Inactive Theory & Practice
Irfan Khawaja is Instructor of Philosophy at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. Carrie-Ann Biondi is Assistant Professor of Philosophy and of Humanities & Justice Studies at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. The views they express here are their own.
Tuesday, May 23, 2006
Angelo Codevilla's No Victory, No Peace: Introduction to a Symposium
Here's the Introduction to a Symposium I'm guest-editing (with Carrie-Ann Biondi) for Reason Papers on Angelo Codevilla's book, No Victory, No Peace. I'm hoping it whets some appetites for the actual symposium, which is in its final stages of editing, and slated to come out very soon.
*************************************************I've been reading Angelo Codevilla's writing on warfare now for more than a decade. I'll confess that some of what he says frankly provokes me to incredulity and horror, but too much of it has the ring of truth to be dismissed or ignored.
I had the good fortune of meeting Codevilla in the fall of 2003 at Princeton University, where I was at the time a lecturer in the Department of Politics, and he had just arrived from Boston University as Visiting Professor of Politics, care of the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions. The idea for the present symposium on his book No Victory, No Peace originated in his undergraduate course at Princeton, "War and Peace," for which I served as teaching assistant (and in the spirit of formations permanentes, as overgrown student). During that semester, as might be expected, we worked our students through the standard issues of warfare and international relations—soft power, coercive diplomacy, economic statecraft, intelligence, strategy, and all the rest.
But it was the manuscript of No Victory—originally written as a series of essays for Commentary, The American Spectator, and the Claremont Review of Books—that stopped the students in their tracks.
Sunday, May 21, 2006
Saddam's Delusions--and the Delusions of "Realism"
For the past three years, we've heard that Saddam Hussein could be "deterred" because he was a rational calculator whose actions could in effect be predicted by decision theory.
This essay, "Saddam's Delusions," in the most recent issue of Foreign Affairs is a concise demolition of that view, based on the 230-page report of the Pentagon's US Joint Forces Command's (USJFC) Iraq Perspectives Project. In conjunction with the final report of the CIA's Iraq Survey Group (ISG)--and standard histories such as Kenneth Pollack's The Threatening Storm--we now have in hand a full rebuttal to the "Saddam as rational actor" thesis. There was, frankly, enough evidence to rebut it before the ISG or JSJFC set foot in Iraq, but never mind.
Incidentally, I recently blogged about an important article on Iraqi WMD by James Lacey, the USJFC-IPP report's second author.
Thursday, May 18, 2006
Sadiq al Azm on Islamism and Islam
About twenty years ago, as an undergraduate auditing a class on Arab Political Thought with the Syrian philosopher Sadiq al Azm, I got it into my head to interview Edward Said in one of the campus's political magazines. The idea, as I remember it, was to query Said on same aspects of Al Azm's famous critique of Orientalism, among other things.
I wrote to Said and got a disappointingly tepid response back, but no outright rejection. A few months later, Said came to campus to give a lecture, and I approached him after the lecture to inquire about his interest in doing the interview. "I don't want to do it!" he muttered, waving me away with exasperation. And that was that.
To the best of my knowledge, Said published no response to Al Azm's critique of Orientalism anytime in the twenty-some odd years between the publication of Al Azm's piece and Said's death. One wonders about the conception of intellectual exchange behind that decades-long silence. One wonders, also, about the sort of profession that looks on such silence with equanimity. If there is a principle at work here, it is this: a Big Name can evade major criticisms of his career-making book with impunity so long as his critics are, by "accepted" criteria, a bunch of "nobodies."
Those thoughts came to mind while reading this interview with Al Azm in the Dartmouth Free Press, an undergraduate magazine at Dartmouth College. (The interview was conducted in February on the occasion of a conference given at Dartmouth in Al Azm's honor.) The difference between Said and Azm—blustering arrogance versus confident receptivity—is telling. The interview turns out to be an interesting one, well worth reading all the way through, but a few passages are especially worth highlighting.
Wednesday, May 17, 2006
From Koenigsburg to The Hague: The Strange Case of Ayaan Hirsi Ali
In his preposterous 1797 essay, "On a Supposed Right to Lie from Benevolent Motives" Immanuel Kant notoriously makes the case that lying is categorically wrong under any and all circumstances, even to save an innocent life.
