INTRODUCTORY COMMENTS



The Link with the Buggy Series on Pape

Some clarifying comments about the use of "Fascism" and its meaning seem very much in order at this point, particularly since several earlier buggy article in this series on Pape's Dying to Win --- a whitewash laundry-job of Islam's almost total monopoly (94%) of dozens of suicide terrorist groups since 1980 --- have referred numerous times to Islamo-Fascism and to Fundamentalist Islamo-Fascism . . . or just plain Jihadist Islamic fundamentalism.

The two Islamo-Fascist ideologies, it goes without saying, obviously share something basic and significant in common --- a thrust toward totalitarian control over a country's political, administrative, legal, military, and economic systems, with little room, if any, for a civil society of vigorously independent non-state groups and organizations. And both encourage the use of terrorism on a large scale, but differ for the reasons behind the use. At the same time, as you'll see in Part One, they differ in some other ways even as they both draw on the key credos and traditions of European Fascism of the interwar period.



How Today's Article Unfolds

1) In Part One, we'll set out a fast-moving survey of the two dominant kinds of Islamo-Fascism. The aim here is to give you a working idea, nothing more, of what they are and some concrete examples of them.

2) In Part Two, the buggy argument will look at interwar European Fascism, noting the varieties and differences among them with some precision and abundant examples and show how --- despite the varieties --- there was a shared core of ideological tenets that the two contemporary forms of Islamo-Fascism share too despite their own differences about totalistic control of all social, private, and religious life in the name of Islamic purity and revitalization.

3) In the third part, we'll try to clarify with lots of examples what the two ideologies of Islamo-Fascism amount to and how they differ in specific ways, with the buggy argument unfolded there reinforcing the links of each to European Fascisms of the interwar period.

4) The 4th part will then look at the extravagant whiteout snowjob that Pape unfolds in chapter 7 --- and in a few places elsewhere in his book --- that makes Islamist-Fascist fundamentalism look like little else other than a harmless resistance to modernity and atomistic liberal and capitalist tendencies.

To read Pape, the whitewashing apologist par excellent, you might think that you're back in the world of Harrison Ford's role in Witness, where --- an honest cop on the run being sought by sell-out cops --- he takes refuge among nice-guy Amish people, with the clash between his modern cultural outlook and their admirable desire to lead a simple, non-modern agrarian existence duplicated --- on a global level, at any rate in Pape-land fantasy --- between raucous American and globalizing forces on one side and altruistic, nice-guy Islamic Puritans on the others fighting only for national self-determination. And who but neo-conservative fanatics and simple-minded George Bush and lapdog Tony Blair could object, diplomatically and militarily, to these Islamic Puritans in search of their Amish-like rural existence amid a benevolent global caliphate and a very very reluctant resort to terrorism and especially suicide-terrorism as a last desperate effort, nothing more, to free themselves from democratic military oppressors?





PART ONE:
ISLAMO-FASCIST FUNDAMENTALISM OF THE JIHAD SORT --- SOME MORE PRELIMINARY CLARIFICATION

The numerous jihadist terrorist groups busily active Kabooming, and assassinating around the world --- the use of savage beheading with a dull scimitar or long knife their preferred weapon for the latter ---- are almost too numerous these days to list briefly. Think of Hamas, Hezbollah, Islamic Jihad, the Algerian GIA, the Abu Sayyaf Group and Jemaah Islamiya Organization active in the Philippines, Indonesia, and the rest of Southeast Asia, Chechen groups now thoroughly motivated by jihadist hatred, and of course al Qaeda and its teeming affiliates and imitators of world-wide . . . probably dozens of the latter. If they flourish abundantly, they do so in no small part because they enjoy the indispensable support of large numbers of imams, sheiks, ayatollahs, charities, publicists, and journalists around the world too, even in the United States and Europe. By the same token, they also enjoy the active support --- financial, logistic, and access to their territories --- of Baathist Syria, fundamentalist genocidal Sudan, Wahhabi Saudi Arabia, and Shi-ite Iran . . . as they once did of the now defunct Afghan Taliban regime.

Then, too, a fairly large number of the Muslim masses world-wide also support or admire these jihadist movements, and in a few moments, we'll try to pin down how many. For the moment, though, concentrate on clairfying the . . .

 

. . . Two Sorts of Islamo-Fascisms

Four Noticeable Differences

(i.) The first big difference concerns the role of radical Islamist fundamentalism and jihadist terrorism in the two kinds of Islamo-Fascisms.

The Islamo-Fascists who aren't fundamentalists don't use terrorism to attack infidels and Muslim enemies in the name of a pure, revitalized Islam. They do use terrorism and on a large scale, but they aren't jihadists who are bent on waging war and encouraging terrorism to purify Islamic societies, bring an end to their decline and decadence, and control and revolutionize all aspects of social, cultural, intellectual, and religious life --- for that matter, all private life too, and in the name of a true, thoroughly sanitized Islam --- as a precondition of renewed power, glory, and conquests for Islam world-wide.

Jihadist fundamentalist terrorist groups and states, to clarify briefly, are motivated by this kind of imaginary pristine, all-conquering utopia and the religious fervor it evokes.

