At the beginning of this month, I started noting some of the positive news stories about improvements in Iraq and the apparent decline of al Qaeda. A lot has been written in this vein since then.

Most interesting of all is this op-ed from Daniel Kimmage in today’s New York Times, in which we find out that AQ, seemingly so far ahead of the technology (and media-saviness) game in 2001, is now eating the dust of Web 2.0:

The genius of Al Qaeda was to combine real-world mayhem with virtual marketing. The group’s guerrilla media network supports a family of brands, from Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (in Algeria and Morocco) to the Islamic State of Iraq, through a daily stream of online media products that would make any corporation jealous.

A recent report I wrote for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty details this flow. In July 2007, for example, Al Qaeda released more than 450 statements, books, articles, magazines, audio recordings, short videos of attacks and longer films. These products reach the world through a network of quasi-official online production and distribution entities, like Al Sahab, which releases statements by Osama bin Laden.

But the Qaeda media nexus, as advanced as it is, is old hat. If Web 1.0 was about creating the snazziest official Web resources and Web 2.0 is about letting users run wild with self-created content and interactivity, Al Qaeda and its affiliates are stuck in 1.0.

In 2008, Kimmage points out, you’re at a sizable disadvantage if you’re that far behind the technology curve [e.a.]:

[A] more interactive, empowered online community, particularly in the Arab-Islamic world, may prove to be Al Qaeda’s Achilles’ heel. Anonymity and accessibility, the hallmarks of Web 1.0, provided an ideal platform for Al Qaeda’s radical demagoguery. Social networking, the emerging hallmark of Web 2.0, can unite a fragmented silent majority and help it to find its voice in the face of thuggish opponents, whether they are repressive rulers or extremist Islamic movements.

Of course, the authoritarian regimes of the Middle East are threatened by the notion that online communities could become powerful enough to challenge their authority, so it’s not exactly clear skies ahead for these dissident voices:

[T]he authoritarian governments of the Middle East are doing their best to hobble Web 2.0. By blocking the Internet, they are leaving the field open to Al Qaeda and its recruiters. The American military’s statistics and jihadists’ own online postings show that among the most common countries of origin for foreign fighters in Iraq are Egypt, Libya, Saudi Arabia, Syria and Yemen. It’s no coincidence that Reporters Without Borders lists Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Syria as “Internet enemies,” and Libya and Yemen as countries where the Web is “under surveillance.”

Still [e.a.]:

There is a simple lesson here: unfettered access to a free Internet is not merely a goal to which we should aspire on principle, but also a very practical means of countering Al Qaeda. As users increasingly make themselves heard, the ensuing chaos will not be to everyone’s liking, but it may shake the online edifice of Al Qaeda’s totalitarian ideology.

I’m always saying that there’s nothing more important than freedom of expression. This is what I mean. It’s why we must stand behind people struggling for the freedom to express their thoughts, and thus challenge the status quo that oppresses them.

There is a sickness afoot in the land when a popular non-political blogger makes note of a politician’s lowering of his own standards and his commenters attack him for speaking his mind.

Jeff Jarvis:

Whenever you want to show how soft big media are on Barack Obama, refer back to Howard Kurtz’ column on their coverage of the candidate’s hypocritical flip-flop on campaign financing. Chapter and verse.

Some comments [e.a.]:

Just drop it. It’s clear you were a Clinton supporter, but if you want a Democrat in the White House in 2009, the political reality is that attacking Obama is the same supporting McCain.

Jeff, would you consider some even handed-ness in your political posts ? It makes your position on press bias seem fairly hypocritical.

Jeff replies:

I am likely to be an Obama voter but that doesn’t mean I can’t hold him to high standards. I am not a member of his cult so I can disagree with him. It’s allowed out here. No, I won’t drop it.

Commenter:

Jeff, you’re entitled to “hold Obama to high standards,” just like the rest of us. And I realize, in a post like this, you’re trying to expose the inherent bias of the media, not bash Obama. But that’s what you’re indirectly doing.

I realize you’re trying to change the media, but please don’t (conciously or unconciously) swiftboat Obama in the process.

Commenter Steve:

So, if I support Senator Obama, I am a cultist?

