Over at Dr. Frank’s What’s-it, a great post on Bad Philosophy, in the form of a commentary on an inter-blog dispute about the merits of the Baader-Meinhof gang and their buddies, the Red Army Fraction.

He takes off from a discussion of history to comment on what he saw in his Bay Area adolescence (one that I shared as well) and he comes to an important insight:

An important element of the complex, I’ve often fancied, is a general psychological condition that fetishized and aggrandized ordinary, adolescent rebellion against parental authority, and invested it with universal significance, making it and its concomitant sensations the focus of life and politics, to such a degree that experiences that do not include the sensations are found lacking, unexciting, inauthentic, suspect; the flame of sticking it to the old man had to be kept alive, and neither the absence of an actual old man to stick it to, nor the fact that one has become an old man oneself, has much bearing on the matter.

Here, I think, you find the psychological engine underlaying the Romantic attachment to (quoting Berlin) ‘…wholeheartedness, sincerity, purity of soul, the ability and readiness to dedicate yourself to your ideal, no matter what it was.’

And what could be more pure than the nihilistic act of terror that denies society’s parental power over you and at the same time destroyed the symbols of that power?

Only an act that destroyed yourself at the same time. Cody Jarrett, meet Mohammed Atta.

I finished the John Boyd biography last week, and have been digging into any source documents of his that I can find.

On reading many of them, they seemed right, but somewhat stale…and then I realized that they were stale because I have been reading about reflections of these ideas for the last twenty years. One reason I enjoyed the film ‘Shakespeare in Love’ so much was that it brought back to me the idea of what it must have been like to see ‘Romeo and Juliet’ fresh and free of preconception.

I have been paying particular attention to ‘Patterns of Conflict’ (available as a blurry pdf at Defense and the National Interest). I keep trying to weld together the liberal half of my worldview – which tells me that, short of something that looks like genocide, we can’t kill the opposition in this War on Bad Philosophy faster than they grow, and so we must somehow disrupt their growth cycle by changing political and social conditions to radically lowering the attractiveness of these causes – with the conservative, which suggests that confronting and killing the opposition is the way to go.

Boyd was there first.From Slide 108 of the pdf above:

Action:

Undermine guerilla cause and destroy their cohesion by demonstrating integrity and competence of government to represent and serve needs of the people – rather than exploit and impoverish them for the benefit of a greedy elite.*

Take political initiative to root out and visibly punish corruption. Select new leaders with recognized competence as well as popular appeal. Ensure that they deliver justice, eliminate grievances and connect government with grass roots.*

Infiltrate guerilla movement as well as employ population for intelligence about guerilla plans, operations, and organization.

Seal-off guerilla regions from outside world by diplomatic, psychological, and various other activities that strip-away potential allies as well as by disrupting or straddling communications that connect these regions with the outside world.

Deploy administrative talent, police, and counter-guerilla teams into affected localities and regions to inhibit guerilla communication, coordination, and movement; minimize guerilla contact with local inhabitants; isolate their ruling cadres; and destroy their infrastructure.

Exploit presence of above teams to build-up local government as well as recruit militia for local and regional security in order to protect people from the persuasion and coercion efforts of guerilla cadres and their fighting units.

Use special teams in a complementary effort to penetrate guerilla controlled regions. Employ (guerillas’ own) tactics of reconnaissance, infiltration, surprise hit-and-run, and sudden ambush to: keep roving bands off-balance, make base areas untenable, and disrupt communication with the outside world.

Expand these complementary security/penetration efforts into affected region after affected region in order to undermine, collapse, and replace guerilla influence with government influence and control.

Visible link these efforts with local political/economic/social reform in order to connect central government with hopes and needs of people, thereby gain their support and confirm government legitimacy.

Idea:

Break guerillas’ moral-mental-physical hold over the population, destroy their cohesion, and bring about their collapse via political initiative that demonstrates moral legitimacy and vitality of government and by relentless military operations that emphasize stealth/fast-temp/fluidity-of-action and cohesion of overall effort.

*If you cannot realize such a political program, you might consider changing sides.

(emphasis and footnote his)

What Boyd is suggesting is to do two things: First to reinforce the legitimacy of the government under attack, and second to do so in a way that bridges across to a fluid counter-guerilla strategy.

