On a subject related to my last post, see this post at the Daily Beast titled “Italy Fears ISIS Invasion From Libya”:

ROME — Last weekend in Italy, as the threat of ISIS in Libya hit home with a new video addressed to “the nation signed with the blood of the cross” and the warning, “we are south of Rome,” Italian prime minister Matteo Renzi shuttered up the Italian embassy in Tripoli and raised his fist with the threat of impending military action. Never mind that Italy has only 5,000 troops available that are even close to deployable, according to the defense ministry. Or that the military budget was cut by 40 percent two years ago, which has kept the acquisition of 90 F-35 fighter jets hanging in the balance and left the country combat-challenged to lead any mission—especially one against an enemy like the Islamic State.

Italian officials might be afraid or “panicking” but they’re exhibiting a puzzling lack of concern. When you’re concerned about your house catching fire, you could have your wiring checked, replace flammable items with flame retardant ones, or even purchase insurance. When you’re terrified, you tell people how frightened you are rather than taking prudent measures.

Italy, like Germany, Belgium, and Denmark, hasn’t lived up to its NATO commitments in decades. If it had, it would have more than 5,000 deployable troops. Times a’wastin’.

Hat tip: memeorandum

There’s a vibrant dialogue going on in the blogosphere about the Atlantic article I linked to yesterday. The views being expressed cover a whole range of reactions from “he’s wrong” to “he’s right but” to “he’s right and”. On the rejection end of the spectrum is this article from Raw Story:

In September, Nihad Awad, the executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), held a press conference in Washington and, flanked by other Muslim figures, announced that 120 Muslim scholars had produced an 18-page open letter, written in Arabic, to ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.

An English translation of the document is a tough slog. As Awad said at the time, “This letter is not meant for a liberal audience.” He even admitted that mainstream Muslims might find it difficult to read.

The letter is an extended exegesis, heavily salted with quotes from the Koran and the Hadith, arguing point by point about the nature of jihad, the slaughtering of innocents, the taking of slaves, and other not-so-savory elements of the distant past — and in the past they should remain, the text argues. It makes the case not only that ISIS was wrong to commit horrific acts of violence in modern times, but that it was interpreting Islamic law incorrectly to justify such acts.

[…]

I was curious, however, what Nihad Awad might make of Wood’s article, since he had gone to so much trouble last year to argue the exact opposite.

[…]

When I reached Awad yesterday, he hadn’t seen the article yet. When I described it over the phone, he reacted immediately by saying, “This is an outrageous statement, an ignorant statement.”

He then asked for some time to read the article in its entirety, and then we spoke again later last night.

“This piece is misleading because it’s full of factual mistakes,” Awad said. “Mistakes are all over it.”

He blamed Graeme Wood for trying to grasp things he wasn’t qualified to understand.

I’m in no position to affirm or deny Mr. Awad’s remarks but consider them carefully. Note that he doesn’t say that the article is wrong. What he’s doing is something very lawyerly that might be thought of as “mau-mauing in detail”. He’s attacking the entire article on the basis of individual factual or textual errors that may or may not refute the article’s thesis and, in true post-modernist style, denying Mr. Woods’s authenticity. In terms of classic rhetoric that’s an argumentum ad hominem which does not refute the veracity of the article.

Next in the apologetics spectrum is this post at The Moderate Voice from front page poster “Prairie Weather”:

Take a look — even if it’s just a quick glance –at Graeme Wood’s article on “What Isis really wants.” Not so much difference between Isis and Christian fundamentalists there within.

[…]

I think we helped to create ISIS. We would almost certainly be responsible for making things worse, not better, if we were to rush in there and start sawing on their necks. We’d surely be setting up a situation in which a new generation of young Muslims, radicalized, would aim their wrath and resentment at our grandchildren. Already they know more about us than we know about them.

This is all about bigotry and racism on both sides. Let’s not kid ourselves about that.

tu quoque fallacy. It says nothing about the true or falsehood of Mr. Graeme’s article. It’s irrelevant.

And with respect to the Lord’s Army I have no problem in saying they’re not Christians. In my tradition it takes more than saying that you’re a Christian to be a Christian. To be a Christian you must imitate Christ and whatever Jesus of Nazareth did he certainly didn’t lead an army that committed atrocities.

