In his view, the Soviet Union had become partially dependent on imported fuels from Iran and Afghanistan. Although Soviet military intervention was the logical consequence of long-term economic penetration, the Islamic Great Awakening has transformed the northern frontier of the Soviet Asian republics into the "front" for a North-South clash of Weltanschauungen. Gerd Linde exposes the multinational character of the old Afghan monarchy (1747-1973), the disputed nature of the Durand Line (1893) between the mountain kingdom and British India, and the evolution of Soviet foreign policy from the presentation of Afghanistan to the world as a model of peaceful coexistence to the military missions in 1979 of Generals Epishev and Pavlovskii. Gerhard Simon ventures a sophisticated analysis of the innner psychological components of Russian expansionism. He locates its dynamic source in an inferiority complex that has grasped historically at colonial expansion as a compensation for internal weaknesses. Analyzing the functional role of various Soviet administrative mechanisms, Astrid von Borcke finds the leitmotif of Kremlin consensus to be "muddling through." Brezhnev's successor will have to continue to appease vested interests, for "Die Alternative zu einer solchen Moeglichkeit waere eine wachsende Macht der Apparate, speziell der Militaers and womoeglich der Sicherheitsorgane: am Ende dieses Weges koennte damit eine Form von Militarisierung des Parteiregimes stehen...(The alternative to such a possibility would be the growing power of the Apparat, especially that of the military and possibly the secret police: this road could eventually lead to a form of militarization of party rule..." (p. 160)
In a sometimes painfully scholastic piece, Helmut Dahm analyzes a new (1975) Soviet military category, the "civil war of liberation" (grazhdanskaia osvoboditel'naia voina). While opposing interstate conflict, Soviet strategy now accepts the possibility of military intervention in civil wars in support of the proletariat. Soviet strategy for the Third World is presented as a Leninist Compelle intrare, ut impleature domus with no trace of an inferiority complex. Gerhard Wettig suggests that the Carter Administration so consistently rebuffed the Soviets that the leadership felt it had little to lose in denying Afghanistan to an encirclement of potential enemies and thereby miscalculated both Afghan military resistance and Third World reactions. Responses among the Warsaw Pact countries were mixed, Christian Meier reports: reactions ranged from dutiful assent (Bulgaria, East Germany and Czechoslovakia), obligatory noises (Hungary), limited support (Poland) and dissociation (Romania). Further, abridgment of Western trade and credits negatively affects East European efforts at economic modernization, which constituted a major justification for detente. With unusual cogency, Heinz Timmermann advocates that Western Europe pursue toward the Third World a "total strategy" of cultural support and economic aid that would complement American efforts while maintaining,if I may suggest, Europe's pretensions to a mission civilatrice.
Simply outstanding on the inner party history of the Democratic People's Party of Afghanistan is Wolfgang Berner's "Der Kampf um Kabul," which discovers in the "Khalq" faction a vehicle for Pashtun nationalism, in the multinational "Parcham" a taint from its former collaboration with the previous Daud regime, and in both factions a political chastity questionable enough to have led to their neglect by Soviet media for over a decade prior to the coup of April 1979. Whether military intervention may serve as a paradigm of Soviet strategy, as Heiinrich Vogel suggests in his introduction, remains problematic. Perhaps the key will be found in New Delhi.
--Slavic Review, vol 41, No. 4
(Winter, 1982), pp. 720-21.
.
Friday, August 22, 2008
Hasain Haqqani, Pakistan: Between Mosque and Military. Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, c. 2005
Book Review (Spring, 2007)
This volume by Professor Haqqani purports to represent an independent study of the changing role of Islamic ideology from the partition of India in 1947 until Pakistan's ambiguous participation in the Bush administration's so-called "war on terror." Haqqani sketches the religious affiliation of the Muslim League, headed by Mohammad Ali Jinnah, describes the evolution of the Muslim faithinto the unifying ideology of the Islamic state, and the subsequent redirection of that faith into various jihadi movements opposed to the Soviet occupationof Afghanistan and secularist (but majority Hindu) India. He concludes that the state should be sundered from Islam, with state power transferred (at US behest) from the existing military-political apparatus to secular political leadership expressed in the English-based parliamentary form favored by trans-national corporations. If the leit-motif of the Pakistani military leadership be correct, that only militant Islamic ideology is strong enough to cement a political superstructure constricting the Sindi and Baluchi nationalities under the boot of a Punjabi military clique, Haqqani's recommendation might be read as recommending the dissolution of the Pakistani state into its component nationalities prior to the reintegration of the disparate nationalities into the neighboring Indian state structure. One may speculate that while such a scenario might gratify Israeli strategic planners, invariably hostile to the prospect of an Islamic state disposing of nuclear capabilities, one might legitimately inquire if such an outcome would be met with unalloyed joy at the Red Fort in Delhi. For as events (not wholly planned) have transpired, both Pakistan and Bangladesh function as Muslim buffer states protecting the Hindu core of the sub-continent from both the reverberating echoes of the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq, to the west, and the readily predictable conflicts between Muslim majorities and Chinese minorities in the east. It would represent very questionable strategy to eradicate the Pakistani state mechanism in order to import its constituent Muslim nationalities into India proper, transferring thereby manageable external tensions into uncontrollable internal uprisings. Pakistan's mililtary cooperation with the PRC is well documented, although not in the present work. To suggest as a remedy for the perceived ills of an incompletely commercialized pseudo-democracy, that the country should be transfered in the Pentagon's inventory from Central Command to Pacific Command, is puerile.