Jeff responds:

No, Steve, but I’m being told I can’t criticize him and hold him to high standards. That’s a cultist talking.

Last word (not on Jeff’s blog but here on mine, where I’m the editor) goes to this commenter from Jeff’s blog:

Obama supporters panic whenever a story appears to question, criticize, or point out the hypocrisies of their candidate.

Indeed! and get a load of this attack, published at the HuffPo, on Jon Stewart for—gasp!—making fun of the Obama Messiah. Joseph Palermo builds his case by accusing Stewart of having been complicit in selling the war in Iraq to the American people:

Slamming the UN weapons inspectors as ineffectual twits dominated right-wing talk radio at the time and The Daily Show was in effect regurgitating the talking points of those who wanted to bring the country to war. Dissing the UN’s efforts on Comedy Central inadvertently helped make the case for war. It is kind of like when Dick Cheney pointed to the New York Times to buttress his warmongering saying: “Hey, even the liberals agree with us!”

Then Palermo goes on to warn Stewart to watch his mouth when he’s making fun of Obama:

When Jon Stewart seeks “balance” for his targets of satire he can end up reinforcing the false impressions that the Bush Republicans want people to have. It’s unfortunate because political humor is a powerful force that can sway some of those “low information” voters the pundits have been flogging lately.

So too was the case last night when Jon Stewart ran a bit about Barack Obama’s decision to eschew public financing. The Daily Show seized the issue as an opportunity to display “balance” and to poke fun at the Obama campaign. But not only did the bit fall flat it played right into the Republican line, which is full of half-truths and outright lies about Obama’s decision.

During the primaries, Keith Olbermann attacked Stewart just for mentioning Obama’s middle name.

Here’s what I think: this attempt by hyper-partisan ideological enforcers to shut down the debate among Democrats about Barack Obama will backfire. Badly.

Intimidating people who are on your own side (Jarvis and Stewart are both Democrats, from what I can tell) is never a good idea, especially here in America, where, as Jeff said, we don’t—and won’t—shut up.

Undoubtedly, those trying to shut down the debate are the product (or the masters) of our elite universities, where diversity is god but where diversity of opinion is unwelcome.

Those often kindly teachers, however, do have a sense of urgent mission. Even if we put them on truth-serum, the academics who dominate the humanities and social sciences on our campuses today would state that K-12 education essentially has been one long celebration of America and the West, as if our students were intimately familiar with the Federalist Papers and had never heard of slavery or empire. Having convinced themselves that the students whom they inherit have been immersed in American and Western traditions without critical perspective—they do believe that—contemporary academics see themselves as having merely four brief years in which to demystify students, and somehow to get them to look up from their Madison and Hamilton long enough to gaze upon the darker side of American and Western life. In their view, our K-12 students know all about Aristotle, John Milton and Adam Smith, have studied for twelve years how America created bounty and integrated score after score of millions of immigrants, but have never heard of the Great Depression or segregation.

Academics, in their own minds, face an almost insoluble problem of time. How, in only four years, can they disabuse students of the notion that the capital, risk, productivity and military sacrifice of others have contributed to human dignity and to the prospects of a decent society? How can they make them understand, with only four years to do so, that capitalism and individual- ism have created cultures that are cruel, inefficient, racist, sexist and homophobic, with oppressive caste systems, mental and behavioral? How, in such a brief period, can they enlighten “minorities,” including women (the majority of students), about the “internalization” of their oppression (today’s equivalent of false consciousness)? How, in only eight semesters, might they use the classroom, curriculum and university in loco parentis to create a radical leadership among what they see as the victim groups of our society, and to make the heirs of successful families uneasy in the moral right of their possessions and opportunities? Given those constraints, why in the world should they complicate their awesome task by hiring anyone who disagrees with them?

Disagreement is at the foundation of human existence, and American democracy is successful (among other reasons) because it takes this fundamental fact of human nature into account.

Plus: If Barack Obama cannot stomach, answer, and withstand criticisms from his own side, he is unlikely to be able to withstand criticism, or attacks, from his political opponents.

The editors of the Chicago Tribune aren’t saying that she did this, but what if Michelle Obama had been caught on tape taunting “whitey”? You got a problem with that, you overprivileged Caucasian?

