Civil Society in Iraq?

When the United States first invaded Iraq you could tell that the Iraqis only knew to obey.  When will “security” be restored, they asked.

It’s possible, top-down peace and security, but it’s not the best kind.  It’s the difference between “society” and the “state.”  The state is the agency of force and compulsion.  Society is the medium of peace and reconciliation.

Now it looks like the Iraqis are finally fed up and they are taking responsibility for peace and security from the bottom up.  That’s what I get from Cliff May’s report on the situation in Iraq.  He talked to “Col. Wayne W. Grigsby, Jr., who commands a ‘surge’ brigade based in a mixed Sunni and Shia area near Baghdad.”

“The Iraqi people are fed up with the violence and with the extremists, both Sunni and Shia,” Grigsby said. Far from “resisting” the American troops in their communities, “they want to join the fight and protect their neighborhoods. They are coming to us and saying, ‘How can we help? We don’t want to live like this.’”

I’d say that you can’t read any better news than that.

Let’s hope it’s true. 

Understanding the Risks We Take

How do you know what risk you are taking?  That’s the subject of a book by Riccardo Rebonato, Plight of the Fortune Tellers.

The problem is that most people in business really don’t know what could happen if things go south.  So Rebonato’s book enables us to think again about notorious debacles like Enron, writes Arnold Kling.

[T]he main reason that Enron got into trouble, I believe, is that for years Enron’s executives and its Board did not understand how it was making its money and the risks involved.

Of course when things started to go badly wrong, Enron’s management started to cheat, and that’s what everyone remembers.  People do that when they get in a hole.  When Nick Leeson, a trader at Barings Bank, got in a hole trading in Nikkei 225 and Japanese bond derivatives  he made such a mess cheating his way out that he took the entire bank down with losses that exceeded one billion dollars.  And Barings didn’t have a clue what he was doing.  Not until it was too late.

How do you evaluate risks?   That is the problem in all kinds of business activity, including most recently sub-prime mortgage-backed securities business.

In the 1980s and 1990s Arnold Kling worked for Freddie Mac, the government-sponsored mortgage giant.  The problem for Freddie Mac was to evaluate what would happen to their assets and liabilities in interest rates changed.

One of the reports that we developed was something that we called the NPV Curve. This report gave an estimate of the value of the company if all assets and liabilities were evaluated at current market prices, and then estimated how this value would change if interest rates were to rise or fall by one percentage point, two percentage points, and three percentage points.

In fact Freddie Mac set up their assets and liabilities so that they could just about survive a ten-year deflation in housing prices equivalent to the Great Depression.

In real life, of course, the future may be worse than the Great Depression.  But we can hardly conceive of such a dismal future.  But by combining the NPV Curve with a Great Depression scenario an institution can develop a set of rules to understand its risks and manage them.

That’s a tool we all could use.

Coercion in the Liberal University

We all shake our heads at the absurdities of the movement ironically called political correctness.  But, the problem is that it impacts real lives, as George Will reminds us.

Quoting from a report from the National Association of Scholars, “The Scandal of Social Work Education,” he writes:

In 1997, the National Association of Social Workers (NASW) adopted a surreptitious political agenda in the form of a new code of ethics, enjoining social workers to advocate for social justice "from local to global levels."

Nothing wrong with that, unless you actually start to coerce students into “advocacy.”

For more than a century the left has been teaching us about the hegemony of the west in imposing its views on the poor.

But there’s no problem when it comes to imposing their views on us.  That’s just “advocacy.”

In fact, it’s ok to force students to do political advocacy as a part of their university course work.

Writes Will: “In 2005, Emily Brooker” enrolled in a class where

a mandatory assignment for his class was to advocate homosexual foster homes and adoption, with all students required to sign an advocacy letter, on university stationery, to the state Legislature.

Brooker objected to the assignment on religious grounds.  She was charged with a violation of professional standards, and was ordered to write a report on how she could reduce the gap between her views and the ethics of the social work profession.

When she sued the university, it dropped the charges and made financial and other restitution.

Maybe there’s an opportunity here.  Liberals have made the class-action lawsuit into a fearsome weapon of progressive politics.  Maybe conservatives should start suing when their academic—not to mention religious—freedom is violated by the hegemonic professors in government universities.

But let us be of good cheer.  This sort of coercion is only needed because the social work establishment is getting panicky.  And it’s significant that the education schools are up to the same tricks.