Now to an old Vietnam-era cynic like myself, this bespeaks the “hearts and minds” approach that ultimately failed.

But on a fundamental level, his proposed solution is the only one that can work.

We need to do two things, according to him (and do read the whole document, it’s fascinating even if it hasn’t completely gelled for me yet): a) create a fighting force that can outguerilla the guerillas; and b) ensure that the overall population has enough faith in our side – enough belief in the legitimacy of the government – that they will not only not willingly cooperate with the guerillas but will willingly cooperate with us.

I’ll even suggest that this is probably the best litmus test I can think of for how we’re doing…are people in the street helping us catch the bad guys? If they are, we’re winning.

And it’s a reminder that a purely military victory in our circumstance isn’t enough. We do have to win the hearts and minds of the people in Iraq and Afghanistan (and Iran, and Syria, and Saudi Arabia, and so on).

We’re faced with a pest-control problem here. Like the coyote problem that besets suburban Angelinos; we can kill them as we find them; we can make our homes more resistant (both of which are good things). But to ultimately solve the problem, you have to reduce the population. We have the capacity to burn down the forests where they live and breed, but the cost of doing that is extraordinarily high. We need to examine the lifecycle of the pest, find the places where we can disrupt it, and do so.

In this, I will argue, the fundamental problem is the tolerance of kleptocracies convenient to our economies and to the investors in our political process. The injustice in those tyrannical societies is the fuel that the engine of Bad Philosophy consumes.

So we need to do four things, as I see it:

# Attack and kill the active terrorists where we can find them, and destroy the infrastructure (financial foremost, logistical, and physical). We need to convince other states that the cost of them not doing this is that we will.

# Attack the belief-structures which constitute the engine of Bad Philosophy; attack them by expounding our own Good Philosophies and by being willing to suggest that all things are not, in the end, equal.

# Deprive the engine of Bad Philosophy of fuel, by attacking the horrible conditions of life that many people in the kleptocratic states must endure – while watching us fete and fund their oppressors.

# Make our own society more resistant to the kinds of attacks they are likely to mount. This isn’t going to be done by some national-scale, Orwellian bureaucracy. It will be done by the coordinated efforts of tens of thousands of county officials and the millions of front-line public safety staff that work for them.

Boyd said (slide 118):

Observations Related To Moral Conflict

No fixed recipes for organization, communications, tactics, leadership, etc.

Wide freedom for subordinates to exercise imagination and initiative – yet harmonize within intent of superior commanders.

Heavy reliance upon moral (human values) instead of material superiority as basis for cohesion and ultimate success.

Commanders must create a bond and breadth of experience based upon trust – not mistrust – for cohesion.

I think that sums it up better than anything I can think of tonight.

So in the ‘good news’ department, I’ve successfully married off my brother to a wonderful woman, and they are off to Hawaii for a luxury golf honeymoon (…hey, I said she was wonderful, not sane…).

Congratulations to them!!

Via Grim’s Hall, a new blog to me but one that I’ll catch up on after my brother’s wedding, I see that someone’s concerned that we will lose the ‘War on Bad Philosophy’.

Spengler (which I assume is a pseudonym) writes a column in the Asia Times titled: ‘Why radical Islam might defeat the West‘. In it, he(?) writes:

Which brings us to the threat of radical Islam. “You are decadent and hedonistic. We on the other hand are willing to die for what we believe, and we are a billion strong. You cannot kill all of us, so you will have to accede to what we demand.” That, in a nutshell, constitutes the Islamist challenge to the West.

Neither the demographic shift toward Muslim immigrants nor meretricious self-interest explains Western Europe’s appeasement of Islam, but rather the terrifying logic of the numbers. That is why President Bush has thrown his prestige behind the rickety prospect of an Israeli-Palestinian peace. And that is why Islamism has only lost a battle in Iraq, but well might win the war.

Not a single Western strategist has proposed an ideological response to the religious challenge of Islam. On the contrary: the Vatican, the guardian-of-last-resort of the Western heritage, has placed itself squarely in the camp of appeasement. Except for a few born-again Christians in the United States, no Western voice is raised in criticism of Islam itself. The trouble is that Islam believes in its divine mission, while the United States has only a fuzzy recollection of what it once believed, and therefore has neither the aptitude nor the inclination for ideological warfare.