Some characteristic deficiencies in this essay in haut vulgurisation are apparent from the first pages, where no foreign diplomatic comment on the 1947 partition are cited, where M.K. Ghandi's opposition to partition is ignored, and when all the secondary sources cited are in the English tongue. Throughout the text, where the argument appears to call for a summation or original conclusion, the author repeatedly eschews a scholar's responsibility to assert an independent judgment by quailing behind a secondary citation. On occasion, a quotation is introduced, being distingiuished neither by originality of thought nor uniquely expressive phraseology. It is striking that the Washington practice of utilizing Islamabad as a "back channel" to Beijing began with Kissinger and Nixon, who apparently never conceived that the Pakistani elite might exploit that same channel to achieve common Eurasian goals, preeminently to constrain and expel American military force structures from the Asian continent. (One may speculate that Dr. A. Q. Khan's nuclear network represented a Streik in this shared strategic vision.) In ultra-nationalist circles, such a policy might be advocated as a justified "pay-back" for Washington's refusal to intervene against the secession of East Pakistan in 1971. This climate of opinion no doubt assisted General Zia-ul-Huq's support of a militant jihadist ideology among the officer caste, and his reinforced emphasis on defining Pakistan as an Islamic state.
The movement away from a secular state toward an ultra-nationalistic military regime was assisted (however involuntarily) by the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. The former civilian prime minister, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, was accused of a plot (apparently fictitious) to murder an opponent, and was executed in April, 1979. In effect, Bhutto was made the sacrificial lamb whose death would expunge the army's guilt for its inability to prevent the secession of East Pakistan. Further, he had angered American financial circles by nationaliing the banking industry as well as several industrial sectors. Bhutto accused the Americans of orchestrating popular demonstrations ("rent-a-mob") against his government. The actions of the President-General did not inhibit the Washington regime from increasing its flow of military aid to Islamabad, as the Zia cllique exploited the usual anti-socialist reflexes that dominate American corporate boardrooms. The Inter-Service Intelligence (ISI) funnelled some two billions of dollars (allegedly) to Islamic resistence elements in Afghanistan, later familiar as the "mujhadeen."
Haqqani correctly points out that Zia's Islamization initiative accentuated sectarian differences within the multi-national state. Regrettably, he remains silent on the multi-ethnic nature of the Pakistani state, preferring to accentuate a speculative rivalry between the Saudi-inspired Wahabbites and Iranian Shi'ites for influence within the administrative apparatus. The author's tendency in this Manichean interpretation appears to follow M.N. Pokrovsky's dictum, that history is current politics reflected back on to the past. In the end, it was the 1983 riots in Sindh, and reaction against burgeoning Islamization, which presaged mounting resistence to Zia's government before his death in a mysterious aircraft accident in August, 1988. The alliance between mosque and military (the author's favorite thesis) generated a profitable collusion between a clique of nationalist military officers and selected mosques in the Punjab, but which was incapable of prevailing in Baluchistan or Sindh.
Insecure at home, with an insufficient power base in the Punjab, the Pakistani officer caste attempted to compensate for its domestic weakness by sponsoring local jihadis in Afghanistan to contest the Soviet occupation. Afghanistan had never accepted the British-imposed Durand Line of 1893 as a permanent boundary. Indeed, in 1947-48, Kabul was even reluctant to acknowledge Pakistan's "right to exist." The Afghan leadership demanded an independent Pashtunistan. The Pakistani generals portrayed themselves as a bulwark against Communism , leaving arch-enemy India aside, temporarily, possibly for financial motives. In Kabul the new prime minister, Mohammad Daud, welcomed Russian financial assistance. An uprising in Baluchistan occurred from 1971 to 1975. In Kabul, Daud overthrew King Zafir Shah, signed 70 development projects with Moscow, and supported the Baluchistan rebellion with money and small arms. En revanche, the Pakistani officers supported Afghan insurgents against Daud and his Soviet advisors. In effect, a low-level proxy was conducted between the two regimes from 1973 to 1977, which Pentagon and Wall Street strategists viewed as an opportunity to support a "community of faith" against the radical social extremists of "atheistic Communism," whose Pakistani fellow-travellers might imitate by nationalizing the banking industry once again. After Daud was overthrown by military officers and replaced by the more moderate Taraki, the Washington-Wall Street combination remained cold to Islamabad's requests for more financial aid. But when the Shah of Iran was exiled by an Islamic-oriented popular rising, Washington and Islamabad revived their symbiotic relationship at the intelligence agency level. Some Washington war-gamers even argued that Moscow's aims (in Kabul!) were to control the Persian Gulf. In 1988, 1,000,000 Afghan refugees had fled into Pakistan. And mujahadeen volunteers trekked to Pakistan to take up the struggle against the pro-Russian occupation regime in Kabul. Two years after the United States began supplying the mujahadeen with surface-to-air missiles, General Zia entered an agreement under which Soviet forces were withdrawn from Afghanistan. A half-year later, he was dead, but the officer caste and the ISI did not abandon the jihad strategy. They continued to support militant Islamists in Afghanistan, while pursuing a nuclear weapons program behind a civilian facade provided by Benazir Bhutto. She became a "tolerated prime minister" in order to facilitate the continued delivery of American funds to the Pakistani military. At the ISI, General Beg believed that a nuclear weapons capability represented a strategic asset and that the Americans would not abandon--much less attack!--a nuclear-armed Pakistan. He was correct. Bhutto became prime minister in December, 1988, but was immediately weakened by economic rivalries between Punjabi industrialists and the central governing apparatus. Religious disorders that followed the publication of S. Rushdi's Satanic Verses further eroded support for the Harvard graduate, and she was dismissed in August, 1990. The author does not presume to adduce his own conclusions as to the proximate cause, preferring instead the prudential path of hiding behind a quotation (pp. 209-10). It could conceivably represent a military reaction to the meeting between Bhutto and Rajiv Gandhi in December, 1988, in the context of which the American ambassador, Robert Oakley, advocated a soft-pedalling of the jihad strategy. But this State Department policy was to be short-lived. Bhutto was dismissed on August 6, Hiroshima Day, four days after Iraq invaded Kuwait, allegedly as punishment for slant-drilling under the border to extract Iraqi oil. A shared officer caste gambit was initiated to unite the American and Pakistani militaries in manufacturing an Islamic (jihadi) front against the secular Ba'athist regime of the late Saddam Hussein. (Haqqani ludicrously avers that the United States was "distracted.")