They believe that this pure and powerful Muslim utopia existed from the 8th through the 15th or 16th centuries, marked by vast Islamic conquests: those by the Arabs of Christian, Persian, and pagan lands in the 7th and 8th centuries, then Ottoman imperial conquests in Europe and elsewhere from the late Middle Ages on, then Tatar rule over Russia, and finally Mogul conquest over Hindu India. More to the point, they believe that this pristine, powerful, militarily conquering Islam can be restored in the future --- not just in some distant future, mind you; rather in the next two decades or so. By contrast, if Islamo-Fascist states like Baathist Syria, Baathist Iraq, and the PLO use terrorism, it's strictly for statist reasons --- which doesn't mean they are unwilling to use, manipulate, or even sponsor jihadist terrorist groups if they promise to further their own largely secular interests. And despite almost universal belief that Saddam Hussein's Baathist dictatorship didn't have links to al Qaeda and meetings with its representatives, even ABC News now admits --- thanks to the slow release by the US government of official Baathist documents --- that they had officially sanctioned meetings together. (For a far more detailed analysis by an outstanding investigative journalist, click here.)

 

(ii.) At the same time --- a second difference just hinted at --- the two Islamo-Fascisms also differ in the visions they have of total control over all social, cultural, and religious life.

When Jihadist Islamo-Fascism seizes state-power somewhere, it institutes a full-fledged totalitarian control over all public and private life without exception, and in that sense it resembles Nazi Germany before and during WWII. From Pape's snowjob whiteout, you'd never know this. You'd not even suspect that Islamic fundamentalism is dedicated to killing Muslims who convert to other religions, to imposing servile conditions on all women, to stoning women to death who are regarded as adulteresses and justifying honor-killings of wayward sisters and daughters (even those raped), to inflicting subservient status on Christian and Jewish minorities (including yearly taxes, the jizya, to the benevolent Muslim state in charge --- a huge annual transfer of wealth that has reinforced 1400 years of rentier-mentality in Muslim societies) while killing off Buddhists, Hindus, Pagans, and what have you, and to instituting terror on a large scale policed by religious fanatics as in Saudi Arabia, Taliban Afghanistan, Shi-ite Iran, and fundamentalist genocidal Sudan.

From Pape's pap, you'd never know that even Algeria --- whose military dictatorship fought and defeated jihadi mass-murderers in a ferocious 10-year long war --- has passed legislation making it a crime for anyone to preach an alternative to Islam. Now you know.

There is, to repeat, no private life whatsoever in Islamic fundamentalism that individuals and families themselves have freedom of choice over that is independent of what imams, ayatollahs, dictators, secret-police and whip-lashing Vice and Sin police torturers decide for them. It's total thought-control, justified in the name of pure Islam; and even if --- which is unlikely --- fundamentalists would be able to seize total power in a highly flawed electoral democracy as in Turkey, you could be sure that their fervent members and leaders would seek similar totalitarian control. It's part of their base-line credos. It's what they believe and stand for. For that matter, a good century or so after the secular revolution in Turkey, 40% of men in a recent opinion survey there favored stoning women who committed adultery.

In all these respects, Islamo-Fascist Fundamentalism is indistinguishable in its total destruction of individual and civil liberties --- never mind tolerance of other religions or secular ideologies --- from Nazi Germany, Stalinist Russia, Maoist China, Pol-Pot's Cambodia, and North Korea today.

The more secular Islamo-Fascists who seize power behave differently. The Baathist Parties in Syria and in Iraq before 2003 created a quasi-totalitarian rule of a brutal and mass-murdering sort, shot-through with the use of terror, but never sought to control and reshape all social, cultural, and private life in their countries, and in that sense secular Islamo-Fascism resembles much more Mussolini's Fascist Italy.



Some Sidebar Clarifications:

For an outstanding, readable historical survey by David Brooks of the Baathist Parties' huge debt to Italian Fascism and Nazi Germany, click here .

The Muslim Brotherhood --- whose emergence in the 1920s paralleled the secular Baathist movements, but had a radical fundamentalist thrust with a wide fallout on all subsequent jihadi terrorist groups world-wide --- was also heavily influenced by both Fascist and Nazi ideologies.

Similar comments --- including the Fascist influences --- apply to Yasser Arafat's PLO and later the Palestinian Authority. Revealingly, to get down to cases, Arafat's mentor --- the Mufti of Jerusalem in the 1930s and early 1940s and the spiritual leader of the Palestinian people --- was a Nazi who took refuge in World War II in Berlin, where he became a crony chum of Hitler, helped organized the Hanjar SS Division of Bosnian Muslims, and encouraged Hitler's Holocaust genocide. Condemned after the war by the Nuremberg Tribunals for war crimes, the Mufti was wanted for execution by both Communist Yugoslavia and democratic Britain, but he fled to Egypt where he met the young Arafat and mentored him for years, going so far as to claim, falsely, that Arafat was a blood relative.

Arafat's PLO was and remains after his death a corrupt, largely secular Islamo-Fascism . . . clinging to terrorism and, if need be, the use of Islamo-Jihadi terrorist groups to that end. After 2000, though, it found that it couldn't control either Hamas or Islamic Jihad --- both Sunni Islamo-Fascist groups, influenced by Muslim Brotherhood ideology--- or for that matter maintain popularity with the masses as the two mass-murdering jihadi Fascist groups resorted to several hundred suicide terrorist attempts. With Hamas' recent election, there seem to be only three alternatives open to the Palestinian rivals: the fundamentalist terrorist groups --- now augmented by al Qaeda's presence in Gaza and the West Bank --- either fall into civil war with Fatah and other secular Palestinians, or instead gradually, but without major violence, move in the direction of Islamo-Fascist totalitarian rule in stealthy limited steps, or opt if it wins the civil war with Fatah and the other secular groups for immediate totalitarian control over all the social, cultural, religious, and private lives of the Palestinian people.