He goes on to talk about the demographic implosion in Europe, and ties it to the philosphic collapse of core faiths – by which I can only interpret that he means religious faith. His quote “The trouble is that Islam believes in its divine mission, while the United States has only a fuzzy recollection of what it once believed…” is certainly a powerful one.

But I’ll challenge Spengler on a few fronts.

The first one is simple; his statement of the problem from the radical Islamic point of view is factually incorrect. We can kill them all (and, as has been said, let God take his own). For the foreseeable future, will be able to do so with relative physical impunity, while they may be able to damage two or three of our cities and kill a few hundreds of thousands of our people.

Somehow one of the issues that has been forgotten here is the imbalance of absolute power between the United States (and the ‘Coalition of the Willing’) and the forces we confront. North Korea can badly damage Seoul before collapsing; they have a million hostages, and that is their source of power. The Islamists (my term for the followers of radical, militant Islam) can hijack a few planes and blow up a few hotels.

I’ve commented earlier on the imbalance between the power of Israel and it’s neighbors:

Let’s be clear. It would take Israel two, maybe three hours to demolish every structure in the West Bank and Gaza. The limit would be how fast they could rearm and turn around the aircraft. They could do it with conventional munitions and would easily have enough left over to defeat the armies of Egypt, Syria, and Jordan and mount a credible threat to the Iranians.

They haven’t. Why? Because they have to live with themselves, and because they are smart enough to realize that they ultimately have to live with their neighbors. The fact that they would mightily piss off the United States might factor into that as well.

The Islamist world is fragile economically and politically (a big part of the driver for Islamist growth), and as a result is fragile militarily as well.

Saddam Hussein’s daughters are convinced that the armies collapsed because they were betrayed. The reality is, as I kind of suggested, that the military might of Saddam’s Iraq was a sham. Col. Jeff Cooper (not the law professor) says that “owning a gun no more makes you a gunfighter than owning a guitar makes you a musician”; a mob of men in uniform, armed with AK-47’s may look like an army, may drill like an army, but without the training, doctrine, etc. etc. that makes up a real army, they are in fact, a mob of men armed with AK-47’s. Similarly, oil wealth may buy advanced fighters, and the tools to make missiles, but the ability to make – and use – these weapons is a part of a far more difficult task.

I can go buy much of the gear that a Ranger carries (I do, much of my backpacking and hiking gear is the effective equivalent). I may have some measure of the training with small arms that a Ranger has (as in fact I do); but that doesn’t make me and three friends like me the equivalent of a Ranger team.

Brutal dictators aren’t very good at the details. It’s a defect; they have a whole country to run and very few people they can trust.

So we have brittle armies defending weak states. They can (and will) resort to guerilla warfare and terrorism. Given time, and patience, we will defeat those.

It won’t be easy, painless, or cheap.

And we do have a potential vulnerability that Spengler correctly highlights; we do not appear to be as strong in our faith as our opponents. Our faith is harder to articulate, it is not based on a few greybeards who sit and read a holy book whose content is fixed.

But appearances can be deceiving; those who drive the nicest cars are not always the richest, nor those who spend all their time quoting scripture the most devout.

I’m confident that there is a deep well of faith in this country and in the values that we champion.

After all, I’ve met Sumi.

And while Spengler worries, and places his hope in

Grim men of faith – Loyola, Oldebarnevelt, Richilieu, Mazarin – led the religious wars of the 16th and 17th centuries, while the Florentines amused the tourists (The sacred heart of darkness, February 11). The trouble with Strauss, I reiterate, is that he was an atheist, rather a disadvantage in a religious war. The West has no armed prophet. It doesn’t even have an armed theologian.

I’ll suggest that we do; it’s a nineteen year old girl driving a Humvee while listening to Pink Limp Bizkit. It happens that that girl is trained to maintain the communications equipment being used by five teams of twenty-something young men as they chase down and kill Saddam’s last soldiers or the remnants of the Taliban. Their religion – their faith, like that of Sumi, is in the freedom, and hope, and possibility that we represent.