Two years later the ISI accused the Bhuttos of being linked too closely to the purported "Indo-Zionist lobby" in Washington, and of "selling out" Pakistan's nuclear program. The new prime minister, Narvaz Sharif, genuflected dutifully before the idols of the barracks, promising to achieve nuclear status at all costs, and to liberate Kashmir into the bargain. But privately he broached the concept (Israel-Indian inspired?) of abandoning Islamabad's nuclear program in exchange for the cancellation of Pakistan's international debt. These ballons d'essai brought him into contradiction with the powerful ISI, whch continued to press for an Islamist government in Afghanistan and which now initiated guerilla operations in Kashmir. Sharif was dismissed after a confused imbroglio, and Benazir Bhutto was returned to office as prime minister in 1993.
More prudently than her late parent, she now advocated a restricted privitazation of the state sector, which advocacy generated a new inflow of foreign capital. As previously, however, she came in conflict with regional nationalism in Sindh, where rioters in Karachi attempted to expel Muslim migrants ("illegal emigrants") from India. The government closed the Indian consulate in Karachi. Matters worsened when her brother was killed by police as a terrorist in September, 1996. Pakistani support for Muslim insurgents in Kashmir spiked as the civilian camerilla arouond Bhutto sought to appease the officer caste's Islamist ideology, partly because of apprehension that the ISI would remove them, following established precedent. Bhuto was slowly pressured into supporting the Taliban in Afghanistan, but to no avail. The president, with Army backing, removed her from office a second time, a demarche accompanied with the usual allegations of corruption.
In an election characterized by strikingly low voter participation, Nawiz Sharif was returned as prime minister in 1997. But when the Chief Justice was deposed by his associate justices, Sharif was implicated in the public mind . He was accused of two transgressions: being too authoritarian, and favoring iimproved relations with India, the officer caste's bete noir. Nevertheless, when India tested nuclear weaponry in May, 1997, Sharif resisted US president Clinton's appeals for procrastination. He ordered the detonation of five atomic bombs. In public he asserted, perhaps credibly, that these tests were necessary to foil an alleged Indo-Israeli strategic plan to bomb Pakistan's research facilities.
Further , he prudently froze $11.8 billion of foreign currency held privately, to forfend a manipulated capital flight, while acceptioning financial support in petrodollars from affluent Arab (i.e., Muslim) governments. But in a fatally flawed judgment, he appointed General Perez Musharraf as army commander. Musharraf promptly executed the officer caste's ideology by launching an incursion into Indian-controlled Kashmir at Kargil. This destabilizing action propted public condemnation by an ad hoc alignment of China, India and the United States. Apprehensive that he would be relieved, Musharraf embarked on a public relations tour of military garrisons to enlist support, and overthrew the prime minister in October. Although some constitutionalist circles wrung a promise from him that he would resign his post as army commander at the end of 2004, he honored his commitment with the same fidelity he had previously shown his prime minister. He didn't.
Once again, the military declared its unfaltering allegience to two overriding strategic principles: the acquisition of nuclear weapons status, and the recovery of sundered Kashmir (irredentism). During Gulf War I, the Jamaat-e-Islami party argued, correctly, that the introduction of Amrican troops into Kuwait and Iraq would impant American imperialism into the center of the Muslim heartland. They were only wrong by a few years. General Beg asserted that the Gulf War represented implementatin of Israel's strategy of asserting regional predominance (by proxy), and was promptly retired for voicing an "inconvenient truth." Musharraf soft-pedalled his former aspirations in Kashmir in favor of the Bush's proclaimed "war on terror" (sloganeering) and switched his sights tohis troublemsome, but infinitely northern neighbor, Afghanistan. In this endeavor General Beg's succesors represented their jihad to the so-called "international community" of financial interests as pro-Western (after expelling the British), pro-democratic (after a military Putsch) and pro-American (rekindling a Cold War reflex). The Pakistani mililtary remained warmly engaged with the American Central Command generals residing in the sunny sea-side resort city of Tampa, Florida , administered by the president's brother, Jeb Bush. But although the ISI assisted jihadis to enter Kashmir, this reviewer must dissent from Haqqani's assertion that Kashmir became "...linked with the global jihad of the Islamists" (p. 288) and "...the Pakistani military's decision to make Kashmir an arena for global jihad" (p. 289). Israelis may assert this, but it is a phantasm. The very cold-minded strategists of ISI are making use of a specific distorted tendency in Islam exclusively for the advancement of Pakistan's state interests, as they conceive them. Globalization barely registers on their bureaucratic radar. The ISI , for example, did not mastermind the Madrid train bombings. They have not adopted the cult of the Caliphate, as put forward by Osama bin Laden. It is not the Japanese Red Army Faction, attacking an Israeli airport. Association is not subordination.