In Pape-land, none of these totalitarian tendencies exist. How could they? The Kaboomers are only "altruistic", "community'minded" nationalists fighting oppression. Only a few extremist Salafis --- clearly a minority in Pape's whitewashed presentation --- would even remotely embrace them.

So how come Hamas's new leader upon acceding to power in the Palestinian Authority says the following?

Chanting "God is Greatest" after the 71-to-36 vote, Hamas lawmakers hugged and kissed Ismail Haniyeh, their teary-eyed prime minister-designate who vowed to not to abandon the fight against Israel.

"The Koran is our constitution, Jihad is our way, and death for the sake of God is our highest aspiration," Hamas lawmaker Hamed Bitawi said.

'Tuesday's comments stood in contrast to a more conciliatory speech by Haniyeh on Monday in which he stressed the new government's push for peace and dialogue'. (Reuters' Dispatch, March 28, 2005)

 

(iii.) Enter another big difference. Both Islamo-Fascisms, it goes without saying again, have built-in thrusts towards outward expansion and conquest.

But whereas Baathist Syria and Baathist Iraq --- which were power-rivals, near to war at times --- have sought regional dominance, Islamo-Fascist fundamentalism in the era of al Qaeda led by the megalomanical bin Laden, who believes he has been directed by Allah to become Islam's new global savior, has far more fervent, full-blown universal pretensions.

Consider these pretensions more carefully. Today's jihadist Fascists are convinced, in a wild-eyed crazy way, that while they create and institutionalize a new caliphate world-wide amid ever purified Islamic countries, they will be simulaneously able --- thanks to controlling most of the world's oil resources and obtaining weapons of mass destruction, not to forget the use of jihadist self-sacrifice --- to renew the earlier conquests by Islam of all infidel lands, and this time, unlike in the past, succeed everywhere. Yes, on a global level. All fundamentalist Islam takes seriously the division of the world into the spheres of Islam and of kafir infidels, with Muslims everywhere obligated, theocratically and morally, to wage war against them until they are all converted to Islam, killed off, or submit as dhimmi inferiors to Muslim rule and superiority.

This outlook, to repeat, is built into the very fabric of Islamic credos and traditions, and is not an aberration even if the secular quasi-totalitarian regimes --- never mind the more straightforward kleptocratic autocrats in the rest of the Muslim world --- no longer practice it. On the strict duty of Muslims in Islamic traditions to wage war against infidels and kill or force them into subservience until Islam dominates the world, click here for the Ayatollah Khomeini's raging take on this . . . Khomeini the most important influence in Shi-ite theology in the last century, and the man who led the Iranian revolution and became the Supreme Leader a la Hitler (above all laws and constitutional restraint) in the new regime.

In case you think this is a strictly Shi-ite version, click here for bin Laden's take on jihadist duties to kill Americans, their allies, and others . . . plus an analysis of the arch-terrorist's rattle-bin megalomania.



 

Enter The 4th Difference: Megalomaniacal Pathologies

(iv.) To this list of differences between the two kinds of Islamo-Fascisms, we need to add some comments about the contrasts between their major leaders. The biggest contrast here is the degree of realism about what these leaders think they can achieve in the near future with their use of terrorism and their grasp on the limits of their power.

Take Saddam Hussein. He was clearly a pathological megalomaniac who likened himself to the new Mohammed, but his foreign policy ambitions were informed much more by a cunning sense of realities. His major ambitions were to become the dominant regional power in the Persian Gulf area and destroy or at least defeat Shiite Iran in war: the latter goal achieved by the late 1980s, the former --- he hoped --- by his invasion of Kuwait and formal annexation. What he would have done if he had gotten away with it, forcing Saudi Arabia and the other oil-producing countries in the area to submit to his dominance, isn't clear.

By contrast, in the bin Laden era of al Qaeda's global network, affiliates, and imitators, Islamo-Fascist Fundamentalism is led by a megalomanic whose ambitions are charged with crackling fervor and manic universal pretensions. He and his ardent follows believe that they will soon succeed --- by use of jihadist terror --- to destroy the apostate Muslim governments, seize control of the Muslim populations around the world, establish a global caliphate, and use it and the lavish oil resources, money-bag finance that flow from them, and the acquisition of WMD to wage global jihad against the infidels. This way, in short order --- no more than a decade or two into the future --- he and his jihadist followers, affiliates, and supporters will end Islam's decline and decadence, revitalize its purity, and succeed in restoring all the glories, expansion of power, and spread of Islam that the great Muslim empires of the Arabs, Ottomans, Tatars, and Moguls of the past.

 

Parallels with Hitler and Mussolini

These differences between two half-crazed megalomaniacs parallels those that separated Hitler from Mussolini in power.

Grasp on Rule and on Power-Realities

Mussolini never had the wild-eyed grandiose ambitions to conquer all of Europe, and from there, the rest of the world, that Hitler did. As the Nazi slogans put it, Heute Deutschland, Morgen die Welt! . . . Today Germany, Tomorrow the World. Hitler took these ambitions seriously, convinced that once Germany conquered the Soviet Union, it would use the territory and its resources for German development and German immigration . . . with the Slavic populations killed off or enslaved. From that base, given long-standing German views about power, geography, and resources that long preceded Nazism, Germany would be able to expand globally in a variety of ways and dominate the entire world.