Truth in utterances that cannot be avoided is the formal duty of a man to everyone, however great the disadvantage that may arise from it to him or any other; and although by making a false statement I do no wrong to him who unjustly compels me to speak, yet I do wrong to men in general in the most essential point of duty, so that it may be called a lie (though not in the jurist’s sense), that is, so far as in me lies I cause that declarations in general find no credit, and hence that all rights founded on contract should lose their force; and this is a wrong which is done to mankind.Kant's argument—if one wants to call it that—is easily refuted. Either we have a right to self-defense or not. If we do, we have the right to use force to defend it, and if we can use force, we can in such cases surely use lesser means to the same end, such as deception. If we lack a right of self-defense, we're pushed to outright pacifism, a position that Kant never defends, and is in any case indefensible.
Tuesday, May 9, 2006
Saudi Lingerie: Not Just for Men Anymore
I think I blog about lingerie far more than I really ought to, but having said that, there is no denying the intrinsic interest of this Reuters item about Saudi lingerie, whether as a gauge of reform in Muslim countries, or as...or as...well, other things.
I applaud this liberalizing move, but remain puzzled by aspects of it. For one thing, since when has lingerie been legal in Saudi Arabia? What could it be legal for--given how much else in that general vicinity is prohibited? For another, what exactly is the Saudi definition of "lingerie," anyway? (First approximation, derived from the photo: "Whatever you wear between you and your burka.") Third, how do they train men to sell women's lingerie? Or is it that they train men to sell it to...OK, no need to proceed any further with that thought.
Christopher Hitchens on Ayaan Hirsi Ali; FGM Revisited
Here's an important piece by Christopher Hitchens in Slate on the recent fate of Dutch parliament member Ayaan Hirsi Ali. I blogged recently about Hirsi Ali here.
For an excellent earlier treatment of the same topic--female genital mutiliation (FGM)--by a believing Muslim woman, see Fauzia Kassinjda's moving book, Do They Hear You When You Cry? The book, written in 1999--in the days before our recent controversies about terrorism and immigration--puts INS policy in perspective. It especially puts into perspective the claim that immigrants and asylum seekers have it easy when they make it to our shores. It's an interesting question, by the way, why Elian Gonzalez made the headlines around that time but Kassinjda never quite did. It's an equally interesting question whatever became of the small controversy over FGM that did arise.
Monday, May 8, 2006
For the Record: I Am Not an African-American
I don't know how or why this happened, but apparently some conservative blogger read one of my fall 2005 posts here at Theory and Practice criticizing Mayor C. Ray Nagin of New Orleans. The blog is being quoted widely, describing me as an African-American. For the record, I am not one.
This sort of thing tends to happen to me frequently. For the record, I am not a woman (much less Diana Hsieh, philosophy graduate student at University of Colorado, Boulder), not a Muslim, not a libertarian (or faux libertarian), not an anti-Semite, not a legal positivist, and not a Machiavellian power-lusting denier of the rights of man, either. While I'm at it, maybe I should add that I'm not consumed by envy of Professor Robert Mayhew of Seton Hall University, and am not "absurd".
Sorry for any disappointment or inconvenience I may have caused anyone for not being what it would be polemically useful for me to be.
Friday, May 5, 2006
Minimum Age Laws for Marriage: The Continuing Clausewitzian Assault on Sex Offenders
This story is a follow-up to a post I wrote last summer about a statutory rape case involving a 22-year-old man impregnating and (then) marrying a 14-year-old girl. It's also a follow-up to a recent debate I had with Mark Brady at Liberty & Power about the supposed "war" on sex offenders.
TOPEKA, Kan. (AP) -- Kansas may have seen the last of its child brides. After a pregnant 14-year-old from Nebraska drove to Kansas last year to marry her 22-year-old boyfriend, now serving time for having sex with the minor, Kansas lawmakers decided it was time [they] set a minimum marriage age.
On Thursday, the Kansas House voted 119-0 to approve a bill that would prohibit anyone under the age of 15 from marrying in Kansas and would set strict limits for would-be brides or grooms under the age of 18. The Senate approved it a day earlier, 36-4.