When you can’t win by persuasion, that’s when you turn to coercion.

Who's Phoney Now?

Ever since the invention of the steam-driven printing press wise heads have advised hot-blooded youngsters not to tangle with the media: Never fight with a guy who owns his own printing press.  That’s what they said.

But recently prominent Democrats decided to mix it up with Rush Limbaugh on the question of who is the bigger patriot.

It’s beginning to look as if the old rule still applies:  Son, never mix it up with a guy who owns his own Golden EIB Microphone.

A couple of weeks ago Senator Harry Reid (D-NV) and 40 other Democratic senators sent a public letter to the CEO of Clear Channel Communications, the parent of Rush’s radio show.  The letter excoriated Rush for impugning the honor of anti-war military veterans.

Now it’s Rush’s turn to respond. As reported on RushLimbaugh.com the letter from Senator Reid has been offered for sale on eBay.

Here is what we are going to do with Senator Reid’s letter.  Tomorrow at 1:30 in the afternoon on my award-winning program, I am going to announce that we are auctioning this letter on eBay.

Of course, Rush does not propose to take the proceeds and spend it on himself.  Rush is a board member on The Marine Corps - Law Enforcement Foundation, a charity that provides scholarships to the children of fallen United States Marines, and he’ll send the eBay selling price to them.  And he’ll match it with an equal amount of his own money.

Will Harry Reid match Rush’s contribution?  He’s a wealthy real-estate investor and ought to be able to pony up some cash to help the children of America’s veterans.

Here’s another suggestion.  Senator Patty Murray (D-WA) has received $15,000 in contributions from Guardian Marine, builder of a $4.5 million boat that the U.S. Navy didn’t want, according to Instapundit Glenn Reynolds. 

Murray and two other Democrats from the Washington State congressional delegation

exercised their political muscle to slip language into a 2002 spending bill to force the Navy to buy the boat from Edmonds [WA] shipbuilder Guardian Marine International.

The Navy gave the boat to the University of Washington which doesn’t need it either.

So here’s an idea Sen. Murray.  Why don’t you contribute $15,000 to the Marine Corps - Law Enforcement Foundation and demonstrate your support for our fighting men and women?  Anyone can sign a letter bad-mouthing Rush Limbaugh.  But helping the children of fallen warriors with your own money is real, tangible support.

It might even clean your hands a little.

Here’s the mc-lef.org url to make on-line contributions, Senator.

"But Critics Say"

It was impressive to watch the network news on Friday as they marked the announcement of Al Gore’s Nobel Peace Prize for climate change advocacy.  Among other things, they celebrated the number of hybrid cars bought and the number of fluorescent light bulbs installed.

While nobody would want to rain on Al Gore’s victory parade, one cannot imagine that if President Bush had won an award the reports would lack the all important “But Critics Say” paragraph.  Yet there was not a breath of a suggestion that Al Gore’s ideas were in the least controversial.

We conservatives first noticed the important cultural artifact “But Critics Say” during the Reagan years, and really got to miss it when it went into decline during the Clinton administration.

But climate critic Dr. William Gray, 78, a long-time professor at Colorado State University said to an audience at the University of North Carolina,  as reported by Steve Lytte:

[A] period of cooling would begin soon and last for several years.
"We’ll look back on all of this in 10 or 15 years and realise how foolish it was," Dr Gray said.

Dr. Gray is an expert in the forecasting of hurricanes.  “We’re brainwashing our children,” he said.

The Nobel Peace Prize is certainly a remarkable institution.  Probably the best way to understand it is as an annual expression of the current enthusiasm of the bien-pensant global academic middle class.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that.  But all the celebration of climate change advocacy makes it difficult to be a critic.  Dr. Gray:

"It bothers me that my fellow scientists are not speaking out against something they know is wrong," he said. "But they also know that they’d never get any grants if they spoke out. I don’t care about grants."

And what is academic freedom worth without a grant for academic research?

Damning Hillary with Faint Praise

Many conservatives must be mulling over the same thoughts as ACharles Krauthammer.  If Hillary Clinton is going to be elected president what does it mean for me?  Writes Krauthammer:

I could never vote for her, but I (and others of my ideological ilk) could live with her — precisely because she is so liberated from principle. Her liberalism, like her husband’s — flexible, disciplined, calculated, triangulated — always leaves open the possibility that she would do the right thing for the blessedly wrong (i.e. self-interested, ambition-serving, politically expedient) reason.