Recognizing this actuality, the American government continued to support the jihadi movement, furthered by ISI chief General J. Nasir, for a full year after Soviet troops left Afghanistan. Ignoring military cooperation, howevr, Secretary of State James Baker III warned that the first of the Bush dynasty might designate Islamabad as a "state sponsor of terrorism." General Nasir again fingered the "Indo-Zionist lobby" in Washijgton as the motivating force behind this threat. Some two months after the Bombay Stock Exchange (not Jerusalem) suffered a terrorist bomb blast, American pressure forced the resignation of General Nasir. In one stroke this this action simultaneously demonstrated the strength of the "Israel-Indian lobby," and disproved the author's contention that Pakistan had become a fully militarized society. (p. 300) Regardless, it has been estimated that some eighteen factional organizations dedicated to the "Kashnmir cause" were operating on Pakistani soil. In 2001, India again pressured Washington to declare Pakistan a "terrorist state." Unwilling or unable to reverse the officer caste's dedication to jihadi principles, Musharraf obfuscated. Professor Haqqani avers that jihadi movements directed against either Afghanistan or India can recur at any time, apparently inclining towards the Weltanschauung of Professor Alan Dershowitz at Harvard Law School, that Pakistan is a "ticking time bomb" of Islamic militancy. If so, this would not make it unique among the Muslim states encompassed by Israel's expanding security perimeter serving the axis of interest between the synagogue and the IDF.
In his somewhat stumbling conclusion, Professor Haqqani argues that Pakistan has become increasingly dysfunctional in the last two decades, that the Pakistanis (ignoring internal national differences) are not crusaders, and that the strengthening alliance between mosque and military has heightened their sense of insecurity. He himself advocates a crusade of conventional shibboleths such as "democratic reforms" and "investment in education" to cut the nuclear Gordian knot of faith and force with...the wand of a power-point projector! The ruling military clique will not be impressed. Musharraf's manipulations provide a perfect camoflague for extracting more petrodollars from the pampered mini-states of the Persian Gulf. Someone, after all, has to pay for those Chinese fighter jets on order from Beijing.
The Anglo-Israeli-American assault on Iraq may prove, after all, to be an extensive but temporary catastrophe (Nakba), for the House of Islam will always be there. Consider the raw figures: from 1954-2000, Washington doled out a penurious $13 billion in predominantly military aid to Pakistan, while constrained by New York financial interests to disburse, from 1948-2006, some $93 billion to the Jewish enclave in The Levant. It would make an piquant study in opportunity costs to conduct a "thought experiment" to estimate how effective the same sum would have been, if invested in improving Mexico, obviating unnecessary border tensions.
The bald assertion that American financial aid has exacerbated administrative disfunction and accentuated structural flaws seems extraordinarily uninformed when one regards the Middle East as a regional theatre of operations. Why has not Israel collapsed under the boot of the "almighty dollar?" The author is apparently on course to recommend yet another fashionable "regime change" in Pakistan. To extropolate from the demonstrated American record from Vietnam to Haiti to Iraq, another regime change du jour could only work to the detriment of both states. It is as impossible to remove Islamic coloration from Pakistni politics as it would be to enforce it on Peoria. Brezhnev and Trotsky both discovered it is impossible to export the socio-political structure of one linguistic-ethnic group on another by bayonets and tanks. Lyndon Johnson learned the same hard lesson, as did the prestigious politicos of the Fourth French Republic. Olmert cannot cope with Hezbollah, or the gathering accusations of corruption. Professor Haqqani's tediously crafted and lumbering scholarly bomber is attempting a perilous cross-wind landing at Chelabi International Airport servicing a political Disneyland.
This volume by Professor Haqqani purports to represent an independent study of the changing role of Islamic ideology from the partition of India in 1947 until Pakistan's ambiguous participation in the Bush administration's so-called "war on terror." Haqqani sketches the religious affiliation of the Muslim League, headed by Mohammad Ali Jinnah, describes the evolution of the Muslim faithinto the unifying ideology of the Islamic state, and the subsequent redirection of that faith into various jihadi movements opposed to the Soviet occupationof Afghanistan and secularist (but majority Hindu) India. He concludes that the state should be sundered from Islam, with state power transferred (at US behest) from the existing military-political apparatus to secular political leadership expressed in the English-based parliamentary form favored by trans-national corporations. If the leit-motif of the Pakistani military leadership be correct, that only militant Islamic ideology is strong enough to cement a political superstructure constricting the Sindi and Baluchi nationalities under the boot of a Punjabi military clique, Haqqani's recommendation might be read as recommending the dissolution of the Pakistani state into its component nationalities prior to the reintegration of the disparate nationalities into the neighboring Indian state structure. One may speculate that while such a scenario might gratify Israeli strategic planners, invariably hostile to the prospect of an Islamic state disposing of nuclear capabilities, one might legitimately inquire if such an outcome would be met with unalloyed joy at the Red Fort in Delhi. For as events (not wholly planned) have transpired, both Pakistan and Bangladesh function as Muslim buffer states protecting the Hindu core of the sub-continent from both the reverberating echoes of the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq, to the west, and the readily predictable conflicts between Muslim majorities and Chinese minorities in the east. It would represent very questionable strategy to eradicate the Pakistani state mechanism in order to import its constituent Muslim nationalities into India proper, transferring thereby manageable external tensions into uncontrollable internal uprisings. Pakistan's mililtary cooperation with the PRC is well documented, although not in the present work. To suggest as a remedy for the perceived ills of an incompletely commercialized pseudo-democracy, that the country should be transfered in the Pentagon's inventory from Central Command to Pacific Command, is puerile.