Mussolini, full of histrionics and bluff, had a keener sense of what Italian Fascism could accomplish even as an ally of Nazi Germany in World War II. Despite the German-Italian alliance, he didn't invade France along the Riviera and Alpine areas until a few days before its final defeat, needed later German aid to save the Italians from being routed in Yugoslavia after their invasion of it, and later was saved from total capitulation in North Africa fighting the British only because of Rommel's huge and efficient German army. No less important, Mussolini and his Fascists never achieved total totalitarian control over Italy, and they were in fact deposed and Mussolini arrested by the Italian government (aided by the monarchy and Church) in 1943 as American and British forces moved directly onto Rome. Mussolini was then rescued by a Nazi-elite unit, which moved him behind German lines to North Italy. There he established a rump Fascist government, only to try escaping into Switzerland as Nazi forces surrendered nearly everywhere in Europe; captured by anti-Fascist partisans, he was shot, and his body taken to Milan, hung upside down, and spat on by the Italians who formerly admired him.

Note, once more, that these differences are also reflected on both the foreign policy and domestic systems created by secular Islamo-Fascist regimes and the more full-fledged totalitarianism and jihadist use of terrorism that Islamo-Fascist Fundamentalists institute.



Some Reading Tips Here



* On the crazed grandiose ambitions and goals of Islamo-Fascist Jihadi-Fundamentlism, see this excellent survey by a scholar who has spent decades studying Islamist jihadist fervor, aims, and violence --- unlike Pape, whose knowledge of the subject seems limited to a half dozen articles and essays, one of which actually endorses global jihad and mass-murder, another written by a post-modernist follower of Michel Foucault, and the other two or three pieces by lightweight apologists. For a good if brief analysis of a 13 page letter sent by al Qaeda's number two man and chief ideologue, Ayman al-Zawahiri, to the head of al Qaeda in Iraq --- the Jordanian Abu Musab al-Zarkawi (whom Pape apparently thinks is Iraqi, listing the kaboomers in that country as all Iraqi "rebels" whose religion is "unkown"!) --- click here. The letter was intercepted by US military intelligence and made public in translation. This statement by Marc Sageman, a former CIA analyst who spent years working with jihadists in Afghanistan and elsewhere --- and who later intensively interviewed over 170 of them in captivity --- is also highly illuminating. You might also find Sageman's 2003 book, Understanding Terror Networks, an indispensable source.

* And be sure not to neglect the writings either of Dr. Andrew Bostom or Robert Spencer --- the latter facing so many death threats from Islamist fundamentalist terrorists that he has to conceal his location and address: click here for Bostom's review of Spencer's key book and some earlier writings by other observers of Islamic jihadi fundamentalism and how it taps core credos and traditions in all forms of Islam. Spencer clarifies what Sharia means at bottom, denying that there are moderate and extreme versions -- only some applications of a moderate sort in certain Muslim societies out of political exigency --- in this article. If you have time, study the following annalysis too, very knowledgeable and conceptual --- also, full of good links at the end to further informative sources on Islamic jihadi fundamentalism and its relation to all forms of Islam. One other good source, and that's enough: click here.

* By contrast, Pape's ludicrous views on these and almost every point about Islam's near-monopoly of suicide terrorism, the nature of Islamic fundamentalism, the use of fabricated data-sets to sustain his whitewashed views, and so on are so fantasy-laden that, in reading them, you wonder whether anything in Dying to Win can be trusted . . . including the use of "and", "a", and "the." (Buggy apologies to a great female intellectual and novelist of the previous generation, Mary McCarthy who described the fellow-traveling apologist of Gulag Communism, Lillian Hellman, as someone whose writings are "all lies, even words like "and" and "the" in them.

Not only does Pape have no first-hand knowledge of jihadists as Sageman and Jerrold Post and others do whom prof bug has repeatedly cited in this series on his bleach-job book, his use of second-hand sources is, to repeat, extravagantly skimpy and lopsided in its apologia, one of which even manages in to endorse jihadi mass-murdering terrorism. It leaves you wondering whether he ever read the sources at all and instead relied on summaries given him by his 16 research assistants. Or maybe --- who knows when you're dealing with a con-artist whitewasher? --- he just thought nobody would check his sources.



 

How Many Muslims Support Jihadist Fundamentalist Warfare and Terror Against Infidels?

Today's buggy article, the 10th in a long-running series on Robert Pape's blunder-ridden book, Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism --- a work that has caused a big splash (mainly in the usual suspect circles) --- continues our analysis of its numerous foul-ups: a teeming multitude of goofs, errors, flaws, make-believe data-sets, tangled logic, and a silly and garbled misuse of logistic regression.

From start to finish, these thronging foul-ups infest the book's data, analysis, and theoretical work. They shoot up and multiply in every direction; they swarm through the pages in bevies of mangled arguments, both quantitative and qualitative; they're so numerous and so varied that, in the end, you're left in a state of topsy-turvy wonder . . . Pape, in prof bug's view, winning the prize hands down for god-awful scholarly pishposh --- at any rate outside the circles of shallow, self-righteous, and barely literate post-modernist theorists.

INTRODUCTORY COMMENTS

What About the Big Splash the Book Has Provoked?

That's an easy question to answer: its favorable reception has been limited to three circles of critics, readers, and commentators: in particular, among left-wing critics of the War on Terrorism, on the xenophobic, isolationist right-wing of the Republican Party, and in power-realist circles that dominate much of American international relations theorizing. Small wonder for the brisk hand-clapping in these circles. The wonder would be that the book's botched, special pleading --- AKA arguments backed by mangled and specious data from page one on and ending with a plea for appeasing the "legitimate" grievances of wronged suicide terrorist zealots --- wouldn't evoke a jubilant response in those circles' activist, disgruntled members.

