Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: MulhollandDrive who wrote (16076)	11/13/2003 10:39:07 PM
From: DMaA	Respond to of 793622

I don't think Bush's great speech the other day marked a change in policy. It was just a restatement of what the goal has been all along - as anyone with a memory of more than 6 months would know: Breaking News From Nine Months Ago "President Bush sketched an expansive vision last night of what he expects to accomplish by a war in Iraq. Instead of focusing on eliminating weapons of mass destruction, or reducing the threat of terror to the United States, Mr. Bush talked about establishing a 'free and peaceful Iraq' that would serve as a 'dramatic and inspiring example' to the entire Arab and Muslim world, provide a stabilizing influence in the Middle East and even help end the Arab-Israeli conflict."--editorial, New York Times, Feb. 27 "The White House recently began shifting its case for the Iraq war from the embarrassing unconventional weapons issue to the lofty vision of creating an exemplary democracy in Iraq."--editorial, New York Times, Nov. 13 opinionjournal.com

To: MulhollandDrive who wrote (16076)	11/14/2003 4:45:22 AM
From: LindyBill	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 793622

Long piece on Intel in the "Asian Times." Excerpt. _________________________________ SPENGLER Why America is losing the intelligence war The quality of American intelligence depends on its moral authority to recruit spies who are willing to betray their own cultures because of their faith in America. During the Great Depression of the 1930s, when the credibility of the West stood at an ebb, Russia recruited intellectuals from the great universities of the West. Against the betrayal of its own elites, the West had no defense, and Russia won the intelligence war of the 1940s and 1950s. Not until the credibility of Russian communism collapsed after the 1956 Hungarian invasion did the tide turn, as Russians and Eastern Europeans shifted loyalty to the American side. Today's intelligence war with radical Islam comes down to a contest for the loyalties of the population of individuals who can move between both worlds. The vast majority of these are university students from Islamic countries in the US or Western Europe, and the remainder are students of Oriental languages in the West. For several reasons, the US is at a vast disadvantage. Unlike other immigrants, Muslim students in the US neither are poor nor politically disenfranchised. They are there precisely because they belong to the elite of their country, for whom foreign study is a privilege. Few are prepared to abandon their culture, while many resent the West. Because of the cultural divide, the vast majority of Muslims who study in the West read sciences or mathematics. Indian and Chinese foreign students dominate these faculties. No Arab has become a scientist of note since the early Middle Ages, while the universities are full of Indian and Chinese Nobelists. Hell hath no fury like an elite slighted. These circumstances tend to provoke the resentment of Arab and other Muslim foreign students toward the West. Muslim students attending the most prestigious Western universities, moreover, hear nothing of the merits of Western culture. Instead, what they learn from post-colonial theory, deconstructionism, and post-modernism is that all culture is a pretext for the assertion of power by oppressors. No qualitative difference separates Dante and Goethe from the meanest screed of the cheapest propagandist. What matters is the sub-text, the expression of power relations buried beneath the rhetoric. They learn of the evil US that slaughtered its native population, oppressed blacks and other minorities, degraded women, marginalized the poor, and operates on behalf of plutocratic financial interests. Not since Kim Philby was an undergraduate at Cambridge has the intellectual elite of the West been so inclined to bite the hand that feeds it. The degenerate view of Martin Heidegger and Ludwig Wittgenstein, which reduces all faith and conviction to capricious existential choice, dominates the mind of the West. From this standpoint it is impossible to challenge another culture, because all differences are arbitrary to begin with. How is it possible under these circumstances to make ideological recruits? There is not much hope for American intelligence among Western students of the Middle East. General John Abizaid, the commander of US Central Command, earned a master's degree in Middle Eastern Studies in 1981 under Professor Nadav Safran, one of the best academics in the field. But in 1985, the Middle East Studies Association censured Safran for accepting CIA funding, destroying his career, according to Martin Kramer, a right-wing critic of the overwhelmingly left-wing Middle East Studies establishment. That was a generation ago; in the interim, the field has shifted even further toward Heideggerian relativism. One does encounter exceptions, such as General William Boykin, an evangelical Christian who evidently does not subscribe to the relativism of the academics and who heads the hunt for Osama bin Laden, among others. The evangelicals represent an important force in American politics, but have little to contribute to the intelligence effort. Born-again Christians in some respects seem as if they were born yesterday. Their educational institutions, such as they are, lack the sophistication to produce the sort of training that General Abizaid received at Harvard when it was still available. American intelligence cannot recruit reliable spies from the available pool of foreign nationals, nor can it train its own. Army Special Forces makes an effort to teach languages to its personnel, but anyone who has met these fresh-faced, well-meaning young people has the impression that they are much better in a gunfight than in a war of ideas. I expect more intelligence failures, more "why-America-slept" exposes, more Congressional committees debating who lost what, and more American casualties. One possible consequence of America's intelligence failures may be a far greater degree of dependency on Israel and India for human intelligence. atimes.com