Some characteristic deficiencies in this essay in haut vulgurisation are apparent from the first pages, where no foreign diplomatic comment on the 1947 partition are cited, where M.K. Ghandi's opposition to partition is ignored, and when all the secondary sources cited are in the English tongue. Throughout the text, where the argument appears to call for a summation or original conclusion, the author repeatedly eschews a scholar's responsibility to assert an independent judgment by quailing behind a secondary citation. On occasion, a quotation is introduced, being distingiuished neither by originality of thought nor uniquely expressive phraseology. It is striking that the Washington practice of utilizing Islamabad as a "back channel" to Beijing began with Kissinger and Nixon, who apparently never conceived that the Pakistani elite might exploit that same channel to achieve common Eurasian goals, preeminently to constrain and expel American military force structures from the Asian continent. (One may speculate that Dr. A. Q. Khan's nuclear network represented a Streik in this shared strategic vision.) In ultra-nationalist circles, such a policy might be advocated as a justified "pay-back" for Washington's refusal to intervene against the secession of East Pakistan in 1971. This climate of opinion no doubt assisted General Zia-ul-Huq's support of a militant jihadist ideology among the officer caste, and his reinforced emphasis on defining Pakistan as an Islamic state.
The movement away from a secular state toward an ultra-nationalistic military regime was assisted (however involuntarily) by the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. The former civilian prime minister, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, was accused of a plot (apparently fictitious) to murder an opponent, and was executed in April, 1979. In effect, Bhutto was made the sacrificial lamb whose death would expunge the army's guilt for its inability to prevent the secession of East Pakistan. Further, he had angered American financial circles by nationaliing the banking industry as well as several industrial sectors. Bhutto accused the Americans of orchestrating popular demonstrations ("rent-a-mob") against his government. The actions of the President-General did not inhibit the Washington regime from increasing its flow of military aid to Islamabad, as the Zia cllique exploited the usual anti-socialist reflexes that dominate American corporate boardrooms. The Inter-Service Intelligence (ISI) funnelled some two billions of dollars (allegedly) to Islamic resistence elements in Afghanistan, later familiar as the "mujhadeen."
Haqqani correctly points out that Zia's Islamization initiative accentuated sectarian differences within the multi-national state. Regrettably, he remains silent on the multi-ethnic nature of the Pakistani state, preferring to accentuate a speculative rivalry between the Saudi-inspired Wahabbites and Iranian Shi'ites for influence within the administrative apparatus. The author's tendency in this Manichean interpretation appears to follow M.N. Pokrovsky's dictum, that history is current politics reflected back on to the past. In the end, it was the 1983 riots in Sindh, and reaction against burgeoning Islamization, which presaged mounting resistence to Zia's government before his death in a mysterious aircraft accident in August, 1988. The alliance between mosque and military (the author's favorite thesis) generated a profitable collusion between a clique of nationalist military officers and selected mosques in the Punjab, but which was incapable of prevailing in Baluchistan or Sindh.
Insecure at home, with an insufficient power base in the Punjab, the Pakistani officer caste attempted to compensate for its domestic weakness by sponsoring local jihadis in Afghanistan to contest the Soviet occupation. Afghanistan had never accepted the British-imposed Durand Line of 1893 as a permanent boundary. Indeed, in 1947-48, Kabul was even reluctant to acknowledge Pakistan's "right to exist." The Afghan leadership demanded an independent Pashtunistan. The Pakistani generals portrayed themselves as a bulwark against Communism , leaving arch-enemy India aside, temporarily, possibly for financial motives. In Kabul the new prime minister, Mohammad Daud, welcomed Russian financial assistance. An uprising in Baluchistan occurred from 1971 to 1975. In Kabul, Daud overthrew King Zafir Shah, signed 70 development projects with Moscow, and supported the Baluchistan rebellion with money and small arms. En revanche, the Pakistani officers supported Afghan insurgents against Daud and his Soviet advisors. In effect, a low-level proxy was conducted between the two regimes from 1973 to 1977, which Pentagon and Wall Street strategists viewed as an opportunity to support a "community of faith" against the radical social extremists of "atheistic Communism," whose Pakistani fellow-travellers might imitate by nationalizing the banking industry once again. After Daud was overthrown by military officers and replaced by the more moderate Taraki, the Washington-Wall Street combination remained cold to Islamabad's requests for more financial aid. But when the Shah of Iran was exiled by an Islamic-oriented popular rising, Washington and Islamabad revived their symbiotic relationship at the intelligence agency level. Some Washington war-gamers even argued that Moscow's aims (in Kabul!) were to control the Persian Gulf. In 1988, 1,000,000 Afghan refugees had fled into Pakistan. And mujahadeen volunteers trekked to Pakistan to take up the struggle against the pro-Russian occupation regime in Kabul. Two years after the United States began supplying the mujahadeen with surface-to-air missiles, General Zia entered an agreement under which Soviet forces were withdrawn from Afghanistan. A half-year later, he was dead, but the officer caste and the ISI did not abandon the jihad strategy. They continued to support militant Islamists in Afghanistan, while pursuing a nuclear weapons program behind a civilian facade provided by Benazir Bhutto. She became a "tolerated prime minister" in order to facilitate the continued delivery of American funds to the Pakistani military. At the ISI, General Beg believed that a nuclear weapons capability represented a strategic asset and that the Americans would not abandon--much less attack!--a nuclear-armed Pakistan. He was correct. Bhutto became prime minister in December, 1988, but was immediately weakened by economic rivalries between Punjabi industrialists and the central governing apparatus. Religious disorders that followed the publication of S. Rushdi's Satanic Verses further eroded support for the Harvard graduate, and she was dismissed in August, 1990. The author does not presume to adduce his own conclusions as to the proximate cause, preferring instead the prudential path of hiding behind a quotation (pp. 209-10). It could conceivably represent a military reaction to the meeting between Bhutto and Rajiv Gandhi in December, 1988, in the context of which the American ambassador, Robert Oakley, advocated a soft-pedalling of the jihad strategy. But this State Department policy was to be short-lived. Bhutto was dismissed on August 6, Hiroshima Day, four days after Iraq invaded Kuwait, allegedly as punishment for slant-drilling under the border to extract Iraqi oil. A shared officer caste gambit was initiated to unite the American and Pakistani militaries in manufacturing an Islamic (jihadi) front against the secular Ba'athist regime of the late Saddam Hussein. (Haqqani ludicrously avers that the United States was "distracted.")