Musab al Zarqawi: Holy Warrior, Terrorist, Loser
American efforts at ideological warfare are dismal enough to make its successes conspicuous by comparison. I was thus delighted to read this front-page item in today's New York Times, describing what seems to me an exceedingly amusing propaganda victory at the expense of the supposedly fearsome Musab al Zarqawi, recently of "Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia." Some choice excerpts from the article drive the point home:
The videotape released last week by the terrorist leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi showed him firing long bursts from a machine gun, his forearms sprouting from beneath black fatigues, as he exuded the very picture of a strong jihadist leader.No one ever said that the preachers of death knew what the hell they were doing. I regret that I can't reproduce the photo of the hapless Zarqawi struggling with his machine gun, since it represents him as looking like a cross between an overweight Yoda, a short Chewbacca, and a bearded Bozo the Clown.
But in clips the American military released on Thursday and described as captured outtakes from the same video, Mr. Zarqawi, head of the Council of Holy Warriors, cut a different figure.
In one scene, Mr. Zarqawi, the most wanted terrorist in Iraq, appears flummoxed that his American-made M-249 machine gun will not fire fully automatically. Off camera, one aide is heard ordering another, "Go help the sheik." A man walks over and fiddles with the weapon so Mr. Zarqawi can fire it in bursts.Another sequence shows Mr. Zarqawi handing the weapon off to other aides and striding away, revealing white jogging shoes beneath his black guerrilla attire. One insurgent later appears to grab the machine gun absent-mindedly by its scalding-hot barrel and drop it.
Wednesday, May 3, 2006
Why Johnny Can't Navigate
This depressing story from National Geographic tallies with my own classroom experience teaching moral and political philosophy at seven institutions in the last twelve years:
Young adults in the United States fail to understand the world and their place in it, according to a survey-based report on geographic literacy released today.Oddly, however, the National Geographic report doesn't quite tally with the findings of the Geography Assessment of the National Assessment of Educational Progress, according to which 71% of American twelfth-graders perform "at or above basic" proficiency in geography.
Take Iraq, for example. Despite nearly constant news coverage since the war there began in 2003, 63 percent of Americans aged 18 to 24 failed to correctly locate the country on a map of the Middle East. Seventy percent could not find Iran or Israel.
Nine in ten couldn't find Afghanistan on a map of Asia.
And 54 percent were unaware that Sudan is a country in Africa.
Remember the December 2004 tsunami and the widespread images of devastation in Indonesia?
Three-quarters of respondents failed to find that country on a map. And three-quarters were unaware that a majority of Indonesia's population is Muslim, making it the largest Muslim country in the world.
Monday, May 1, 2006
More on the Non-Significance of Duke Lacrosse
This article in today's Slate comes from the "great minds think alike" department. A quote:
Americans seem to have an insatiable appetite for criminal-justice stories. Unfortunately, with that appetite comes a certain measure of moral flabbiness. No one does the hard work of thinking or checking. They simply consume what they are fed. And the solution may just be a crash diet. Our Canadian neighbors have a fully functioning criminal-justice system that is as skeptical of press coverage as ours is amorous.
Friday, April 28, 2006
There Oughta Be a Law (and there is)
Sometimes rhetorical questions only too richly deserve to be answered, as in the following case, culled from the letters column of today's Trenton Times:
I'd like someone to tell me why all citizens should not be required to volunteer one year of their life in service to their country. I spent two years in the Peace Corps.Answer: Because the concept of a "voluntary legal requirement" is a contradiction in terms. Any more brilliant questions?
JOSEPH M. ZANNONI
Hamilton
Mercifully, there's already a law on the books that covers this case. It's called the Law of Noncontradiction. In one sense, compliance is voluntary. In another sense, it's mandatory. And that's no contradiction. A puzzle.
Wednesday, April 26, 2006
Jane Jacobs, RIP
This is the second memorial post I've had to write in a row. I regret I can't quite do either person justice right now.
I finished reading Jane Jacobs's The Death and Life of Great American Cities eleven years ago--it was the spring of 1995--in a hotel room in Chicago. (I bought it and started reading it in that very deadest and most dismal of American cities, South Bend, Indiana.) I still remember the sense of exhiliration I felt when I read the last word on the last page and closed the book. The experience is as vivid to me as events that might have taken place yesterday or last week. Her prose was like that: it had the vividness of a classic novel and the clarity of classic philosophy. I can't say that of very much that I've read in the eleven years since I read Death and Life.