Are there really white people out there so ignorant of history, so unaware of the nuances of language and so threatened by minority grievances that they take genuine umbrage at the term “whitey”?

More a taunt than a threat, the word has no ugly history and hints at no particular stereotypes. It may have been hurled in a menacing fashion in ugly personal confrontations from time to time, but it’s never been used to keep a people down, to put them in their place, to rank them as subhuman.

I hate the concept of “hate speech” for just this reason: one man’s hate speech is another’s righteous grievance. But riddle me this: who’s to judge?

Freedom of speech, for all—that’s the ticket.

Just in time for the Episode Two of The Petraeus Show, which pre-game “reviewers” analyzed and critiqued well in advance of opening night (see the headlines on Memeorandum (at 9:30 a.m., just before showtime),
Gallup releases poll results on Americans’ attitudes toward the war in Iraq.

Upshot [e.a.]:

The 2008 presidential election will present voters with a clear choice on Iraq, with Republicans putting forth one of the Senate’s fiercest supporters of the war and Democrats choosing one of two leading Senate opponents, including Obama, who has made his opposition to the war from the beginning a major focus of his campaign. If McCain is elected, U.S. policy on Iraq will likely continue as it has under the Bush administration, with slower troop drawdowns tied to progress in establishing security in Iraq. If Obama or Clinton is elected, finding a quick end to the war will likely be the new president’s top priority.

In general, the public tends to side with the Democrats from the standpoint of favoring a timetable, but relatively few advocate a quick withdrawal. And most seem sympathetic to the Republican argument about the United States needing to establish a certain level of security before leaving Iraq.

Call me crazy, but it looks to me as if, all things considered, Americans would rather stick around and do the right thing by Iraqis than just get out.

It’s my opinion, based on an anthropological reading of the culture, that Americans would like to win in Iraq—as we like to win everywhere, because we Americans are a profoundly competitive people—but the conventional wisdom these days says otherwise.

See Glenn Greenwald, for example, in a post titled “Cokie Roberts speaks out on the war on behalf of the American people”:

Yesterday, Cokie Roberts — while expressing scorn for the “Responsible Plan for Withdrawal” advocated by 42 Democratic Congressional candidates and numerous military experts, and described by fellow panelist Katerina Vanden Heuvel of The Nation — said this:

VANDEN HEUVEL: It is not, but you know what, the responsible thing to do is withdraw. [you hear Cokie odiously chuckling at this point]

VANDEN HEUVEL: If we withdraw responsibly, the region would be more stable in the long term, America will be restored as a responsible global leader, and there are 42 challengers, you are absolutely right Cokie, who have a responsible plan to withdraw.

ROBERTS: Convincing the electorate of that I think would be very difficult, and I also agree that the notion that Sen. McCain and Sen. Graham you heard this morning putting forward, that Americans would prefer to win, is–

VANDEN HEUVEL: But what is winning? This war is unwinnable, there are no military solutions.

The video is also here. Roberts’ claim — that Americans agree with McCain, Graham and her that withdrawal is a bad idea and that they want to stay until we win — is just a lie. There’s no other way to put that.

Really? I don’t see any evidence to back up your claim, Mr. Greenwald. We may quibble about whether Americans want to “win” (since they’re repeatedly told by the MSM that we cannot win) or whether they just want to do the right thing, but the polling (for what it’s worth) suggests that relatively fewer people want to just get the hell out of there and call it “responsible.”

All things considered, people seem much more interested in the political theater surrounding The Petraeus Show. Here’s a gem from the NYT:

Testimony by General Will Test Candidates for President

All three senators running for president — John McCain of Arizona, Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York and Barack Obama of Illinois — will have a chance to question General Petraeus and Ryan C. Crocker, the American ambassador to Baghdad. Each of the three is determined to use the spectacle to advantage, but all face political risks as well as opportunities in the back-to-back hearings before the Senate Armed Services and Foreign Relations Committees. …

Mr. McCain, a Republican, has the logistical advantage in appearing before his two Democratic competitors. General Petraeus is set to testify first to the Armed Services Committee, beginning at 9:30 a.m., and Mr. McCain, the ranking Republican member, will be the second to speak, after the committee chairman, Senator Carl Levin, Democrat of Michigan.