Among other things, to return to Dying to Win, Pape --- besides whitewashing and covering up the near-monopoly of Islamic terrorist groups in suicide attacks between 1980 and the start of 2004, on which his book focuses --- unfolds a series of rippling criticisms of the Bush (and Blair) policies in the War on Terrorism. Simultaneously, it argues for tête-à-tête negotiations with al Qaeda's mass-murderers and the desirable need by us to appease their alleged legitimate grievances . . . these al Qaeda chaps, after all, to use Pape-speak, really only poor oppressed nationalist leaders, who, in more Pape-hokum, are really pretty admirable community-minded altruists like the other suicide terrorist groups he analyzes . . . exactly 2 in a cover-up data-set of 15 suicide terorist groups, the 13 others all Islamic.

Three Sidebar Clarifications Are Needed Here:

1. No, prof bug didn't vote for George Bush either in 2000 or 2004, both for reasons of domestic and foreign policy differences. And though he has been critical of the way the Iraqi occupation has been handled by our government, he still supports the original invasion and hopes it will work out. His chief reason: he's an avid supporter of the US government under any President pushing an agenda of American ideals --- support for human rights, democratic change, and international cooperation --- in foreign policy except at times when significant national security interests require some concern for the trade-offs and hence the need to moderate or even suspend the policy

There aren't many such occurrences.

An example of moderating or suspending the policy for strict, dire security interests: an alliance in all but name with Maoist and Post-Maoist China in the 1970s and 1980s aimed at the common Soviet enemy.

By contrast, the protection of Arab dictators since 1945 as something in our long-run interest has been a disaster . . . for us first and foremost, and for Middle East change and peace. Among other things, prof bug would have liked to have seen us move directly toward Baghdad in the Gulf War of 1991, which was opposed by the power-realist managers that dominated the first Bush administration's policies . . . no matter how many Shi-ite and Kurdish rebels were betrayed by us in the process. And almost 6 decades of coddling these double-dealing Arab dictators --- interested primarily in staying in power and milking their populations by means of their gangster-like states and tribal-clan dominated patron-client networks, not to forget huge oil revenues in some countries --- produced exactly what?

Well, no end to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict; and a disastrous effort to win over the chief gangster-terrorist of the PLO, Yasir Arafat, to a compromise peace --- Arafat, meanwhile, amassing a family fortune of billions of dollars bilked from foreign aid; and growing anger and resentments among alienated intellectuals and crackpot semi-literate imams and other religious ignoramus-fanatics; and , the capper, the emergence of radical Islamo-Fascist terrorist groups that included the 9/11 massacres in New York and Washington. But hey, power-realists, right-wing xenophobic isolations, and angry left-wing America-Is-Always-Wrong Bush-haters are convinced that if only we had continued taking the same poisonous coddling-medicine --- except after 9/11 in horse-doctors' dosages --- the Middle East, South Asia, Southeast Asia, and the world would be far far better off, and especially if we followed Pape's advice, chatted nicely with the ruthless terrorist leaders who hate us from top to bottom (as we did nice-guy Yasir Arafat, invited to the White House by Clinton more times than any other foreign statesman), and showed what good-fellows we were by appeasing their slews of "legitimate grievances" against us.

Only the US intervention in Iraq has, for the first time in decades, unfrozen the disastrous Arab status-quo and --- turbulence and all --- open up the possibility of long-run desirable changes.

2. Power-realists, for what it's worth, have spawned some different theoretical thrusts over the decades, but all of them take for granted that war and conflicts are inevitable in international life and regard the pursuit of idealism in foreign policy --- read: American ideals --- as foolish and calculated to backfire and worsen things, if not producing outright disasters . . . including the creation of inevitable counter-balancing coalitions of other powerful states.

So what explains repeated American efforts since 1918 to pursue, repeatedly, various ideal-marked policies . . . starting, at the end of WWI, with Woodrow Wilson to create the League of Nations and a Just Peace, later FDR's creation of the UN, Truman's Marshall Plan, Carter's Human Rights campaign (later implemented by the Reagan administration in Latin America and the Philippines), the New World Order of George Bush senior, and the attempt to transform the dictatorial states of the Middle East in democratic directions? American arrogance and hubris, that's what. Again and again, power-realists of all sorts have watched with dismay the pursuit of these ideals, condemned them, and predicted disaster after disaster.

The outcome?

Surprise! Surprise! For nearly a century now, exactly the opposite of realist predictions. Despite certain setbacks in a complex world of violently clashing ideologies --- including the sudden emergence of radically new, mass-murdering totalitarian states like genocidal Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and Miitarized Japan on one side and the Soviet Union, Maoist China, Pol Pot's Cambodia, North Korea, and the same evil ilk on the other --- American power, influence, and ideals, far frrom producing disasters as realists have predicted, have continued to expand and multiply globally. It all leads to you to wonder what is needed to bring the various versions of power-realism into line with hardhead realities?

Nor were new, ruthless, genocidal totalitarian states the only radical challenge to American power and influence in the 20th century. After 1945 there was also the danger of nuclear war. For nearly five decades in the nuclear age, successive American administrations not only won the Cold War, but kept the conflicts with the horrendous "evil empire" of the Soviet Union --- a term used by that great American idealist, Ronald Reagan, which Wilson, Franklyn D. Roosevelt, and Harry Truman would have never hestiated to invoke too --- from ever reaching the stage of great-power nuclear war. And what did power-realists and their new bedfellows on the left since the Vietnam war predict? Nuclear catastrophe, that's what. And not just because there were huge deployments of the nuclear weapons on both sides in the cold war, but because of continued innovative nuclear doctrines by the US and a deliberate shift to the offensive, ideologically and militarily, in the Reagan period . . . one more example, it was argued by both alarmed groups, of the "arrogance of American power and hubris" --- or dangerous self-delusive ideals and rhetoric.