I read nearly all her books, but my favorites happen to be Death and Life and the under-appreciated and philosophically rich Systems of Survival, which made a lasting impression on me. It is, I think, symptomatic of our culture and discourse that Systems of Survival is so little discussed or understood, and that it inspires feelings of anger and contempt in so many ill-informed and undiscerning critics.
It almost seems an act of ingratitude to leave it at that, but for now, I'll have to content myself with linking to the New York Times obituary,
which captures at least a bit of the moral and intellectual excitement she generated.
A real loss for the republic of letters.
Tuesday, April 25, 2006
Alida Valli, RIP
I just read in this morning's New York Times about the death of Italian actress Alida Valli. Apparently she passed away on Saturday the 22nd. She was essentially unknown in the United States except among die-hard Ayn Rand fans, for her memorable performance in the Mussolini-era film version of Rand's novel, We the Living. Here is the Wikipedia article on Valli, recent as of a few days ago, with memorial notices at the bottom.
I'm pressed for time right now, but I'll add a bit more on Valli and the odd fate of We the Living later today.
P.S. Dammit, I just noticed that Aeon Skoble beat me to the punch on this.
Monday, April 24, 2006
A Few Obvious Questions about the Duke Lacrosse Case (that no one seems willing to ask)
The first and most obvious question is: why is this case worthy of national attention? What differentiates it from the thousands upon thousands of similar cases being dealt with by police departments and DA's offices around the country?
If the answer is that this case involves race and class, my response is: why does that matter? Race and class are essentially irrelevant to ascertaining the facts of a case or offering a judgment on guilt or punitive desert. Why then should race and class assume such colossal proportions by otherwise intelligent people discussing a criminal accusation? For that matter, how does even race and class differentiate the Duke case from the thousands of cases out there?
We are told that there is something unjust about the way the accused lacrosse players are being treated. There is a judicial presumption of innocence, goes the argument, and yet they (or the students recently arrested) are being treated as though they were guilty. True enough. How does that differ from thousands and thousands of cases splashed over daily newspapers every day in every town, city and county in the country? Every day people are arrested and treated in the press as though they were guilty when no one knows their guilt or innocence. When was the last time we had a national debate about the in-principle propriety of this practice?
Wednesday, April 19, 2006
A Hell of a Day
I always take note of April 19.
It's the anniversary of the "shot heard round the world" (the inception of the American Revolution at Lexington and Concord).
It's the anniversary of the beginning of the 1936-1939 Arab Revolt.
It's the anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. (It's believed that April 19 marks the beginning of Masada, but for obvious reasons, e.g., the non-invention of the Gregorian calendar at the time, I haven't been able to confirm this.)
It's the anniversary of the failure of the Bay of Pigs invasion.
It's the anniversary of the conflagration at Waco.
It's the anniversary of the bombing of the Alfred Murrah Building in Oklahoma City.
And it's the day before the anniversary of Columbine, as well as Hitler's birthday (which is what Columbine was planned to "commemorate").
Here's to hoping we can end the list there.
Hat-tip to Paul Blackman and David Kopel's book, No More Wacos: What's Wrong with Federal Law Enforcement and How to Fix It, which drew many of the preceding facts to my attention.
Jihad and Counter-Jihad
Here's an interesting if somewhat muddled discussion by Jonathan Rauch of the relation between jihad and terrorism. A few comments:
Rauch is certainly right to say that we need to get the identity of the enemy right in the "current war," and his article is in that respect a welcome step in the right direction. He quotes Mary Habeck, a military historian at Johns Hopkins, and author of a new book on the subject, Knowing the Enemy: Jihadist Ideology and the War on Terror. I haven't read it, but it sounds worth reading.
The enemy, according to Rauch's summary, is "jihadism," which he defines loosely as an aspect of Islam which "engages in or supports the use of force to expand the rule of Islamic law. In other words, it is violent Islamic imperialism."
Tuesday, April 18, 2006
Looking for Anti-Semitism in All the Wrong Places
Moral hysteria, as a mentor of mine once put it, is the ringing denunciation of the venial. What it leads to in practice is moral confusion—the conflation of the venial with the vile, and vice versa. That may sound cryptic, but it is in my view a perfect description of the debate about the supposedly anti-Semitic content of the Walt-Mearsheimer article on the Israel lobby (or "Lobby," if you will). We are, in short, looking for anti-Semitism in all the wrong places.
