I was going to just walk on by Professor Cole’s latest attack on his own credibility and then I read this:

US troops in the neighborhood attracted the interest of children. At first the soldiers tried to wave them away, but then gave in and handed out candy. Presumably Baath or fundamentalist intelligence already had the US convoy under surveillance, and they saw this moment as an ideal time to act. A bomb-laden SUV slammed into the scene, killing over 30 persons, mostly children, and at least one US soldier. It also left over 25 wounded. The dead were immediately taken to the Shiite holy city of Najaf for burial.

I heard a report on National Public Radio on Wednesday quoting one of the bereaved mothers as blaming the Americans for the childrens’ deaths (insofar as they were the occasion for the bombing).

(emphasis added)

So no matter how heinous the act of the terrorists, it is, of course, the American’s fault.

OK, that’s annoying. So let me take a minute and make sure you’ve caught up on The Professor’s latest. It’s not like I haven’t taken my own swings at Professor Cole, but this is just embarrassing (that is, embarrassing for him). It appears that he:

1. Made a gross error (link is to a grab of his site by Martin Kramer) in his post – a la Pape – blaming Islamic terrorism on Western occupation (he suggested that 9/11 was a reaction to the massacre at Jenin…which not only never happened, but didn’t happen in 2002, well after 9/11/2001);

2. When Martin Kramer gutted him on his mistakes, Cole “Winston Smithed” his mistake (changed it without note or comment) and then posted a lame apologia when he was caught out. I like the term “Winston Smithed” – or just “Winstoned” and encourage people to use it often when appropriate;

3. When Kramer busted him for doing that, he posted this request to the Kossaks:

Please do up an oppo research diary on Martin Kramer. Who is he? Where did he come from? When he was head of the Dayan Center in Tel Aviv, to whom did he report in the Israeli intelligence community? Who funded his work on Hizbullah? Was he fired from heading the Dayan Center? How does he suddenly show back up in the US after a 20-year absence with a book that blames unpreparedness for 9/11 on US professors of Middle East Studies instead of on the Israeli Mossad and the US CIA/FBI? What was his role in getting up the Iraq War and in advising the US on the wrong-headed policies that have gotten so many Americans killed? Who pays his salary, now, exactly? What are his links with AIPAC, and with the shadowy world of far-right Zionist think tanks and dummy organizations?

Basically, he asked the mob to go burn Kramer down. Note that I’m aware of Kramer’s interest in compiling a dossier of writings by Cole and others; I think there’s a big difference in compiling a catalog of someone’s work – for which they are responsible, as I’m responsible for my words here – and digging into the career of an opponent with the clear intent of unearthing damaging information.

When called on that bad behavior, he simply edited it out of existence.

Kramer, on the other hand, did a hysterical job of creating a ‘research diary‘ on himself, while skewering the pretentious professor.

Look, I think I’ve learned my own lesson on tone from my meeting with Adam Bellow (and note that I’ve got a draft post tying him to Valentino Rossi, so watch out). I read Cole every day, and I’m sure that I’ve learned a few things in the time I’ve been reading him.

Sadly, one of those is that he’s not really a very nice guy.

Another is that he deserves to be mocked – primarily because of his claim to authority in his arguments. Look, there are people in the blogs who are real experts in things (Daniel Drezner, Larry Solum), and what’s interesting is how seldom (if ever) they wave the flag of their academic authority, and how often Professor Cole waves his.

As another voice in the gentle babble of the blogosphere, Cole’s as entitled to his positions and arguments as the rest of us. Let’s just leave it at that.

But it would be nice if he played by the rules the rest of us play by – and cut out the attacks on people rather than arguments, and most of all realized that when he Winstons, the thing that gets erased first is his own credibility.

Ok, so:

…the former head of the Los Angeles Urban League, sheriff’s deputies from San Francisco and Orange Counties, a lawyer for a large home-building company and a leader of a textile workers union

walk into a bar.

What do they all have in common?

Two obvious things, as far as I can tell.

First, they are all, in one way or another highly dependent on government policy for their financial well-bring (note that the same could be said of a defense contractor, an insurance company executive or a host of others).

Second, they are the ones who set the compensation of the California legislators and constitutional officials. In the face of an ongoing state fiscal crisis, they just gave the legislators a 12% raise.

Hmmmm.

I notice the potential for some seriously distorting feedback here. What do you think??

As I noted in a comment below, I happened to look up as I was reading the Pape interview and see my copy of Conrad’s ‘The Secret Agent‘ on the dining room bookshelf (between Larry Brown’s ‘Facing the Music‘ and Gordon Dickson’s ‘Tactics of Mistake,’ in case you care…).

And I dredged out of my memory the notion that we may just have been here before; grieving over the torn bodies of the victims of terrorists.

Part of the reason I’ve argued for so long (in the face of some heated opposition) that there are some common intellectual and historical roots between the New Left (which is really the mainstream left today) and Islamism is because – in part – the New Left has it’s roots in the decades of terror in the late 1800’s and in the philosophies that shaped them.