Although Juan Cole doesn’t mention Mr. Woods’s article or link to it he certainly must have it in mind in his most recent post in which he denies seven “myths” about Islam. Dr. Cole’s post is worth reading but, ultimately, I think that his political views overwhelm his thesis. His thesis is that DAESH is a criminal gang, its power and influence are “smoke and mirrors”, and it will soon collapse. He does provide some good advice for the administration, however:

Politicians should just stop promising to extirpate the group. Brands can’t be destroyed, and Daesh is just a brand for the most part.

IMO DAESH is a bit more than a brand; it’s a network organization and a pretty effective one that we’re just not prepared to cope with.

Also, I’m troubled by Dr. Cole’s reliance on proportions as an important consideration:

Actually, the numbers are quite small proportionally. British PM David Cameron ominously warned that 400 British Muslim youth had gone off to fight in Syria. But there are like 3.7 million Muslims in the UK now! So .01 percent of the community volunteered.

I’m troubled by it for two reasons. First, .01 of the 1.6 billion Muslims is 160,000 people. That’s a lot of people whatever their proportion might be. Second, in the present age of super-empowerment 160,000 people can wreak a lot of havoc. It’s not comforting, it’s dismaying.

On the affirming side of the spectrum is James Joyner’s post at OTB:

Unlike al Qaeda or even the Soviet Union, whose leadership mostly manipulated religious or secular ideology to gain support for secular, political goals, Bagdadi and company are true believers. They literally can’t compromise. So, short of killing every last one of them—which is perhaps a futile exercise, given the nature of martyrdom, the best we can hope for is to help them fail at their own game while keeping the lightest footprint possible.

There’s the usual heated discussion going on in comments there. In comments Lounsbury remarks:

Rubbish. The sheer messianic lunacy of DAESH is widely alienating.

As usual his comments are well worth reading. At one point Lounsbury was a frequent commenter here and his blog, now dormant, is in my thrifty blogroll. If I’m not mistaken, he’s an Anglo-American financier living in Morocco, fluent in Arabic and pretty well informed on issues relating to the Middle East and North Africa and especially those affecting finance.

The best reaction piece I’ve read so far was by Adam Silverman and posted at Balloon Juice:

John asked me for my take on Graeme Woods’ article “What ISIS Really Wants.” Before I start I want to make it clear that my understanding of Islam is that of an informed outsider. I have been studying Islam, or portions of it, since I was an undergraduate and conducted fieldwork for the US Army in Iraq that dealt with both religious and tribal identity. I have published articles dealing with jihad and shahadat, as well as the tribal and religious identity and its effects on US operations in Iraq.** I was even fortunate enough to have a counterpart cultural advisor who was both Muslim and had an advanced degree in Islamic Law and Jurisprudence that I could rely on as a resource to verify if I was correct in my understanding and interpretation of his religion. As I liked to say when I would brief on these, and related subjects, everything I am telling you is true and verifiable, except where it isn’t because I’m an outsider trying to make sense of someone else’s religion.

Overall I think Woods’ article is quite good and I highly recommend you click over and read it before proceeding. It is thought provoking and makes a number of points explicit that have rarely ever been made implicit regarding ISIS. For example, the millennial and apocalyptic components to ISIS’s theology. Woods also has an excellent section dealing with ISIS’s refreshing and recontextualizing long dormant components of Islamic theology and dogma. I was also impressed that Woods took the time to make it clear that al Qaeda was a logistic, support, and training network much more than it was structured like a company. One of the biggest errors in understanding al Qaeda over the past decade came out of the attempts to understand al Qaeda as a corporation or conglomerate.

He goes on to expand on the concept, important among Sunni Muslims, of ijma, usually translated “consensus”, to make the point that you can’t really say that there’s one, monolithic Islamic theology but that dogma, doctrine, and practice all vary from community to community and that Mr. Woods’s neglect of that point is a deficiency in his article. What’s the “Muslim mainstream”? Does the very idea have any meaning? Where does DAESH fit into Muslim thought? Read the whole thing. It’s very enlightening.

I’d like to commend a pair of articles on the “Islamic State”, DAESH to your attention. The first is an article in Atlantic by Graeme Wood on DAESH’s objectives:

Ideological tools may convince some potential converts that the group’s message is false, and military tools can limit its horrors. But for an organization as impervious to persuasion as the Islamic State, few measures short of these will matter, and the war may be a long one, even if it doesn’t last until the end of time.

It seems to me that one of the problems that Western secularists have in understanding DAESH is that they refuse to believe that it’s possible for people to be genuinely sincere about religious conviction. I think that points to a serious defect in Western secularists, a strategic weakness.

