Conversations with History Blog

The Emperor Has No Clothes

Ian Lustick, Bess M. Heyman Professor of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania, has just published a new book Trapped in the War on Terror (University of Pennsylvania Press).  Lustick was a recent guest on Conversations with History. http://globetrotter.berkeley.edu/people6/Lustick/lustick06-con0.html The book is a powerful attack on the logic of U.S. strategy and a compelling account of its consequences for domestic politics. In comparing the War on Terror with the Containment Doctrine of the Cold War, Lustick, drawing on his expertise in Middle East politics. demonstrates that, unlike Kennan's doctrine, Bush's War on Terror lacks a subtle understanding of the nature of our new adversary, the Islamic jihadists. He goes on to explicate how this flawed strategy has corrupted domestic politics.  His insights reminded me of Hans Christian Anderson's fairy tale, "The Emperor Has No Clothes." Read the interview and then go buy the book. 

Evil and the Problem of Terrorism

As host of the Conversations with History archive, http://globetrotter.berkeley.edu/conversations/  I prepare for the interview by reading the guest's collective work. I am then able to place the most recent book in the context of the guest's  life and times. This immersion often opens a vista for understanding current events in a way that is unexpected.  Let me cite an example that is relevant for today's news.

In the fall of 1999, I interviewed the noted psychiatrist and social theorist Robert Jay Lifton.  http://globetrotter.berkeley.edu/people/Lifton/lifton-con0.html  Dr Lifton had just written Destroying the World to Save It: Aum Shinrikyo, Apocalyptic Violence, and the New Global Terrorism. This book is an analysis of the Japanese religious cult that launched the sarin attack in the Tokyo subway. In giving us a profile of the members and their charismatic leader, Lifton helped me understand the cult like quality which even the educated can embrace when a fanatical religious leader seems to be offering an ideology that responds to the spiritual and moral dislocation of modern life.  After the terrorist attack on the United States on September 11, 2001, I returned to Lifton's book as an invaluable resource.

Now that a recent article in the New Yorker by Jane Mayer chronicles the use of medical doctors in the U.S.camp at Guantanamo http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/articles/050711fa_fact4 I was reminded of a seoond Lifton book, The Nazi Doctors. Here Dr. Lifton answers an important question:  How could German physicians who were committed to saving lives become such an important part of the concentration camps where they helped destroy lives. There is, Lifton teaches us, a fine line between good and evil that even the best trained can easily and without self recognition cross in the service of ideology.  I strongly recommend Lifton's books as an important resource for understanding the fanaticism that drives the terrorist cells.  He also shows the fine line that should not be crossed in the fight to defeat them.

Goodbye Bandar, Hello Turki

Today's New York Times http://nytimes.com/2005/07/21/international/middleeast/21bandar.html?pagewanted=all reports on the changing of the guard at the Saudi Embassy.  The article does not do justice to the backstory--how these two Saudi officials are implicated with the United States in the rise of Al Qaeda and of Osama Bin Laden.  To raise these issues at this time might seem unseemly in the context of the many parties in Washington honoring Ambassadors Bandar and Turki. The story is a complex web of intrigue and strategic blunder.  It is the tale of how U.S. policy in the last phase of the Cold War relied on the Saudi connection, Pakistan, and militant Islam to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan.  Fortunately, Steve Coll's Pulitzer Prize winning book, Ghost Wars, is a masterful account that tells us all we need to know.  I interviewed Coll for Conversations in March 2005 http://globetrotter.berkeley.edu/people5/Coll/coll-con0.html Read the interview and then the book. Also see the Conversations with History Research Gallery on Militancy and Moderation in Islam http://globetrotter.berkeley.edu/PubEd/research/islam.html especially the interview with Ahmed Rashid at http://globetrotter.berkeley.edu/people2/Rashid/rashid-con0.html