I’ll take Sumi and a million like her over Loyola and we’ll win this war in a walkover.

UPDATES: Porphy comments.

(musical selection corrected by reader email)

Well, it’s going to be a fun September here in California!! Here’s what we have on the plate:

1. The Recall. Do we vote 2nd term Governor and former Presidential aspirant Gray Davis out of office and send him home to his little-used West Hollywood condo? If we do that, are we damaging the Democratic Party? Are we damaging the State?

Assuming we do send him home, we have:

2. The Replacement. Who do we vote in to replace him? As of this afternoon, we have (in order of my perception of their electability) some major candidates…Arnold Schwartzenegger
Cruz Bustamente
Arianna Huffington
John Garamendi
Tom McClintock

Darryl Issa – the guy who funded the recall effort with $1.7 million of his own cash, just pulled out about an hour ago.

We also have

Audie Bock (ex-Green Assembly member from Oakland)
Peter Camejo (ex-Green candidate for Gov)
Larry Flynt (pornographer)
Jack Grisham (lead signer for punk band T.S.O.L.)

And last, but not least, Angelyne!!

If nothing else, it’s the full-employment-for-political-consultants month, and since some of them are my friends, I’m all for it.

As a voter, however, it’s kind of confusing.

First, I think that the recall is a Good Thing. I know it’s going to cost us money, and distract our politicians’ attention from the current set of crises. But I think that it’s a giant bucket of ice water splashed in the political establishment’s face, waking them up to the peasants with pitchforks standing outside the building howling with rage.

If you’ve read much of my stuff, you’ll know that I’m one of them. I’m tired of ‘seagull government’, I’m tired of paying taxes for programs that don’t work while ones that do get cut off and abandon people in real need, I’m tired of a government that manages to lack compassion, common sense, a sense of humility, and a sense of purpose beyond lunch and eventually getting a nice retirement paycheck … and here I’m talking about the elected officials, not the folks working at the DMV or the Welfare Department. It’s their management that makes them act the ways we don’t like, and their management that can and must change them. It’s the leaders who select that management who need to be kept accountable.

The system needs a slap in the face and a kick in the ass. It needs a lot more as well, stuff that will only come with long patient work and commitment, and the challenge will be to take that anger and turn it into fuel for the long haul ahead. But for now, we’ve got to get started someplace, and someplace feels like my local polling place in October.

I’m personally torn between the desire to have a grownup come in and clean up the mess – a Leon Panetta (Bustamente might make that level with me, I’ll have to think very hard), and someone who will come in, hang the legislators out of the window and shake them by their ankles until they see their way to more meaningful change – which would be an Arnold.

I’m going to be researching Bustamente with my friends in Sacramento. I’m disinclined to support him because supporting him dodges the larger-scale issues set out above…it doesn’t respond to change with anything except handing the job to the next guy in line for the job. But that’s not a firm position.

Panetta would be my ideal candidate – has enough political weight to have relations up and down the line, can call in friendships and favors, is smart about budget issues. He doesn’t address the ‘soft’ issues, but he probably would do the best job on the hard ones. Sadly, he isn’t in the race, and with today’s developments, is unlikely to jump in.

Ah-nold would probably be next. I’ve met him twice (once in the context of business, and once accidentally – a long time ago, pre-Terminator – in the gym, where he stopped to criticize my technique and wound up giving a half-hour seminar to fifteen people on situps), and frankly been impressed both times. He’s a smart businessman who has managed to surround himself with competent people in his chosen fields of endeavor – and that’s one of the first things I look for in judging someone. His policy mix is probably right down the middle for California – although he shoots, he’s probably pro-moderate gun regulation, pro-choice, pro-gay, pro-education. He has shown himself canny in his use of celebrity to further his goals – whether business or political – and he has the communication skills to use the bully pulpit, if he really has a message to give.

Jesse Ventura is the obvious comparison, and he turned out to be an awful governor. But…he was a commentator (a solo contributor, as opposed to a manager), and at the end of the day, he broke trail for Tim Pawlenty, who is from all accounts a damn good governor.

So it’s likely that Arnold has a better chance than Jesse to be competent (although he has the horrible disadvantages of no political relationships in Sacramento), and he may well serve the same function in breaking trail for someone better.