The present prevailing wisdom seems to be that DAESH will burn itself out because it can’t govern. Neither could the Ottoman, the last caliphate. That only troubled the West for the better part of a millennium. Only a few million people lost their lives in the wars that ensued from the 15th to the 19th centuries. With modern technology I’m sure DAESH can improve on that.

The other is from USA Today:

WASHINGTON – Since exploding onto the world stage as a conquering force in Iraq a year ago, the Islamic State has expanded its reach across the Middle East despite a U.S.-led bombing campaign that has killed thousands of militants and destroyed tons of their equipment.

Monday, Egypt launched an airstrike against Islamic State targets in neighboring Libya after the terrorist group posted a video of militants beheading a group of Egyptian Christians.

This month, U.S. forces killed a former Taliban leader in southern Afghanistan who had sworn allegiance to the Islamic State weeks earlier. The Pentagon said the group’s presence in Afghanistan was nascent but demonstrated its global aspirations.

Signs of the Islamic State have emerged throughout the Middle East. Some extremists in the Sinai, where militants battle the Egyptian government, have sworn allegiance to the Islamic State. Groups affiliated with the militant organization have popped up in Algeria and Tunisia.

The beheadings and burnings that have shocked the West and rallied some Middle Eastern governments to oppose the Islamic extremists have appealed to young Muslims willing to fight the West or what they perceive as corrupt Arab governments.

My view is that DAESH is likely to be a nuisance to the United States, dangerous to Europe, and an existential threat to a number of our notional allies in the Middle East and North Africa. I wouldn’t equate DAESH with Islam but I do think it represents a disease that is endemic in Islam.

Despite its absence from the newspapers and the nightly news report the ebola outbreak in West Africa is still ongoing. It’s been more than a week since the last situation report from the World Health Organization but to my eye the trend suggested by the last several situation reports suggests a disease that has gone from epidemic to endemic. The total number of cases is still mounting and the total number of deaths is still mounting.

It’s better than when the cases and deaths were rising exponentially but it’s still not good news.

In reaction to the terrorist attack in Copenhagen over the weekend, the editors of the Wall Street Journal declaim:

Stopping terrorism from becoming normal will also require describing accurately the jihadist threat. The Obama Administration in the U.S. has refused to identify Islamism—or even “Islamic extremism”—as the ideology behind the recent attacks on the Continent and the horrors in Syria and Iraq. Such obfuscation doesn’t help moderate and reformist Muslims, whose cooperation is essential to defeating jihadists. Copenhagen can set a counterterror example by calling the enemy by its name.

It’s not just terrorism our European cousins need worry about. violent crime, generally, has risen rapidly there over the last forty years even as it has declined here.

I’ll repeat what I’ve said before: the traditionally ethnic states of Europe need to decide what sort of countries they wish to be and take the steps to insure that’s what they become. One size won’t fit all and the various countries will need to make their own decisions. It’s up to them. It’s none of my business.

I can’t help but wonder in reading Robert Samuelson’s lament for the small returns to consumers from investments in information technology:

In a recent essay, economic historian John Komlos of the University of Munich argues that the economic value of new technologies has declined over time. A century or so ago, “the incandescent bulb replaced the kerosene lamp, and the value added [to national income] as well as to welfare in terms of reliability, convenience, health and safety [was] humongous,” he writes.

Similar transformations stemmed from many 19th- and 20th-century technologies: steel-making, the telephone, automobiles, airplanes, antibiotics, and radio and television.

The same is not true of much information technology, Komlos argues. Consider Facebook. “While social networking facilitated by Facebook is a popular feature of the Internet, basically it merely replaces older ways of socializing without adding much to our feeling of well-being,” he writes. “It monetized activities that were for the most part left previously outside of the market’s purview.”

why he’s selected information technology as his whipping boy? I agree with the general proposition: consumers aren’t realizing the surplus from technological innovation the way they did a century ago. Producers are. The entire question might be summed up as where are our flying cars? Or, alternatively, the future ain’t what it used to be.

However, the real place to look isn’t at information technology but at healthcare. It would take some convincing before I believed that the aggregate amount (in real dollars) that the federal government has spent on information technology research over the last 50 years amounts to what it pays to support the NIH each year ($26 billion). The Internet itself was invented on a government investment of less than $1 million. And I suspect that if you took the aggregate public and private amount that’s been spent on information technology research over the last forty years it’s dwarfed by what is spent on healthcare every single year. Are we that much healthier than we were in 1970? Life expectancy has only gone up by about 10% over the period and I’d attribute a lot of that to the reduction in smoking which is not healthcare. Said another way the return on investment in information technology has been pretty darned good while the ROI on healthcare is extremely small.