Mrs. Clinton, a more junior member of the panel, will speak later. Mr. Obama, a junior member of the Foreign Relations Committee, which is holding its hearing in the afternoon, will be the 13th on that panel to speak, perhaps after the evening news.

The headline of this piece (referring to a “test”) is yet more evidence of Andrew Tyndall’s thesis about the nexus between the campaigns and the media and the gameshow-type coverage that has evolved during this election cycle.

As for the substance of the NYT’s Elizabeth Bumiller’s piece: she suggests that Obama’s testimony occuring “after the evening news” would be a bad thing.

What century is she living in? Her own paper today cites the woes of the networks’ news divisions. The “evening news” is a woolly mammoth.

Cable “news” is the thing, dontcha know? Who cares if Obama’s “test” occurs last on the floor of the Senate? It will happen just in time for Campbell Brown of CNN and Keith Olbermann to lead with it!

I’ll try to follow up tonight. Stay tuned.

Today, George W. Bush sounded like the leader of the free world:

This [humanitarian] assistance is easing burdens for many Cuban families. But the sad fact is that life will not improve for the Cuban people until their system of government changes. It will not improve by exchanging one dictator for another. It will not improve if we prop up the same tyranny for the false promise of so-called stability.

As I told the Cuban people last October, a new day for Cuba will come. And we will know when it’s here. We will know it’s here when jailers go to the cells where Cuban prisoners of conscience are held and set them free….Until that day comes, the United States will continue to shine a bright and revealing light on Cuba’s abuses. We will continue to tell the stories of Cuba’s people, even when a lot of the world doesn’t want to hear them. And we will carry this refrain in our hearts: Viva Cuba Libre.

( Contentions)

The strong counter-terrorism efforts undertaken by the British government are announced by officials and covered by the press, and so it’s logical to assume that the British people are aware of the various programs, right?

Probably not, Timothy Garton Ash suggests:

This has got to stop. Britain’s snooper state is getting completely out of hand. We are sleepwalking into a surveillance society, and we must wake up. When the Stasi started spying on me, as I moved around East Germany 30 years ago, I travelled on the assumption that I was coming from one of the freest countries in the world to one of the least free. I don’t think I was wrong then, but I would certainly be wrong now. Today, the people of East Germany are much less spied upon than the people of Britain. The human rights group Privacy International rates Britain as an “endemic surveillance society”, along with China and Russia, whereas Germany scores much better.

What degree of infringement on our freedoms are we willing to tolerate in order to feel secure?

It seems quaint now (shamefully so) to think of how outraged I felt only ten years ago when, in conversation with friends, I heatedly accused Rudy Giuliani of being a “fascist” for his Orwellian installation of surveillance cameras in Washington Square Park (in an effort to keep out drug dealers and other undesirables).

Like many people, since 9/11 I’ve traveled a long road in search of answers to these questions—without success so far.

Although it is my most abiding political passion, I don’t write as much about the Enlightenment value of freedom of speech as I used to. (I fall into the infotainment trap—and the exhaustion trap—just like everybody else.) So, because I’ve been slacking (or sparing you my loftier thoughts), I haven’t written a lot lately about Ayaan Hirsi Ali, though I used to.

But this Flemming Rose interview with Hirsi Ali (on Rose’s new blog over at Pajamas Media) caught my eye, because explanations of the phenomenon of “Islamist terrorism” don’t get any clearer than this:

Why do you think so many politicians have kept silent in your case?

“Primarily because they still think in terms of the nation state and believe that radical Muslims respect national borders. The groups who were behind the bombings in New York, Madrid, London, the killing of Theo van Gogh and the threats against the Danish cartoonists are of the same kind, though they may have different names. I am talking about people inspired by Islam that use threats and violence and don’t respect any borders. They are willing to kill and die for their faith. Because they are convinced that they will be rewarded in paradise. That’s the kind of thing we are confronted with. And that’s what we have to discuss. Not me as an individual.”