At this point, barring Panetta showing up by Saturday, or some news about Arnold that will shock me (a movie star who likes women!! The horror!! The horror!! Sorry, unless he’s a rapist, I can’t get upset about that…), I think I’m tipping his way.

There’s a problem…

…if he brings a GOP infrastructure with him, it will be an issue in the ’04 Presidential campaign, and if I believed it would be a close race in ’04 and that California was critical, I might waver a bit.

Lots to think about, and meanwhile, sit down, strap in, and hang on…this is definitely going to be interesting.

Via the estimable Oxblog, I discover a bunch of new-thinkers right here in Los Angeles, the ‘Hope Street Group’.

The Hope Street Group promotes principles and policies aimed at achieving an Opportunity Economy, in part by harnessing the skills, networks and resources of a new generation of business executives and professionals.

Sounds pretty good so far. They support what they call the ‘opportunity economy’, in which market incentives are created and market barriers lowered to ensure that everyone has a chance to participate. I definitely like the sound of that.

The details, however, need a bit of work.

They have several white papers available online. I’ll make one key suggestion for them; following on the excellent usability work of Jakob Nielsen, I’ll suggest that presenting multipage papers online only as pdf’s is a Bad And Annoying Thing.Let’s look at one of the papers; the paper on housing. It’s an area I know something about, having studied it in grad school, written some laws on the subject while working for the Jerry Brown administration, and worked as a consultant to developers of conventional and affordable housing (I have a couple of parallel careers, what can I say…).

Their paper is titled:

BUILDING A NATION OF HOMEOWNERS Making homes more affordable: downpayment assistance for first-time buyers

and suggests two basic policy changes:

Making homes more affordable: downpayment assistance for first-time buyers

Making homes more plentiful: a tax credit to spur affordable home construction

They propose to pay for this in large part by:

Adjusting the mortgage interest tax deduction

Limiting mortgage interest deductibility to mortgage principals below $300,000.

Although eliminating the tax deductibility of interest on mortgage principals between $300,000 and $1 million may seem drastic at first, that the reality is that only 7% of homes sell for more than $300,000, affecting just over one million homebuyers.

and

Eliminating the deductibility of interest on second/vacation home mortgages.

They admit one issue with their proposals:

“This proposal does not address local regulatory barriers or homeowner education programs, both of which make a crucial difference in promoting or hindering homeownership.”

Response: There is no question that local regulatory barriers are a major obstacle to home building and therefore to home ownership. The local control that creates these barriers must be preserved. But the local challenges facing developers make federal intervention all the more important. Because the market incentives to build affordable homes are blunted, federal incentives are crucial. Tax breaks to developers of the sort proposed here are designed to let builders get back to building.

First, and foremost, the idea of expanding homeownership – as a financial and social anchor – is one that truly can work for many people. They are right on in their diagnosis, but the prescription leaves something to be desired.

Let’s go through the points.

Downpayment assistance.

First, why? Why not revamp existing Federal mortgage programs to offer targeted insurance to homebuyers at 100% of the purchase price? The issue is that they will not have any stake in the purchase, and so you’ll see a high rate of default. My answer would be to take a Grameen Bank approach, and do two things. First, create a pool of credit that can be used but must be repaid, in conjunction with the high LTV loans. Leverage existing institutions – local churches and some nonprofits that can accept people into training programs, peer them with a small group of eight to ten others, and when they graduate, make them eligible for the loans…and responsible for each other’s performance – a key feature in Grameen Bank success stories. Have ongoing credit and homeownership training, and let them work toward either refinancing these ‘silent seconds’ out, or have them due on sale.

Second, the issue is typically the amount of overhead that goes into the government or nonprofit infrastructure in programs like this. By simply creating a new kind of FHA-insured home loan, you’ll expand the pool of capital and the existing real estate markets will make use of it; you can then layer on the added availability of ‘microcredit’ loans with a much smaller investment in infrastructure, and with a revolving pool of capital that will be, to a large extent, self-replenishing.

In addition, there is a limited pool of affordable housing in most communities – buyer subsidies will typically wind up in the hands of the sellers as the market clears with the price of homes pushed upward by the new supply of buyers.