From Malaesta’s “Propaganda by deed” in 1876 to the Wall Street Bombing in 1920 (arguably the first car bomb), anarchist & socialist ‘true believers’ – and those who fell into their wake – killed czars and kings as well as industrialists and those unlucky enough to be standing close by.

The response within Europe was brutal, ruthless, and doubtless – by our standards – impossibly unjust.

But the movement had put down roots, and as it grew … through Fanon and Guevara, who became the icons of the praxis-oriented members of the New Left in Columbia, Port Huron, and Paris.

The levels of violence in Europe in the 1890’s were far lower than those we’re seeing in the Middle East today, and the intensity was lower as well. But we live in a faster-moving, more connected world, and the tools for big explosions don’t just come from Nobel’s factories any more.

I think it’s worth exploring this history a little bit, and seeing what it was that brought on – and most important, what brought down – the levels of public violence. I’d encourage folks to add what they know, and will post on it again in the near future.

You know, I actually think the Governator (California Governor Arnold Schwartzenegger) is doing much a better job than he’s often credited for in the media. But he’s stepped in something squishy and foul-smelling, and he’d better get his shoes cleaned up before he tracks it into the house.

Two days before he was sworn into office, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger accepted a consulting job paying an estimated $8 million over five years to “further the business objectives” of a national publisher of health and bodybuilding magazines.

The contract pays Schwarzenegger 1% of the magazines’ advertising revenue, much of which comes from makers of nutritional supplements. Last year, the governor vetoed legislation that would have imposed government regulations on the supplement industry.

According to records filed Wednesday with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Schwarzenegger entered into the agreement with a subsidiary of American Media Inc. on Nov. 15, 2003. The Boca Raton, Fla.-based company publishes Muscle & Fitness and Flex magazines, among others.

Now it gets worse, because the parent of these magazines, American Media, also published the National Enquirer and other tabloids.

I remember reading an oped in the LA Times suggesting that the tabloids had deliberately laid off of Arnie because of a business arrangement between him and their publisher , and dismissing it as implausible.

It’s not so implausible now, and the Gov. had better get his shoes cleaned quickly.

I’ve had my eye on this book for a while – “Dying to Win: The Logic of Suicide Terrorism” by Robert Pape of the University of Chicago. Kevin Drum linked to an interview with Professor Pape in the American Conservative.

He makes some statements sure to raise the hackles on some of our readers…but I’d want to read his research before responding, and to be honest, an exhaustive review of suicide bombing is worth going over, regardless of whether the ideology expressed by the author agrees with your or not. I think hackle-raising is good, and that it’s important to challenge your assumptions to see how well they stand up.

In the interview, he says:

TAC: So if Islamic fundamentalism is not necessarily a key variable behind these groups, what is?

RP: The central fact is that overwhelmingly suicide-terrorist attacks are not driven by religion as much as they are by a clear strategic objective: to compel modern democracies to withdraw military forces from the territory that the terrorists view as their homeland. From Lebanon to Sri Lanka to Chechnya to Kashmir to the West Bank, every major suicide-terrorist campaign—over 95 percent of all the incidents—has had as its central objective to compel a democratic state to withdraw.

TAC: That would seem to run contrary to a view that one heard during the American election campaign, put forth by people who favor Bush’s policy. That is, we need to fight the terrorists over there, so we don’t have to fight them here.

RP: Since suicide terrorism is mainly a response to foreign occupation and not Islamic fundamentalism, the use of heavy military force to transform Muslim societies over there, if you would, is only likely to increase the number of suicide terrorists coming at us.

Since 1990, the United States has stationed tens of thousands of ground troops on the Arabian Peninsula, and that is the main mobilization appeal of Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda. People who make the argument that it is a good thing to have them attacking us over there are missing that suicide terrorism is not a supply-limited phenomenon where there are just a few hundred around the world willing to do it because they are religious fanatics. It is a demand-driven phenomenon. That is, it is driven by the presence of foreign forces on the territory that the terrorists view as their homeland. The operation in Iraq has stimulated suicide terrorism and has given suicide terrorism a new lease on life.

Now this is an interesting statement on a number of levels, and one I want to think hard about. He ties suicide bombing closely to nationalist (i.e. territorial) aspirations, not to cultural ones.

This seems like one of those “cleavage” notions; your perceptions on this issue will drive you to one side or the other of a deep political divide. If you believe this is relatively tightly tied to nationalist aspirations, then the terrorists become part and parcel of the admirable line of those fighting for their homelands. If not, it’s the Clash of Cultures, and a global war.

I’ve suggested for a while that there are some fuzzy bridges between the two; that Franz Fanon and Che Guevera are connected to Qutb and Osama bin Laden.

I’ll also suggest that – since I now take the words of our enemies very seriously – you go look at Bin Laden’s original 1998 fatwa; which was based largely on his outrage at the US war against Iraq in the first Gulf War, and on the presence of U.S. military on the Arabian Peninsula.

Personally, I’m inclined to believe that there would have been another causus belli for the Islamists had it not been this. But I think this is an interesting question, and look forward to reading the book.