So, where are our flying cars? We’ve decided to spend the money on a few extra days or weeks of vegetative life for the elderly instead (that’s where a good chunk of the healthcare dough is spent—the last weeks of life).

However, the explanation I’d provide fits information technology and healthcare equally well. What we’re seeing is exactly what you’d expect when the government protects and subsidizes providers and relies on the providers to look out for the interests of consumers from the goodness of their hearts, for ethical reasons, and so on. Producers capture most of the surplus.

Is it my imagination or is the administration’s narrative on DAESH preparing to collapse? Consider:

Iraq’s Sunni blocs halt parliament activities after sheikh’s killing
Tribal leader: Iraqi troops in Anbar could ‘collapse within hours’
Sunnis may exit Iraq parliament after sheik’s slaying
Military and ISIS Clash Over Iraqi Town Near a Base Housing U.S. Troops

Let’s engage in a little thought experiment, purely hypothetical. That the war against DAESH in Syria is a bust is now so obvious it can hardly be denied. What are the implications for U. S. policy if the war against DAESH in Iraq is revealed to be equally ineffective? Do we arm the Kurds in the recognition that whatever arms we give them may well be captured by DAESH? I doubt the Turks will think much of our arming the Kurds since those arms could well end up being turned against them. Does the rhetoric begin the transformation from “degrade and destroy” to “contain” to something else? What happens? That’s a question. I honestly don’t know.

At Reason.com Steven Greenhut presents a status report on public pensions in California:

A newly published federal court decision found the California Public Employees’ Retirement System was merely banging the legal table with its “iron fist” in the Stockton bankruptcy case.

Judge Christopher Klein rejected the pension fund’s argument that California cities could not reduce pension benefits even in bankruptcy. The decision could dramatically change the way pensions are handled in future bankruptcy proceedings, even though the judge upheld the city’s workout plan, which leaves existing pensions untouched while “impairing” creditors.

The judge was clear: When California cities go bankrupt, pensions can be cut. After Klein made that point in his verbal ruling in October,CalPERS shot back in a statement: “The ruling is not legally binding on any of the parties … or as precedent in any other bankruptcy proceeding ….” Now it seems legally binding and precedential.

California Democrats have no one to blame but themselves for the fix that state and local governments find themselves in. If Illinois’s ruling Democrats had a lick of sense they’d seize the opportunity the election of Republican Bruce Rauner has presented them to place the blame for solving Illinois’s public pension problems on Rauner while continuing to posture on it. In other words they should fight but not too hard.

Just in time for President’s Day, Jonathan Bernstein takes note of the most overrated and underrated presidents:

My list of overrated would include Kennedy, Reagan and Wilson, and perhaps Jackson, but I’d add Jimmy Carter and Richard Nixon. For underrated, I usually say Grant, but I’ve also sometimes added Harding and Ford. I do wonder whether those suggesting that Ike and Truman are underrated are behind the curve by a few decades about how those presidents are viewed.

While I note that these lists are heavily colored by mythology and political affiliation, I think that certainly the most overrated president of my lifetime and probably one of the most overrated overall would have to be John Kennedy. I also a president who is conspicuous by his absence from the article. Where’s Lyndon Johnson?

When the glare of the Baby Boomers’ hatred of Lyndon Johnson (and their love for Kennedy) has passed, I think that flinty-eyed scrutiny will reveal that many of the worst aspects of the Kennedy-Johnson administration will be laid squarely at Jack Kennedy’s feet while some of the best of the period will be attributed to Johnson.

I found this interesting:

Barack Obama ranks mid-pack at 18th, just behind George H.W. Bush and ahead of James Polk. His average “overall greatness” rating, on a 0 to 100 scale, comes in at 58, just a bit above average. Obama scores well on “integrity,” but only a little above average on legislative, diplomatic and military skills. He’s also rated the second-most polarizing (behind George W. Bush).

IMO Obama’s star has already passed its zenith. He’ll always have his adherents but in 75 years when his strongest supporters have passed from the scene I strongly suspect that, right with George W. Bush, he’ll be considered a poor-to-mediocre president. I might be wrong but I won’t be around to see it.