They propose to deal with it through tax credit subsidies to for-sale housing developers, essentially extending the existing programs that have applied to rental housing. Nice for the developers, but in a marketplace with an immense demand for housing like the ones we have now, unlikely to have a significant impact.

They touch on it when they mention that local regulatory barriers are an issue.

Folks, they are the issue. Some time I will do a long post on the inherently corrupt and disastrous state of zoning practice in most of the country with which I am familiar, For now, suffice it to say that in the City of Los Angeles, it takes a minimum of eighteen months to get a significant project approved, and typically (and I’m not talking Ahmanson Ranch scale projects) takes two years.

Modest ‘affordable’ homes require high density in urban areas, and both the modest scale of the houses and the densities required mean strong local opposition as homeowners are concerned about protecting their home values from being reduced by an influx of ‘lesser’ homes.

Affordable for-sale housing (which I would generously define as costing $270,000 or less in Los Angeles) returns modest profits to the developers, as opposed to lower-density, larger, more expensive market-rate housing.

Greater difficulty, lower profits…hmmm.

They will doubtless kick off some housing development with this, and some developers who would have done projects regardless will wind up benefiting, but the overall impact in urban areas will be low.

They propose to finance these subsidies with modifications to the mortgage deductibility of ‘jumbo’ mortgages and second homes.

Now I actually agree with them; I actually floated proposals a while ago (before the mortgage interest deduction was capped at mortgages of $1,000,000) that we limit the mortgage interest deduction to 3x the national average, and that we eliminate the vacation home deduction (which is often used for Winnebagoes and boats, anyway). But the political reality is that those proposals are DOA.

Good luck, have fun storming the castle, as they say. Actually, it’s worse than that. Not only is their suggestion quixotic, but the current economy is in large part being kept afloat by high home prices combined with low-interest deductible mortgages.

These home prices are predicated on one thing – the ability to find new buyers who will pay as much or more. And if those buyers can’t deduct the mortgage interest – if they have to start paying those high prices with after-tax dollars. Well, you say, it will only impact the expensive houses, which will become less expensive. Driving down the price of the less-expensive houses, and so on ad infinitum.

Now personally, I think we have far too much of our national wealth trapped in our houses. I think we overconsume housing both in quantity and cost, and that we’d be better off as a nation (even though I’d be broke) if house prices were substantially lower relative to incomes, and if more liquid equities in productive companies were relatively a more attractive investment.

I’ll work through their other proposals in the next few days, and drop them a note and invite them to respond.

(edited to highlight quoted material)

Another good Nick Kristof column today.

I may have to rethink my opinion of him. Damn, I hate it when facts overrule prejudice.

Tomorrow will mark the anniversary of one of the most morally contentious events of the 20th century, the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. And after 58 years, there’s an emerging consensus: we Americans have blood on our hands.

There has been a chorus here and abroad that the U.S. has little moral standing on the issue of weapons of mass destruction because we were the first to use the atomic bomb. As Nelson Mandela said of Americans in a speech on Jan. 31, “Because they decided to kill innocent people in Japan, who are still suffering from that, who are they now to pretend that they are the policeman of the world?”

He then goes into the emerging history being uncovered by Japanese historians that suggests that the Bomb did in fact fracture the ruling coalition and create the possibility of surrender.

Read the whole thing.

UPDATE: Sparkey of Team Stryker adds more historical background.

I’ve been catching up on my blog reading tonight while Tenacious G catches us up on Quickbooks, and found a few things:

First of all, sign me right up for Vanderleun’s holiday campaign:

NO CDs FOR THE HOLIDAYS.
WEB TO RIAA: TWO WRONGS DON’T MAKE A RIGHT.

I haven’t bought any new CD’s since May. Just picked up a nice used copy of “Will the Circle be Unbroken” at Amazon. No greater effort than buying a new one, and I saved a few bucks. I won’t buy any more new CD’s this year. I may not buy any next year. My life doesn’t seem to be any worse for it. Yours won’t be either.

He’s looking for someone to design a web button … click on through and help him out.

