After the attack on the twin towers in NYC, I began trying to understand what was going on by studying about Islam and about the Middle East. I was disappointed that most of my reading didn't help me place attitudes and events in any kind of context. Most books concentrated just on very recent times --mostly just the past five years. Many took one large step back through history to touch on U.S. support to the Afghan mujaheden. Beyond that the strides grew impossibly long, skipping all the way to the battle of Vienna in the 17th century and the founding of Islam by Muhammad in the 7th century. I was also disappointed that a sort of alumni "teach in" seemed to hint that real issues existed but didn't define them clearly.

After over a year I finally discovered several critical keys to understanding the situation. One is something called the "clash-of-civilizations hypothesis." That discussion went on among the foreign policy elite several years ago and I was blissfully unaware of it. Events gave it new relevance, and many current discussions assume it as background and don't make sense without it. A second is the possible importance of the Sunni/Shi'ite Muslim division. Although the distinction has very recently seemed less important as an international organizing factor, it explains many policies and events. The third is the central place in much U.S. foreign policy of Iran and the Iranian Revolution, which has been so strong that the "Islam problem" has been equated to the "Iran problem."

One book did more than all the others together for me to put Islam and the Middle East into context. It's the somewhat obscure America and Political Islam: Clash of Cultures or Clash of Interests? by Fawaz A. Gerges.

Although published in 1999 toward the end of the Clinton presidency, America and Political Islam sheds a lot of light on the attack on the twin towers in 2001. Focussing on U.S. foreign policy toward various aspects of the Muslim resurgence and how it has changed both through time and in different places puts recent events into a broader context that is sorely missing from many analyses. The book's investigation begins with the Iranian Revolution and covers four presidencies: Carter, Reagan, Bush I, and Clinton.

It tackles head on the climate after the end of the Cold War, noting that an over-easy replacement of the "red menace" of Communism with the "green menace" of Islam explains surprisingly much. It also tackles the tendency to conflate the "Iran problem" with the "Islam problem" which has often led to inappropriate responses to current situations.

The largest contribution the book makes is in sketching out how much U.S. foreign policy is constrained by Congress and public opinion. Our presidential administrations would probably have made much more nuanced, relevant, and accomodationist responses to various situations related to Islam if they had not been cornered by powerful congressmen with simplistic black and white views of the world. A secondary contribution is pointing out the very many places where the U.S. in dealing with Islam says one thing but does something different.

A second book that supplied a whole lot of background is The Threatening Storm: The Case for Invading Iraq by Kenneth M. Pollack. While I disagreed with the book's obvious conclusion, I found the information it provided invaluable for making sense of the situation. Published several months before our military action, it discussed many things that came to pass --such as difficulty getting past vetoes in the U.N. Security Council and the very lukewarm and subdued reaction of Iraqi civilians to troops-- and makes it clear they were not (or at least should not have been) surprises.

The book gives two rationales for invading Iraq, neither of which was discussed hardly at all in public previous to the invasion by the people who brought us war. (I disagree with the reasons but was happy to see them presented much more clearly than our public officials have.) One is the "good guy" reason that the Iraqi regime was so horribly repressive of its own people that a change of governments would be a great net benefit to the average Iraqi. The other is the "self interest" reason that the regime was crazily unstable and was hell bent on obtaining nuclear weapons, making it necessary to respond to the threat before nuclear weapons were actually obtained. (Although chemical and biological weapons are also classed as "weapons of mass destruction" they are not as threatening or as significant as nuclear weapons.)

Even during its most pointed arguments for the conclusion I disagree with, the book presents a reasonably balanced view by describing other issues that should be considered. As examples here are some quotes from the book: "Moreover, the United States is not some rogue superpower determined to do what it wants regardless of who it threatens or angers. If we behave in this fashion, we will alienate our allies and convice much of the rest of the world to band together against us to try to keep us under control." "For the moderate Arab states, European and Asian participation would be important to legitimize the operation in the eyes of their people; the more the operation was seen as having broad international support, the more legitimate it would seem to arab populations, while the less international support it had, the more it would be seen as an anti-Arab scheme cooked up by the United States, its Arab 'puppets,' and (they will insist) Israel."