It’s late, and I just got home and am squeezing in a few minutes at the computer.

There are a lot of things I want to blog about (the backlog is big) but I couldn’t let today pass without mentioning the anniversary of the Srebrenica massacre; the most prominent, but not the only, failure of the ‘peacekeeping’ model.

Much of what I do for a living involves negotiation, and one thing that has been clear to me is that there are people for whom a successful negotiation is the single most important outcome – they cannot accept that negotiations are episodic, and that if one side ‘s desired outcome is a successful negotiation, and the other’s is – anything at all – that it’s often the case that both sides will get when they want.

Churchill famously said “jaw jaw jaw is better than war war war,” and he was right. Talking is better than fighting.

As long as talking is all that is going on, and as long as it simply isn’t a matter of the other side buying time saying “nice doggie” while finding the appropriate stick, or worse, buying time while busily erasing the living evidence of their crimes.

The L.A. Times had an excellent article about Srebrenica today, as did the New York Times, who focused in part on the trauma the events presented to the Dutch soldiers guarding the Muslim enclave.

Mandated to defend the U.N.-declared ”safe haven,” the Dutch battalion stood by as the carnage unfolded, and has been accused by some of sharing responsibility for the worst massacre in Europe since World War II.

Nearly 8,000 people died after Bosnian Serbs overran the enclave 10 years ago Monday. While the Dutch watched, the Serbs separated Muslim men and boys from their families, loaded them into trucks and took them away for execution. The U.N. war crimes tribunal in The Hague has ruled it was genocide.

Official inquiries have cleared the 370 troops of blame. Overwhelmed, undermanned, under-armed and with orders to shoot only in self defense, they were helpless to stop the onslaught, independent investigators have concluded.

The false appearance of strength and the structures of negotiation are not a useful defense against evil.

He suggests that today’s not a day to score political points. It’s a day to comfort, study, and contemplate.

So for the last three weeks, I’ve been dealing with a very depressed Tenacious G. We went away over the Father’s Day weekend, and came back to discover that our last remaining cat – the feral kitten Biggest Guy had brought home and – imaginatively – named Kit had gone out and not come back.

For the last three weeks, we flyered the neighborhood, visited local vets and shelters, and walked around bothering our neighbors to no effect.

This morning, as I got up to make coffee, tea, and cocoa for the house, I heard a familiar mewing sound from the back door.

A healthy but skinnier Kit was there, wondering what I was making her for breakfast.

She got AIMS and pumpkin.

Happiness reigns in small things, indeed…

One of my favorite books is by an old professor from my alma mater – one who I sadly never took a class from.

Page Smith wrote the out-of-print “A New Age Now Begins: A People’s History of the American Revolution.” It’s no puerile Marxist reimagining, a la Howard Zinn, but a peoples’-eye view of the events around our Founding.

One thing you get from it – clearly – is the incredible level of change and risk that the Founders took, and took with a clear and open eye.

He talks about the events of July 2 and 3, as the Congress debates the resolution that would finally make the United States independent.

After all these bargainings and maneuvers it seemed that Congress would at last, pressed and cajoled, vote with great reluctance to declare the colonies “free and independent” when the delegates met the next day. But John Adams, weary from a day of feverish politicking and chagrined that his oratory had failed of its purpose, wrote to Samuel Chance that the “great debate” that was to have terminated in a unanimous vote had been instead “an idle dispense of time.” He was confident that with the hoped-for arrival of Rodney the next day, the resolution would pass “perhaps almost with unanimity.” But, he added with his characteristic realism. “If you imagine that I expect this declaration will ward off calamities from this country, you are much mistaken. A bloody conflict we are destined to endure. This has been my opinion from the beginning…If you imagine that I flatter myself with happiness and halcyon days after a separation from Great Britain, you are mistaken again. I do not expect that our new government will be as quiet as I could wish, nor that happy harmony, confidence and affection between the colonies that every good American ought to study, labor, and pray for, will come for a long time. But freedom is a counterbalance for poverty, discord and war, and more. It is your hard lot and mine to be called into life at such a time. Yet,” he added, “even these times have their pleasures.”

I’ll leave you with those words, and one of my own:

Happy Independence Day to everyone.

It would be funny if it weren’t so predictable; Duncan Black (Atrios) has been waving the “chickenhawk” meme again.

I thought I’d beaten this to death and put a stake in it. It’s an immoral position, a politically naive position, and one that undermines our polity. Plus it’s just plain rude.

But let’s play the hand out a bit. As I noted before, as a fellow liberal, I’ll bet he supports higher taxes on the rich (see this Google search).

When Duncan asks his paymaster, George Soros, or his candidate John Kerry, to voluntarily pay higher taxes – because it’s a policy he supports – he can open his mouth try and intimidate a bunch of GOP kids into silence without being such an obvious hypocrite.

I’m sure Soros could easily write a check for $10 – $20 million, and in seriously encouraging him doing that, Duncan could provide leadership that might actually crack open the taxes issue.

I won’t be holding my breath.