For two weeks a debate has raged here at HNN and elsewhere over the now-famous Walt-Mearsheimer article and its anti-Semitic implications, presuppositions, innuendo, affinities, etc. I'll assume that all proximate participants in this debate are sincerely worried about anti-Semitism. If so, I have a suggestion for a much better way for them to spend their time. Bonus: it even involves The Protocols of the Elders of Zion!
Sunday, April 16, 2006
The Duke Lacrosse Debate: People With Nothing to Say, Saying Nothing
It would be an interesting task to figure out what current event deserves the title of "the silliest controversy of the season." I guess top prize would have to go the Walt-Mearsheimer debate--which consists on the one hand of people who think the Arab states are our allies because they shut Israel out of the 1991 Gulf War, and on the other of people whose defense of Israel consists of the accusation that two top-tier professors of international relations are actually covert lobbyists for the Czar of Russia.
Close behind this would have to be the debate over the Duke lacrosse scandal, which consists on the one hand of people who desperately want to violate the presumption of innocence in order to have something profound to say about race and class—and on the other hand, of whatever it is that David Brooks thinks he's saying.
Brooks's contribution to the Duke lacrosse debate consists of the following thesis, expressed in an April 9 column in The New York Times called "Virtues and Victims":
Saturday, April 15, 2006
What's Wrong with Nebraska?
That question is implicitly posed by this somewhat misleadingly-titled article in today's New York Times, "Law to Segregate Omaha Schools Divides Nebraska."
OMAHA, April 14 — Ernie Chambers is Nebraska's only African-American state senator, a man who has fought for causes including the abolition of capital punishment and the end of apartheid in South Africa. A magazine writer once described him as the "angriest black man in Nebraska." He was also a driving force behind a measure passed by the Legislature on Thursday and signed into law by the governor that calls for dividing the Omaha public schools into three racially identifiable districts, one largely black, one white and one mostly Hispanic.I say "somewhat misleading," since the law doesn't literally "segregate" the schools so much as re-district the city by race. Not that I regard racial redistricting as a good, just, rational or constitutional thing. Precisely the reverse, on every count. But it's worth looking past the sensationalist headline to get a better grip on what is going on here—hence my title.
The law, which opponents are calling state-sponsored segregation, has thrown Nebraska into an uproar, prompting fierce debate about the value of integration versus what Mr. Chambers calls a desire by blacks to control a school district in which their children are a majority. Civil rights scholars call the legislation the most blatant recent effort in the nation to create segregated school systems or, as in Omaha, to resegregate districts that had been integrated by court order. Omaha ran a mandatory busing program from 1976 to 1999.
Recent Entries
- Angelo Codevilla's No Victory, No Peace: Introduction to a Symposium
- Saddam's Delusions--and the Delusions of "Realism"
- Sadiq al Azm on Islamism and Islam
- From Koenigsburg to The Hague: The Strange Case of Ayaan Hirsi Ali
- Saudi Lingerie: Not Just for Men Anymore
- Christopher Hitchens on Ayaan Hirsi Ali; FGM Revisited
- For the Record: I Am Not an African-American
- Minimum Age Laws for Marriage: The Continuing Clausewitzian Assault on Sex Offenders
- Musab al Zarqawi: Holy Warrior, Terrorist, Loser
- Why Johnny Can't Navigate
Recent Comments
- Tonja Christine Fleischer on Why Johnny Can't Navigate
- Carrie-Ann Biondi on War Propaganda in the Public Schools
- Carrie-Ann Biondi on War Propaganda in the Public Schools
- Jeff Beam on War Propaganda in the Public Schools
- Nick Cullather on Saddam's Delusions--and the Delusions of "Realism"
- Jason Pappas on Angelo Codevilla's No Victory, No Peace: Introduction to a Symposium
- Kirill Rivkin on Looking for Anti-Semitism in All the Wrong Places
- Kirill Rivkin on From Koenigsburg to The Hague: The Strange Case of Ayaan Hirsi Ali
- Michael Edward Piston on Musab al Zarqawi: Holy Warrior, Terrorist, Loser
- Darren Michael Peterson on Sadiq al Azm on Islamism and Islam
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