Two years later the ISI accused the Bhuttos of being linked too closely to the purported "Indo-Zionist lobby" in Washington, and of "selling out" Pakistan's nuclear program. The new prime minister, Narvaz Sharif, genuflected dutifully before the idols of the barracks, promising to achieve nuclear status at all costs, and to liberate Kashmir into the bargain. But privately he broached the concept (Israel-Indian inspired?) of abandoning Islamabad's nuclear program in exchange for the cancellation of Pakistan's international debt. These ballons d'essai brought him into contradiction with the powerful ISI, whch continued to press for an Islamist government in Afghanistan and which now initiated guerilla operations in Kashmir. Sharif was dismissed after a confused imbroglio, and Benazir Bhutto was returned to office as prime minister in 1993.
More prudently than her late parent, she now advocated a restricted privitazation of the state sector, which advocacy generated a new inflow of foreign capital. As previously, however, she came in conflict with regional nationalism in Sindh, where rioters in Karachi attempted to expel Muslim migrants ("illegal emigrants") from India. The government closed the Indian consulate in Karachi. Matters worsened when her brother was killed by police as a terrorist in September, 1996. Pakistani support for Muslim insurgents in Kashmir spiked as the civilian camerilla arouond Bhutto sought to appease the officer caste's Islamist ideology, partly because of apprehension that the ISI would remove them, following established precedent. Bhuto was slowly pressured into supporting the Taliban in Afghanistan, but to no avail. The president, with Army backing, removed her from office a second time, a demarche accompanied with the usual allegations of corruption.
In an election characterized by strikingly low voter participation, Nawiz Sharif was returned as prime minister in 1997. But when the Chief Justice was deposed by his associate justices, Sharif was implicated in the public mind . He was accused of two transgressions: being too authoritarian, and favoring iimproved relations with India, the officer caste's bete noir. Nevertheless, when India tested nuclear weaponry in May, 1997, Sharif resisted US president Clinton's appeals for procrastination. He ordered the detonation of five atomic bombs. In public he asserted, perhaps credibly, that these tests were necessary to foil an alleged Indo-Israeli strategic plan to bomb Pakistan's research facilities.
Further , he prudently froze $11.8 billion of foreign currency held privately, to forfend a manipulated capital flight, while acceptioning financial support in petrodollars from affluent Arab (i.e., Muslim) governments. But in a fatally flawed judgment, he appointed General Perez Musharraf as army commander. Musharraf promptly executed the officer caste's ideology by launching an incursion into Indian-controlled Kashmir at Kargil. This destabilizing action propted public condemnation by an ad hoc alignment of China, India and the United States. Apprehensive that he would be relieved, Musharraf embarked on a public relations tour of military garrisons to enlist support, and overthrew the prime minister in October. Although some constitutionalist circles wrung a promise from him that he would resign his post as army commander at the end of 2004, he honored his commitment with the same fidelity he had previously shown his prime minister. He didn't.
Once again, the military declared its unfaltering allegience to two overriding strategic principles: the acquisition of nuclear weapons status, and the recovery of sundered Kashmir (irredentism). During Gulf War I, the Jamaat-e-Islami party argued, correctly, that the introduction of Amrican troops into Kuwait and Iraq would impant American imperialism into the center of the Muslim heartland. They were only wrong by a few years. General Beg asserted that the Gulf War represented implementatin of Israel's strategy of asserting regional predominance (by proxy), and was promptly retired for voicing an "inconvenient truth." Musharraf soft-pedalled his former aspirations in Kashmir in favor of the Bush's proclaimed "war on terror" (sloganeering) and switched his sights tohis troublemsome, but infinitely northern neighbor, Afghanistan. In this endeavor General Beg's succesors represented their jihad to the so-called "international community" of financial interests as pro-Western (after expelling the British), pro-democratic (after a military Putsch) and pro-American (rekindling a Cold War reflex). The Pakistani mililtary remained warmly engaged with the American Central Command generals residing in the sunny sea-side resort city of Tampa, Florida , administered by the president's brother, Jeb Bush. But although the ISI assisted jihadis to enter Kashmir, this reviewer must dissent from Haqqani's assertion that Kashmir became "...linked with the global jihad of the Islamists" (p. 288) and "...the Pakistani military's decision to make Kashmir an arena for global jihad" (p. 289). Israelis may assert this, but it is a phantasm. The very cold-minded strategists of ISI are making use of a specific distorted tendency in Islam exclusively for the advancement of Pakistan's state interests, as they conceive them. Globalization barely registers on their bureaucratic radar. The ISI , for example, did not mastermind the Madrid train bombings. They have not adopted the cult of the Caliphate, as put forward by Osama bin Laden. It is not the Japanese Red Army Faction, attacking an Israeli airport. Association is not subordination.