I saw this in the L.A. Times Sunday magazine (intrusive registration etc. etc. use ‘laexaminer’/’laexaminer’) and assumed other bloggers would pick it up; I’m surprised that no one’s blogged this up until now, so I’ll toss it out there. The subtitle was:

His Behavior Was Bizarre. His Peers Insulted His Muslim Faith. He Was Shipped Off to Fight in Iraq. Then He Allegedly Murdered Two Army Officers.

And a sympathetic look at the Iraqi fragger follows. It opens:

Once a month Quran Bilal drives north out of Baton Rouge, La., in her black Nissan, a car so old she cannot remember its year, only that she paid $700 for it used and that the odometer has now turned 148,000 clicks. A side window is broken and the air-conditioning blows hot.

Bilal endures it because this is the only way she can visit her son, Sgt. Hasan Akbar, her eldest, who is confined to a military brig at Ft. Knox, Ky.

…

As disturbing as the attack was, Akbar’s defense is equally troubling. His mother and his military lawyers say he snapped in the face of relentless ridicule, of him and of Muslims in general. He had complained before his arrest that soldiers and officers harassed him and scared him and trampled on his religion. Moments after his arrest, according to fellow soldiers, he blurted out that he feared ”American soldiers were going to kill and rape Muslims” once Iraq was taken.

If we expect that the U.S. military is a microcosm of society, then such harassment isn’t terribly surprising, especially after Sept. 11. But if we expect the military, with its rigorous oversight and strong need for cohesive fighting units, to have less tolerance for religious harassment and other divisive forces, then Akbar’s case may provide a painful lesson of the kind the nation has wrestled with since the shootings at Columbine High School in Colorado and elsewhere where the killers felt they had been hazed or shunned by their peers.

There’s more…

Articles like this tend to make me want to gnaw my way through the newspaper.

The good defense attorneys – the $450/hour ones and the ones who take the high-profile pro-bono cases – have become masters of publicity, and I tend to look at articles like this as a salvo in the upcoming legal battle.

Even if not explicitly placed by the defense, they say a lot about our attitude toward crime and criminals.

The hazing is real, the murders alleged. The article stakes out a broad social critique, and then spirals down to focus on one obviously disturbed young man.

In Akbar’s case, it should be noted, harassment might have been just part of the problem. Soldiers testified at his preliminary military court proceedings this summer that he was known for strange behavior, a flaw he does not deny. At his Ft. Campbell, Ky., Army base and in the Kuwaiti desert awaiting combat in Iraq, he often seemed aloof and confused. Soldiers recalled him pacing aimlessly, talking to himself, laughing and smiling at nothing. Army superiors said he was passed over for promotions, given second and third chances to shape up and then reassigned to more mundane duties.

…

But despite these advances, his performance began to falter and his superiors began noticing odd behavior. His conduct mystified them, leaving them at a loss to explain his sudden changes. It ultimately led to his being frozen out of future promotions.

Several superiors testified at Akbar’s preliminary military court proceedings that he was late for assignments. On a training exercise to Louisiana, where he was in charge of making sure other soldiers brought their gear, officers said he forgot his duffel bag. He misplaced his dogtags. On the day of the Sept. 11 attacks, when the base was on high alert, he showed up at the gate without his ID badge, the supervisors said.

Army officers said they found him asleep in training classes. They watched him sneak into Army vehicles and try to sleep away the afternoon. He could not keep up with physical exercise, they said, a failing for any sergeant expected to lead troops. He walked aimlessly, sometimes talking or laughing to himself.

There’s an interesting story to be done…about how an Army with a substantial number of Muslim soldiers – at war with a Muslim nation – manages the obvious conflicts of fellowship and anger. There is a story about the tragic intersection of events in the Kuwait desert that cost two lives – un-named, unremarked except as “It was kind of an ugly scene there,” said Capt. Terence Bacon, one of the wounded. “A lot of noise. A lot of screaming. A lot of blood.” A good story might have balanced the lives of the dead and the accused and made us wonder how their lives diverged.

Instead we’re treated to a story which does two things. It humanizes a man who we trained to be a killer and who may well instead have become a murderer, breaking the ground for a sympathetic defense. And it lays the blame for the incident fully on the institution, not the individual.

Actually, it does a third, which is to remind me once again how the internal bias and contradictions in the modern corporate media are so damn maddening.