Reality, needless to add, turned out differently. As usual, the alarmists proved wrong.

3. A key academic book that brought the two camps together --- managerial power-realism and left-wing liberal views of America-as-Evil --- on crux-issues regarding American foreign policy's "deadly idealistic influences" if pursued by military means appeared at the end of the Vietnam War, Theodore Lowi's End of Liberalism. Among other things, it featured a key chapter entitled "Making Democracy Safe for the World" --- get it? the inversion of Wilson's slogan in 1917-1918 --- with, so Lowi argued, the American pursuit of democratic ideals abroad leading invariably to exaggerating both the threat from Communist totalitarianism and the urgent need to deal with it firmly.

The outcome here? Once again, nonsensical tosh in academic and activist circles.

In particular, less than two decades after Lowi's disaster-predicting book appeared, the Soviet Union disappeared along with the Soviet Empire, while global Communism went into the trashcan of history (though only after mass-murdering well over a 100 million people), Russia and all of the European countries of Soviet imperial rule have become democracies, and so have all the former states that once comprised Communist Yugoslavia . . . American intervention in the civil wars there in 1995 and again in 1999, despite the entirely predictable hokum about invariable backfiring disasters and demented American use of force to export democracy there. For the first time in 1600 years, ever since the downfall of the Roman Empire, all of Europe from the Urals to Britain and Ireland is peaceful and cooperative in non-militarized ways, with the cooperation institutionalized in the EU and NATO . . . the latter an American creation too that has always been more than a limited, realist-based security alliance, and the former in no small ways generated by the Marshall Plan that required West European cooperation for joint administration and by subsequent American support despite misgivings during the reign of Charles de Gaulle in France in the late 1950s and 1960s.

No matter.

Some people never learn from experience. Their minds are closed to reality, like those of all ideologues . . . especially those who think they are knowledgeable and hard-headed about realities --- alias, my reading of them, dude.

And so expect recurring, almost non-stop predictions of disaster to go on emanating from intransigent power-realists, and Republican xenophobes and isolationists, and self-righteous, semi-literate politically correct academics, and angry and frustrated left-wing activists and American-haters . . . not just in the near future, you understand, but on and on into the distant decades.

Including, with near certainty --- note quickly --- the same high-pulsating hokum of the 1980s and early 1990s about American Decline . . . remember it? The inevitable decline caused, first and foremost, by over-expansion on the global stage on the part of Hubris-driven America that will not only produce a powerful counter-balancing alliance and growing anger and resentment among the world's masses, but inevitable economic and military decline, whether relative or absolute. Japan and Germany, back in those days as you might recall, the two new emerging economic hegemons poised to replace American influence and economic clout world-wide . . . yes, believe it or not, both Japan and Germany, two creaking, aging countries who have competed mightily since 1991 to see which could rack up the worst economic performance since the Great Depression. With, wonder of wonders, American per capita income now about 55% higher than German and Japanese levels --- but no matter.

Decline has already made it back into the news, with a Harvard professor, Niall Ferguson, already seeing the US plunging down the chutes into the economic dump, surpassed by a fantasized European Union or India or China or --- who knows? --- Islam-on-the-March.



Back to Pape

Small wonder, in line with these fears of arrogance-driven use of military power in the world --- at any rate, if it's used to pursue ideals and deal with anything less than a direct invasion of American core material interests --- Pape's Dying to Win also argues strenuously against the use of American military power that targets vicious, brutally homicidal terrorist groups on land anywhere in the world. And note.

He argues against its use not just toward al Qaeda's cutthroat paranoids and its Islamo-Fascist affiliates and imitators world-wide --- all of which uses, he assures us in his last chapter, have made us less safe, not more so, since 9/11 --- but also against the quasi-totalitarian Islamo-Fascist states of of Syria and Iran . . . active sponsors of these Islamo-Fascist Fundamentalist terrorists for their own their own state-interests. And yes, no military action against them even if they were to arm themselves with nuclear weapons, never mind. Any such military targeting of their weaponry would invariably backfire, as it has in Pape's mental-world when we've used it in Afghanistan and Iraq.

How strange.

While Pape prattles on in that last chapter with his doom-doom stuff --- including how the use of military force to destroy the Taliban totalitarian-state in Afghanistan and the Baathist totalitarian state in Iraq --- it turns out that his predictions of ever greater hatred and resentment toward the US in the Muslim world and ever greater support for the jihadist terrorists were flatly wrong.

As late as the start of last summer, the Pew Global Attitudes Survey showed that Muslims world-wide were more fearful of growing Islamist extremism than were Americans and Europeans. For the evidence, click here . When you reach that earlier buggy article, note that you can follow another link to an earlier buggy article that shows how the US has never been more popular in the last decade in Pakistan and Indonesia. And note that the growing support in Pakistan --- found last year --- was surveyed before the huge American relief-effort to deal with the recent earthquake disaster in that country.

Never mind. As even the simplest of his predictions have been quickly shown to be false within a couple of months after Dying to Win hit the bookstands last spring, Pape --- full of puffed-up self-importance and delusion --- has continued to prattle on in his self-celebrating TV interviews that we can expect his silly, Simple-Simon logistic regression's frequency distribution (run on an entirely fantasized data set and riddled with sophomoric D- understanding of logistic regression's complexities) to repeat themselves in the future.