I am struck by the patience, steadfastness, and serenity with which this courageous woman continues to make the case against fanaticism [e.a.]:

“Many people are calling on Muslim dissidents to support Western values, but how can we do this, if we at the same time cannot count on your support and protection? So, the fundamental question is: What is the price of free speech? How much are we willing to pay for it? How strong is the political will to support it? The answers will determine the kind of debate we are going to have in the future, especially about Islam.”

The political will is not strong at all, because we in the West take our freedoms for granted. And we will continue to take them for granted until we feel personally constrained by their absence.

In an interview, Andrew Breitbart describes the real impact of the digital revolution:

The Internet has created raw immediacy and raw connectedness to anything and everything.

It seems that if you’ve ever felt constrained by the bureaucracies of the world — whether it be government or corporations — it seems that now any individual can do anything that they set their mind to. A person can create a Web site that looks as if it’s a multinational corporation. You can go to GM.com or you can go to MG’s blog, and MG’s blog is 10 times more compelling. You can pretty much do anything. You can start your own T-shirt company, you can cultivate an audience, you can create a business from scratch. ….

Yep. It’s pretty goddamn cool. Not to mention that it’s a bonanza for us news junkies who’ve got something to say:

I’m a news addict, news aficionado …

The idea now, on the Internet, that I can read everything that’s being read inside the major newsrooms in the country — I’d pay top dollar for that, back in the day. And now it’s all there.

You know that you’re seeing the same exact information that the Dan Rathers, the Peter Jennings, the Tom Brokaws of the world are seeing. You’re like, “Wait a second. Why did you choose that to be the No. 1 story?” And you start gaining a level of confidence that there’s a conventional wisdom out there, set by people with a very parochial sensibility.

Given that anything’s possible on the Internet, you kind of feel motivated to say, “Let me have my say on this. Let me try and counteract the effect of there being a machinery that creates conventional wisdom without taking into consideration alternative viewpoints.” …

That pretty much describes my experience, and the long, long road I’ve traveled on the Internet, of which I’ve been an officianado aficionado since 1993, when I signed up for my first Pipeline (a local NYC ISP) account, up until today, when I mark sixteen months as a blogger (averaging four link-and content-rich posts a day).

Once, in response to a post by Jeff Jarvis on the topic of who we bloggers are, I left the following comment:

We are longtime thinkers and readers and writers who went to the same schools as MSMers (No insult intended. Some of my best friends are MSMers.) but decided to pursue careers and professions other than journalism. We make our living doing other things, but we continue to read and to be engaged by the dynamic world around us and by the world of ideas. We like to read. We like to write. We like to make fun of what we observe in public life, like in MST3K. We like to debate. We understand rhetoric. We know how to check facts and sources.

It’s not journalism, though–few of us are out there bearing witness or interviewing people or acquiring other primary-source material (although with the advent of podcasting and various blogging consortia, that may be changing).

It’s…I dunno. Maybe blogging is “opinion reporting.”

We’re different from journalists, because we seek to mix it up with our readers. We’re looking for conversation and debate. We want to be involved in the intellectual/cultural life of our country (such as it is). Some of us are tired of shouting back at the talking heads on TV and NPR and at editorial writers and columnists. We have areas of expertise and opinions, too.

The blogosphere is where thinking people go to debate the politics of the day, the ideas of public intellectuals, and the opinions of paid opinion writers. It’s where the national conversation is taking place. Be there or be square.

Here’s more from that inspiring Breitbart interview:

Q: You create your own news wire.

A: There are people who can go out there and become a creme brulee blog and obsess on creme brulee and have strong opinions on creme brulee, and which is the best type of creme brulee. They can fight against the creme caramelle people who don’t have the hardened sugar top. And eventually, people who like creme brulee will migrate to this place and that person will become the creme brulee spokesperson. And then maybe a dessert company finds this person, says, “You know more about this than our president does,” and hire them for $75,000 a year.

It seems that there’s been, across the board, a democratizing of everything. It seems that the American spirit of freedom is being exported. In a MacLuhanesque way, the medium is the message. The freedoms that we see online in this country — there’s no taxation of it — all these things have all benefitted from the growth of the Internet.