You have to admire the Clintons.  They certainly make the most out of their situation: leading a liberal party in a conservative country.

Maybe a Clinton presidency is the best prospect for conservatives in this period of conservative exhaustion.  If they really are as “flexible, disciplined, calculated, triangulated” as Krauthammer wants them to be then they are the right people to lead the nation while conservatives rest and recuperate—and do the serious thinking needed before floating in on the next conservative flood tide.

Their Jihad and Ours

Ever since the seven century, we are all constantly reminded, jihad has been a one-way ticket to Islam.  The jihad warriors conquered the ground, sweeping out of Arabia, westwards along the south shore of the Mediterranean and north through Spain, eastwards across the ancient lands of Persia and the great civilization of India.

But they were not just nomad bands, strewing destruction in their wake.  They offered a remarkable proposition to the peoples that they conquered, as Lee Harris makes clear in his review of The Legacy of Jihad by Andrew Bostom.

The Muslim victors could have condemned their victims to everlasting servitude, but they didn’t.  They gave them a choice.  They could stay as they were, a conquered and humiliated people, or they could join the victors and surrender to Islam.

Quite a concept, writes Harris.

Indeed, it is difficult to imagine any method by which a quicker pacification of a conquered people could be achieved than by allowing them to make a swift and easy transition from being outsiders to being insiders

If you were a Christian or a Jew, you were permitted a middle way, of dhimmitude.  You could keep to your religion of the book, but you had to acknowledge the supremacy of Islam.

It has been a remarkably successful proposition down the centuries.  Very seldom has Islam retreated from the lands it had conquered not just by the sword but with the word of Mohammed. 

So the question is: How can we, in the enlightened tolerant west, contest on equal terms with such a powerful ideological force

The answer is that we have a pretty powerful jihad concept of our own.  Just like the Muslim jihad it is a program of world conquest.  And it offers a remarkable menu of benefits to those that surrender to its will.

You already know its name.  It is the movement of democratic capitalism informed by the spirit of Christianity.

It began in the despair of Jewish defeat in the Roman Empire and grew with the conversion of rich women in the cities around the Mediterranean.  From monasteries in northern Europe in the dark ages it took over the minds of the feudal nobility.

And then about half a millennium ago in the aftermath of the religious upheaval we call the Reformation it started to go global.  It was a force of remarkable power and it spread across the world, for its strength was not just spiritual, but economic, political, cultural, and military.

In place of tribal gods it offered the God that saved all of mankind.  In political terms it offered the community of language to transcend the community of the kindred.  In economic terms it offered a community of trust that was proven by acts of trustworthiness.  In cultural terms it offered a separation between cultural power and religious power, and in military terms it offered the strength of the western team and delegation combined with the economic power of the community of trust.

And anyone could join.  All they had to do was to liberate themselves from the limited trust boundaries of the blood kindred—the tribe or clan—and learn to expand the boundaries of trust as far as they could tolerate, beyond the boundary of blood kin, even beyond the boundary of language and religion to the horizon of humanity itself.

The chief block against the expansion of this European idea was Islam.  On the west was the barrier of the Atlantic Ocean; on the east was the implacable foe of Islam.  But the development of ocean transportation in the fifteenth century allowed the jihad warriors of capitalism under Christianity to outflank Islam in the east by establishing trade routes to India around the continent of Africa and migrate westward across the Americas and thence to China.

Growing slowly at first and then with gathering speed, the capitalist Christian jihad has finally achieved the capitulation of the two great ancient cultures of the world: India and China.  Now we are left with a single holdout, Islam, inoculated against the western virus by its own jihad faith, is facing what may be a final challenge.

In the tumultuous confrontation between two jihad armies, can the jihad of Islam survive?  Will the next century see the final annihilation of Islamic jihad in a double envelopment, the traditional German Kesselschlacht?  Or will the jihad warriors achieve a breakout from the Middle East into the population collapse of western Europe?

That, of course, is the Question.  President Bush has made the first steps to oppose the breakout and to divide up the homelands of jihad.  It will be up to his successors and up to us what happens next.

For it is true that, just as we understood in the Cold War that communism and capitalism were in a contest for the hearts and minds of the peoples of the world, the outcome of the present war depends upon a similar understanding, a multigenerational covenant to contain and neutralize the virus spreading out of Araby.