Oh sure. And prof bug will be skyhooting at midnight tomorrow in interstellar space along with Elvis Presley and James Dean by flapping his arms energetically and imagining that he's a cross between Captain Marvel, Mary Marvel, Batman, and Clark Kent -in-the-arms of foxy Lois Lane. A manic fantasy you say? Sure, agreed: but then I wouldn't spin it out for 335 pages and call it Dying to Win, lauding the heroic altruism of these oppressed nationalist Kaboomers suffering under American and other democratic military occupation and simultaneously whitewashing Islam's almost total monopoly of all suicide terror groups since 1980.

So What Does the Arch-Whitewasher Propose As --- Get This! --- An Entirely Pap-Based "Strategy for Victory in the War on Terrorism?"

As it happens, Pape --- who kinetically refuses at any point whatsoever in his 335 pages to offer any criticism (AKA reality-testing) whatsoever of any of the jihadist terrorist Kaboomers (on the contrary, good-guy "community-minded nationalist altruists") --- is not only generous with his criticisms of American policies, he is briskly happy in the last few pages to come up with several alternative policies. Specifically, some ongoing negotiations with the cutthroat mass-murdering zealots and a lot of carefully crafted American concessions to satisfy their numerous legitimate grievances towards us --- the USA, it goes without saying, the great power responsible for most of them ---will in Pape-think do the trick to bring us VICTORY IN THE WAR ON TERRORISM (Pape-language) . . . along with some toughened border and immigration policies, a long-run move toward energy-independence, and the protection of Persian Gulf oil resources by sea-based means if the oil flow ever stops in the interval.

Surprise! Surprise!

Pape isn't at all concrete here.

He doesn't tell us why, even if we appease the various jihadist terrorist groups --- dozens of them --- they wouldn't start kabooming us and others the second we used his brainy sea-and-air power to liberate the oil wells that the terrorists have seized them. No matter. Pape, to repeat, no master of logic and consistency, calls his crafty, castle-chasing scheme a New Strategy for Victory in the War on Terrorism . . . victory, please note, Pape's hoopla term for disguising appeasement of brutal mass-murdering Islamo-Fascist haters of America, American values, the West, and infidels everywhere --- but especially the alleged Jewish world-wide conspiracy that has stage-managed, in the words of no less a "widely respected Muslim statesman", the former quasi-dictator of Malaysia, Mahathir Mohamad (whom Paul Krugman defended immediately afterwards as a particularly responsible leader) who . . .

at the annual Summit of Islamic Countries in 2003's late Fall, remember, --- 57 in all --- asserted, to one and all with high-pounding applause amid a standing tribute to his "candid" remarks, that Jews rule the world. Yes, all the despotic gangster heads of dozens of Muslim states (save for secular Turkey) rose to their feet at the end of his Nazi-like conspiratorial explanation of why Islamic countries are so backward in economic development, technology, science, knowledge, and military power, and greeted his candor jubilantly: "We are," Mahathir said . . .

" up against a people who think. They survived 2,000 years of pogroms not by hitting back but by thinking. They invented socialism, communism, human rights and democracy so that persecuting them would appear to be wrong so that they can enjoy equal rights with others."

Mahathir, emboldened by the ecstatic look apparently on the dimwit faces of his assembled fellow Islamic dictators, went on to say that . . .

"I will not enumerate the instances of our humiliation," Mr. Mahathir said. "We are all Muslims. We are all oppressed. We are all being humiliated. . . . Today we, the whole Muslim [community], are treated with contempt and dishonor. . . . There is a feeling of hopelessness among the Muslim countries and their people. They feel that they can do nothing right." He added: "Our only reaction is to become more and more angry. Angry people cannot think properly.

So Jews rule the world, pulling strings everywhere . . . the essence of all modern Jew-hating racism, however it's served up: whether by Nazi Social-Dawinian pseudo-biology, Fascist fears of Jews who control socialism, communism, capitalism, liberalism, and what have you, or crackpot, semi-literate imams, sheiks, publicists, intellectuals, dictators, and terrorist leaders who either embrace Islamo-Fascist Fundamentalism or (in the case of most Arab dictators) manipulate it demagogically to divert attention from their gangster-like kleptocratic rule that has produced bankruptcy, resentment, and bewilderment among their countrymen.

And of course, they are responsible for all of Islam's swarming multitudinous troubles: economic and technological backwardness that grows more backward daily, poverty, and high-pulating levels of unemployment especially among shiftless and angry young men ---- the major source of recruitment for Islamo-Fascist movements, just as their non-Islamic equivalents were for European Fascism in the 1930s. Not to overlook, you understand, the worst literacy levels in the world aside from Turkey's and Indonesia's, and a radically dysfunctional education everywhere (with the translation of foreign books by the 300 million Arabs for a 1000 years now less than what Spain with 40 million people is treated to annually, yes annually), and breathtaking ignorance of secular knowledge among the semi-literate or totally ignorant Muslim masses. With, to boot, the existence everywhere in the Muslim world of tribal-clan dominated patron-client networks, whose high-energy croynism ensures that all major institutions will be monopolized by mutually back-scratching incompetents in all top positions. And, of course, on a psychic level, pulsating, kinetically charged rage born of anger, frustration, resentment, and rampant envy all connected to a paranoid conspiratorial understanding of the world . . . Jews, yes all 14 million world-wide, pulling strings everywhere to conspire and undermine the glories, power, wealth-making, knowledge, and responsible government in 56 Islamic countries.