The author, Kenneth M. Pollack, however had high profile second thoughts after our invasion. In the article "Spies, Lies, and Weapons: What Went Wrong" (which may no longer be easily available on the web) in the Jan/Feb 2004 issue of Atlantic Monthly magazine, he says that prewar intelligence about Iraq, particularly that related to weapons of mass destruction (WMD), was way off base.

This photo shows what my window looked like during our warring on Iraq.

I have become quite concerned about our national politics, although I'm unclear how I can participate meaningfully. I feel that an unreflective certitude born of being "morally right" is dangerous, and anyone who had a "conversion experience" as an adult and frequently makes decisions based on their new understanding of morality is extremely dangerous. As a resident of New England with its history, I'm hyper sensitive to reappearances of the puritan ethos. Unlike the Puritans, our leadership should have a sense of humor. Taking oneself or the job too seriously is a strong hint of an excessively narrow worldview.

Although the U.S. defense budget is only about 4% of its GNP, the U.S. spends more on its military than any other nation or civilization ever has in the history of the world, an amount that even though significantly reduced from a couple decades ago is greater than the combined amounts spent by the next 12 nations. Good intentions and a high moral tone are no excuse for this nation's level of violence. I don't accept that in order to get what we need, it's necessary to destroy somebody else's livelihood with explosives.

Our foreign policy should be more aware of history. For example Rashid Khalidi in his book Resurrecting Empire: Western Footproints and America's Perilous Path in the Middle East points out that Fallujah was the starting point of the Iraqi revolt against the British in the 1920s. What happened there in spring 2004 may have had as much to do with history as it did with current events.

This excerpt from "The Fifty-first State?" by James Fallows in the November 2002 issue of The Atlantic Monthly expresses well my misgivings about our occupation of Iraq:

When British administrators supervised the former Ottoman lands in the 1920s, they liked to insinuate themselves into the local culture, à la Lawrence of Arabia. "Typically, a young man would go there in his twenties, would master the local dialects, would have a local mistress before he settled down to something more respectable," Victor O'Reilly, an Irish novelist who specializes in military topics, told me. "They were to achieve tremendous amounts with minimal resources. They ran huge chunks of the world this way, and it was psychological. They were hugely knowledgeable and got deeply involved with the locals." The original Green Berets tried to use a version of this approach in Vietnam, and to an extent it is still the ideal for the Special Forces.

But in the generation since Vietnam the mainstream U.S. military has gone in the opposite direction: toward a definition of its role in strictly martial terms. It is commonplace these days in discussions with officers to hear them describe their mission as "killing people and blowing things up."

In a later article in the Jan/Feb 2004 issue of the same magazine "Blind Into Baghdad" (possibly no longer easily available on the web), James Fallows views our postwar handling of Iraq as deeply flawed although the invasion itself was a success. Here's the magazine's summary of his article: " The U.S. occupation of Iraq is a debacle not because the government did no planning but because a vast amount of expert planning was willfully ignored by the people in charge. The inside story of a historic failure "

Essays by others troubled by our nation's current foreign policy include the very sharp turn to the right orchestrated by a tiny group, a comment on replacing the policy of deterrence with the policy of preëmption, and reflections on how to behave as the world's only superpower.

Here's a critique of president Bush's ultimatum speech preparatory to attacking Iraq. It's now clear that winning the peace is much more difficult than winning the war in Iraq. How does one restore order and create a non-violent stable political climate while at the same disproving that one is an "occupying power" or "came for the oil." An article by Fareed Zakaria describes well the situation and the difficulties. Our management of Iraq has gone so badly for a long time that more and more public figures are questioning it. While the capture of Saddam Hussein is most definitely a good thing, it doesn't dramatically improve the wider situation. Here for example is a column by Robert Kuttner which originally appeared in the Boston Globe September 10, 2003 under the headline "Neo-cons have hijacked US foreign policy".

Our military action in Iraq has been strongly linked to terrorism. I'm not convinced that link is real. Although many in our federal House of Representatives say there was a link, the 9/11 Commission Final Report says there wasn't. In the past Osama bin Laden excoriated Saddam Hussein. And the adamantly secular policies of Saddam Hussein were hardly a good match for the Islamist convictions of al Quaeda. In fact, as argued for example by Jessica Stern in How America Created a Terrorist Haven, our military action in Iraq has made our situation worse instead of better.

Here's Garrison Keillor's We're Not in Lake Wobegon Anymore which expresses my opinions well.

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