It’s very difficult to sell to totalitarianism in the Internet age. Do you want a free Internet? Do you want absolute control of your Internet life, or do you want to put that in the control of others? And I think that if people were to start taking away your freedoms online, you’d see a bloody revolution.

Q: People would fight for their online freedom.

A: Right. To many people, it’s everything. I think people take it for granted. I think people should be jumping up on top of their beds, thanking God every single day that this thing was invented.

Well, I wouldn’t go that far, but it’s pretty goddamn cool. And it’s definitely liberating.

Thomas Mallon wonders aloud what today’s intellectual climate bodes for the future. Here are a few of his musings:

How can American professors learn to write about literature in language that isn’t a crude, pseudo-technical insult to the text it’s supposedly explicating?

[A]re owners of intellectual property willing to realize that longer and longer copyright terms are doing more to inhibit than promote creativity?

Are American writers, artists, and thinkers truly prepared to admit that Islamofascism is a real, and even imminent, threat to everything they are accustomed to thinking, saying, and creating?

That last one is what caught my eye on Andrew Sullivan’s blog. But this one is my personal favorite, because it addresses the question that came up after 9/11 that was never addressed honestly: why “they” hate us.

Are we also willing to admit that the universalization of English is more apparent than real? And that our general failure to know foreign languages is an act of both laziness and arrogance — one that threatens America’s legitimate claims to leadership in the world?

One reason “they” hate us is that we don’t even care enough about any of “them” to even learn their goddam languages or custums. As a nation, we are dangerously self-involved—and smug about it to boot. That has got to change.

… for making me feel less alone with my dark thoughts, and for always coming to the defense of freedom of speech.

This time the subject is Ayaan Hirsi Ali (whom I have written about here, here, here, here, and here), and her betrayal by people who should know better.

Hirsi Ali is no fundamentalist, Hitchens writes:

Garton Ash and Buruma would once have made short work of any apologist who accused the critics of the U.S.S.R. or the People’s Republic of China of “heating up the Cold War” if they made any points about human rights. Why, then, do they grant an exception to Islam, which is simultaneously the ideology of insurgent violence and of certain inflexible dictatorships? Is it because Islam is a “faith”? Or is it because it is the faith—in Europe at least—of some ethnic minorities? In neither case would any special protection from criticism be justified. Faith makes huge claims, including huge claims to temporal authority over the citizen, which therefore cannot be exempt from scrutiny. And within these “minorities,” there are other minorities who want to escape from the control of their ghetto leaders. (This was also the position of the Dutch Jews in the time of Spinoza.) This is a very complex question, which will require a lot of ingenuity in its handling. The pathetic oversimplification, which describes skepticism, agnosticism, and atheism as equally “fundamentalist,” is of no help here. [e.a.]

That bolded sentence points to the greatest injustice in Buruma’s and Garton Ash’s position: they allow Islamist thugs, theocrats, and hard-liners living in the West (with protection from our laws, because we don’t want to intrude on their “customs,” because we’re so damn polite and sensitive) to dominate, by terror and intimidation, Muslims who fled their homelands to escape precisely that kind of persecution. For me this is (for now) merely a somewhat abstract Orwellian nightmare as I contemplate this callous and stupid betrayal by people who, as I said, should know better.

However, for those Muslims living in Europe who wish to become—and to be considered—Europeans first and Muslims second, Buruma and Garton Ash’s intellectual position creates a Kafkaesque situation. They escaped horrors at home only to be confronted with the same horrors now here in the West … from which there is no escape. Ever. The hatch of freedom (the freedom for them to be 100% secular, like many Europeans, for example) is being closed. Voluntarily. By people who profited from those freedoms their entire lives, who continue to profit from them, but who deem them too dangerous to be placed in the care of the newly Enlightened.

Hitchens concludes:

But who dares to say [that First Amendment "absolutism" is] the same as the belief that criticism of religion should be censored or the belief that faith should be imposed? To flirt with this equivalence is to give in to the demagogues and to hear, underneath their yells of triumph, the dismal moan of the trahison des clercs and [Auden's] “enlightenment driven away.” Perhaps, though, if I said that my principles were a matter of unalterable divine revelation and that I was prepared to use random violence in order to get “respect” for them, I could hope for a more sympathetic audience from some of our intellectuals.