Recognizing this actuality, the American government continued to support the jihadi movement, furthered by ISI chief General J. Nasir, for a full year after Soviet troops left Afghanistan. Ignoring military cooperation, howevr, Secretary of State James Baker III warned that the first of the Bush dynasty might designate Islamabad as a "state sponsor of terrorism." General Nasir again fingered the "Indo-Zionist lobby" in Washijgton as the motivating force behind this threat. Some two months after the Bombay Stock Exchange (not Jerusalem) suffered a terrorist bomb blast, American pressure forced the resignation of General Nasir. In one stroke this this action simultaneously demonstrated the strength of the "Israel-Indian lobby," and disproved the author's contention that Pakistan had become a fully militarized society. (p. 300) Regardless, it has been estimated that some eighteen factional organizations dedicated to the "Kashnmir cause" were operating on Pakistani soil. In 2001, India again pressured Washington to declare Pakistan a "terrorist state." Unwilling or unable to reverse the officer caste's dedication to jihadi principles, Musharraf obfuscated. Professor Haqqani avers that jihadi movements directed against either Afghanistan or India can recur at any time, apparently inclining towards the Weltanschauung of Professor Alan Dershowitz at Harvard Law School, that Pakistan is a "ticking time bomb" of Islamic militancy. If so, this would not make it unique among the Muslim states encompassed by Israel's expanding security perimeter serving the axis of interest between the synagogue and the IDF.
In his somewhat stumbling conclusion, Professor Haqqani argues that Pakistan has become increasingly dysfunctional in the last two decades, that the Pakistanis (ignoring internal national differences) are not crusaders, and that the strengthening alliance between mosque and military has heightened their sense of insecurity. He himself advocates a crusade of conventional shibboleths such as "democratic reforms" and "investment in education" to cut the nuclear Gordian knot of faith and force with...the wand of a power-point projector! The ruling military clique will not be impressed. Musharraf's manipulations provide a perfect camoflague for extracting more petrodollars from the pampered mini-states of the Persian Gulf. Someone, after all, has to pay for those Chinese fighter jets on order from Beijing.
The Anglo-Israeli-American assault on Iraq may prove, after all, to be an extensive but temporary catastrophe (Nakba), for the House of Islam will always be there. Consider the raw figures: from 1954-2000, Washington doled out a penurious $13 billion in predominantly military aid to Pakistan, while constrained by New York financial interests to disburse, from 1948-2006, some $93 billion to the Jewish enclave in The Levant. It would make an piquant study in opportunity costs to conduct a "thought experiment" to estimate how effective the same sum would have been, if invested in improving Mexico, obviating unnecessary border tensions.
The bald assertion that American financial aid has exacerbated administrative disfunction and accentuated structural flaws seems extraordinarily uninformed when one regards the Middle East as a regional theatre of operations. Why has not Israel collapsed under the boot of the "almighty dollar?" The author is apparently on course to recommend yet another fashionable "regime change" in Pakistan. To extropolate from the demonstrated American record from Vietnam to Haiti to Iraq, another regime change du jour could only work to the detriment of both states. It is as impossible to remove Islamic coloration from Pakistni politics as it would be to enforce it on Peoria. Brezhnev and Trotsky both discovered it is impossible to export the socio-political structure of one linguistic-ethnic group on another by bayonets and tanks. Lyndon Johnson learned the same hard lesson, as did the prestigious politicos of the Fourth French Republic. Olmert cannot cope with Hezbollah, or the gathering accusations of corruption. Professor Haqqani's tediously crafted and lumbering scholarly bomber is attempting a perilous cross-wind landing at Chelabi International Airport servicing a political Disneyland.
"The Trouble with Islam," by Tawfik Hamid,04/03/07
(This column of opinion appeared in the Wall Street Journal on April 3, 2007. )
In initiating this "thought piece" with the rhetorical query, "What went wrong?", the writer cited the "brilliant Orientalist Bernard Lewis," well-known as a virulent Zionist propagandist. This is the first thing that "goes wrong" in his column for the pro-globalization Wall Street Journal, published from Mayor Bloomberg's trans-Atlantic financial base. It is soon disclosed, mirabile dictu, that the author has labored in the Islamic vineyard for twenty years (his count) to channel a pacifist current, or better, streamlet, within the House of Islam. Next, after agreeing with the "politically correct" argument that terrorism is correctly interpreted as a symptom, and not the cause, of unrestrained conflict, Mr. Hamid paradoxically asserts that the same Western "progressives" accompany Islamist radicals along the path to the next bloody barbarity with enthusiastic cries of "Hallelulah!" and "Hosannah!"In a word, they are fellow-travellers with practicioners of insensate murder. Queerly, he excuses Israel's catastrophic impact on the Muslim world as having no influence to create a model for Islamic (as distinguished from Zionist) radicals to emulate. The author's fallacious accusation that Western intellectuals restrict themselves to "self-criticism" represents a rebirth (or eternal return) of the opprobious practice of insinuating that opponents of the Hamid-Lewis axis of distortion are Reds.
From the distorted description of anti-Muslim demonstrations in Spain and Denmark, it is apparent the author desires to propagate the illusion the public opinion on the Continent is dominated by fear of Islam. His assertions are directly contradicted by observed reality. Mr. Hamid is a fugitive from his home culture who perhaps presumes to emulate the role of the notorious Iraqui exile, Mr. Achmed Chalibi. The columnist rushes impetuously forward to provide further evidence when he asserts that "interfaith dialogues with Muslims have largely been fruitless," ignoring the existence of Christian support for the Palestinians in organizations such as SABEEL, the charitable labors of ANEER, and the visit of Pope John Paul II to the mosque in Damascus, Syria. It is scarcely necessary to recall the cooperation of many decades between the Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, into which the Israeli authorities have long pressured to insinuate thier own organization, symbolized by a resplendent diamond.