Little wonder then that 60% of the Arabs surveyed in a Gallup Poll in early 2002, months after 9/11's massacres, were convinced that no Muslims were at all involved. With, needless to add, ignorant, hateful imams, Sheiks, publicists, journalists in the controlled media, intellectuals, and dictators quickly willing, demagogically, to exploit this crackling paranoid style and rage for their own ends, encouraging the rumor that several thousand Jewish employees in the World Trade Center were informed by the global Conspiratorial Cabal-in-Charge to stay home on September 11th, 2001.



Of course, don't expect to find any of this in Pape's apologia-tract --- an elaborate con-job cover up of Islamo-Fascist Fundamentalism's almost total monopoly of suicide-terrorist attacks since 1980, and little else. Expect instead to find more whitewash stuff about the raging Jew-hatred in Islamo-Fascist Fundamentalist circles, and you know what? Not a word about it in Dying to Win; nope, not a peep from Pape except in one brief instance . . . mentioned in a couple of moments, with the usual thick brush-work of whiteout stuff. There are absolutely no entries in Dying to Win's lengthy index --- the only praiseworthy thing in the con-artist cover up book --- for either anti-Semitism or Jews.

Well, what should we expect from Pape next?

A work on the Nazi system using new Mad-Hatter data-sets, mindless logistic regression, and no reference whatever to Jew-hatred and the Holocaust? Or maybe a searching study with 16 new research assistants and 20 more crony chums reading a brilliant new manuscript of Stalin's push to create a just, stateless society, populated by wonderful New Men and Women . . . with no reference to the Gulag system and of course no reality-testing of Stalin's mind-set, a big NO NO method used in slippery ways throughout Dying to Win, the pace-setter here. Or possibly an intensive set of interviews with Fatah members and magical let's-pretend data-sets based on them --- with ludicrous reports of logit modeling that test statistically to a third decimal-point proving, with a projected frequency distribution of 95%, what a wonderful, honest, and altruistic leader Yasir Arafat was . . . the man dedicated to seeing that each and every penny of foreign aid, well over $10 billion, went into the hands of his needy people?

As they say, you pays your money and you takes your choice.



Consider anew the Disney-like Studio treatment of Hezbollah. For Pape, it's strictly a good-guy nationalist cause, led by the usual community-minded altruists striking out at their oppressors who never, ever, carried out at least one and probably two suicide attacks in Buenos Aires, Argentina several thousand miles away from Israel in the 1990s. But of course the main targets were Argentine Jews, and hence Pape can't be bothered to list this as a new "campaign" in his imaginary data-sets. Then, too, another Islamo-Fascist terrorist group carries out suicide bombings in Turkey, but no matter --- Pape can't be bothered to list it honestly either, noting instead that the targets weren't Turkish citizens or even Turkish Jews, but "Jews". Why not be upfront, Pape? Why not be more explicit instead of using cagy omissions and stereotyped language and say what you think of Islamo-Fascist views of a world-wide Jewish conspiracy out to get Muslims everywhere.

Pape does refer once, in passing, to an al Qaeda fatwa that refers to enemies of Islam --- read: Jews and Americans --- and the duty of Muslims everywhere to kill these fiends everywhere. And Pape's take on this fatwa? Surprise again! . . . fully in line with his bleach-job work. If al Qaeda were genuine about its Jew-hatred --- which Pape disguises as "Israeli-hatred" --- it would, Pape says, have beem Kabooming in Israel too . . . something he observes, as he wrote his final manuscript in 2004 and maybe into 2005, that hadn't occurred.

The reality?

Pape --- sloppy as ever with his facts and data, or just engaged in more con-artistry cover up lies --- seems not to have noticed that

1) al Qaeda carried out punitive terrorist attacks against Israeli citizens in Kenya back in 2002;

2) that al Qaeda was busy in the 1990s fighting in Afghanistan with the Taliban and planning its operations elsewhere, with Hamas, Islamic Jihad, Fatah, and yes, Hezbollah and other more shadowy groups busily Kabooming against Israelis from 1995 on, but that al Qaeda terrorists began operating in 2004 on attacks against Israelis in the Sinai Peninsula ;

3) that in the same month, August 2004, al Qaeda's No.2 leader --- Ayman al-Zawahiri --- urged Muslims to attack Israeli, Western, and Asian interests and citizens around the world, especially in Egypt:

4) that, more recently in December 2005, al Qaeda's chief hit-man and terror group in Iraq --- Abu Musab al-Zarqawi's --- publicly claimed responsibility for a missile attack fired from Southern Lebanon at Israel.

'It's the era of Muslim resistance, after the (Arab) governments submitted to the Zionist occupant. We should learn the lesson of Chechnya, Afghanistan, of Iraq, of Palestine," a voice attributed to Zawahiri said on a tape aired by Al-Jazeera on October 1. "Don't wait for the American, British, French, South Korean, Hungarian and Polish forces to enter Egypt, the Arabian Peninsula, Yemen and Algeria to start the resistance," the speaker added. "We should start the resistance from now."

5) that the links between Hamas and al Qaeda in Gaza and the West Bank started most likely in 2000, and have expanded rapidly since then.

 

Question: Is This A Fair Summary of Pape's Arguments?

Yes, stripped to their bones, it's fully so in prof bug's view . . . just as, in this lengthy series on Pape and Dying to Win, all his analysis and views are strictly his own.

Specifically, Note Once More That . . .