In sum, Mr. Hamid's slanted column of opinion, reeking of neo-con radicalism and Likhud Party extremism, constitutes an atrocity against objectivity. It cannot be accidental that his propagandistic eruption appears while House Speaker Pelosi is en route to Damascus. If Mr. Hamid has undergone a conversion experience leading him to renounce Islam in favor of the Weltanschauung of the late general Ariel Sharon, he should at least dispose of the courage to confess his apostasy.
--Isaac D'Israeli
In initiating this "thought piece" with the rhetorical query, "What went wrong?", the writer cited the "brilliant Orientalist Bernard Lewis," well-known as a virulent Zionist propagandist. This is the first thing that "goes wrong" in his column for the pro-globalization Wall Street Journal, published from Mayor Bloomberg's trans-Atlantic financial base. It is soon disclosed, mirabile dictu, that the author has labored in the Islamic vineyard for twenty years (his count) to channel a pacifist current, or better, streamlet, within the House of Islam. Next, after agreeing with the "politically correct" argument that terrorism is correctly interpreted as a symptom, and not the cause, of unrestrained conflict, Mr. Hamid paradoxically asserts that the same Western "progressives" accompany Islamist radicals along the path to the next bloody barbarity with enthusiastic cries of "Hallelulah!" and "Hosannah!"In a word, they are fellow-travellers with practicioners of insensate murder. Queerly, he excuses Israel's catastrophic impact on the Muslim world as having no influence to create a model for Islamic (as distinguished from Zionist) radicals to emulate. The author's fallacious accusation that Western intellectuals restrict themselves to "self-criticism" represents a rebirth (or eternal return) of the opprobious practice of insinuating that opponents of the Hamid-Lewis axis of distortion are Reds.
From the distorted description of anti-Muslim demonstrations in Spain and Denmark, it is apparent the author desires to propagate the illusion the public opinion on the Continent is dominated by fear of Islam. His assertions are directly contradicted by observed reality. Mr. Hamid is a fugitive from his home culture who perhaps presumes to emulate the role of the notorious Iraqui exile, Mr. Achmed Chalibi. The columnist rushes impetuously forward to provide further evidence when he asserts that "interfaith dialogues with Muslims have largely been fruitless," ignoring the existence of Christian support for the Palestinians in organizations such as SABEEL, the charitable labors of ANEER, and the visit of Pope John Paul II to the mosque in Damascus, Syria. It is scarcely necessary to recall the cooperation of many decades between the Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, into which the Israeli authorities have long pressured to insinuate thier own organization, symbolized by a resplendent diamond.
In sum, Mr. Hamid's slanted column of opinion, reeking of neo-con radicalism and Likhud Party extremism, constitutes an atrocity against objectivity. It cannot be accidental that his propagandistic eruption appears while House Speaker Pelosi is en route to Damascus. If Mr. Hamid has undergone a conversion experience leading him to renounce Islam in favor of the Weltanschauung of the late general Ariel Sharon, he should at least dispose of the courage to confess his apostasy.
--Isaac D'Israeli
Wednesday, August 20, 2008
Editorial Appeal
The Independent Scholars' Initiative is searching for volunteer editors who will solicit critical reviews and concise articles oriented primarily, though not exclusively, to the following themes: Eurasian political and economic history; economic sociology; monetary theory; and analysis of international investment vehicles. Critiques of millitary strategic planning, considered as a dependent variable of economic development, will also be welcomed. Eurasia will be understood to comprise Japan, China, the Koreas, India, Pakistan, and Islamic states from Bangladesh to the Mediterranean. It will not normally include Islamic African states, or Oceana. Contributions will be considered in major European languages using the Latin alphabet. Contributions may also be transmitted in Cyrillic scrlpt. Irrelevant contributions or epistles will be summarily deleted. As the Russian historian V.O. Kliuchevsky advised, "Let the research be long, and the report be short." August 20, 2008
Tuesday, August 19, 2008
Open Letter to Jeffrey Sachs, Columbia University
The Independent Scholars have perused your short letter in the Financial Times of August 19. In your usual manner you choose to overlook relevant factual data that does fit within the parameters of your publicistic thrust. You do not, for example, point to the pseudo-democracy in Italy, where Berlosconi continues to evade prosecution for bribery by having a supine parlliament declare him immune; you do not refer to Tony Blair's mistatements to a supine parliament to comped Britain into an oil war; you do not advert to the riots in the banlieux of France protesting Muslim exclusion from the opportunities lavished on the jeuness doree (such as yourself); you do not point to President Bling-Bling's abolition of the 35-hour week in France in the interests of travail, patrie, et famille, and you neglect to mention that Europe's proclivity to negotiate rather than to bomb was attained at the cost of the death of countless millions of soldiery in two world wars.
In your Cloud Coo-Coo Land portrayal of perpetual European prosperity, you do not refer the innocent reader to the columns on the last page of the FT, which are headlined, "Mood Turns Defensive on Grim Economic News," "Energy pares Footsie Losses," and "Ireland's AIB leads the Banking Retreat."
Buffon declared two centuries ago, Le style, c'est l'homme, and in this he was correct, for the communication accurately reflects the true Sachs--all gloss, and no veracity.
---By Our Own Correspondent.
In your Cloud Coo-Coo Land portrayal of perpetual European prosperity, you do not refer the innocent reader to the columns on the last page of the FT, which are headlined, "Mood Turns Defensive on Grim Economic News," "Energy pares Footsie Losses," and "Ireland's AIB leads the Banking Retreat."
Buffon declared two centuries ago, Le style, c'est l'homme, and in this he was correct, for the communication accurately reflects the true Sachs--all gloss, and no veracity.
---By Our Own Correspondent.
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