HerbEly

The 2006 Terrorism NIE: Errors of Omission

    There are some significant points unaddressed in the Declassified Key Judgments of the National Intelligence Estimate “Trends in Global Terrorism: Implications for the United States” dated April 2006. This blog has contended the October 2002 NIE on Iraqi WMD contained a serious omission. It misled by failing to specify whether Iraqi WMD programs had progressed to the point at which Iraqi trops were equipped, trained and ready to use them. Had it done so, Operation Iraqi Freedom might have been fought differently – or not fought at all. Townhall columnist Alan Reynolds Reynolds criticizes Congressional leaders for not seeing through the ambiguous and misleading statements in the October 2002 NIE on Iraqi WMD programs.

    While the 2006 NIE tells us “…threats to US interests at home and abroad will become more diverse, leading to increasing attacks worldwide.” It does not characterize these threats.

Col. Patrick Lang on the Arabic / Islamic Viewpoints

    One of the things that I learned during the Cold War is that it was crucial to be able to view the world through Soviet eyes. This was difficult since I worked in a group responsible for following Soviet weapons programs and industries. Since we were not Soviet scholars we had to rely on secondary sources – academics, journalists, and military officers. Over the years, I developed an intuition for choosing reliable sources of information about the Soviet viewpoint.

    We will never resolve the conflict with terrorist organizations without being able view Western Society through Arabic and Islamic eyes.

    This is more work than I want to do and I’m not sure where to start.

    My experience as a senior intelligence analyst and supervisor, my education as one of the very few civilian graduates of the US Army War College, and my understanding of religion as a driving force in international affairs all tell me to pay attention to Col. Patrick Lang.

    On September 11, Col Lang gave a talk at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center. You can hear an mp3 version of his talk here. For a Daily Progress report on the talk go here. In a few weeks an online video will be available here.

    For a summary of Col Lang’s professional qualifications go here.

    Col. Lang is of the opinion that several professional intelligence officers drank Kool Aid and failed to stand up on their hind legs and tell Bush administration officials the truth (as they saw it) about Iraq and its WMD programs. Based on my position as a former intelligence insider, I agree.

    There was a just war case to be made for invading Iraq. Blinded by their viewpoint, the neocons misstated the case, gave the public the wrong reasons for the war, and fought it in the wrong way. Tragic.

    Senator John Warner saw a way for Congress to address the underlying strategic issue. His chances of success are about equal to a snowball in that region whose gates will not prevail. The result - unless we succeed in Iraq - will be another two decades of bitter domestic politics and international discord. Tragic.

News Flash: Economists Discover the Value of the Sabbath

The WaPo’s Richard Morin’s Unconventional Wisdom column reports on a study by economists Jonathan Gruber of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Daniel M. Hungerman of the University of Notre Dame:

“…when states eliminated blue laws, church attendance declined while drinking and drug use increased significantly among young adults. Even more striking, the biggest change in bad behavior mostly occurred among those who frequently attended religious services, they report in a working paper published by the National Bureau of Economic Research, "The Church vs. the Mall: What Happens When Religion Faces Increased Secular Competition?"

At one time, all but eight states had blue laws. Today 13 have statewide Sunday selling bans on some products or leave it up to local jurisdictions to decide, with mall owners among those leading the fight to get these statutes off the books.
It turns out those business owners may be doing the devil's work. Before the shopping ban was lifted, about 37 percent of people in a state on average attended religious services at least weekly, Hungerman said. "After the laws are repealed it falls to 32 percent" -- a drop "not driven by declines in religiosity prior to the law change."

Next thing we know, someone will discover that Exodus 20:8-10  was written not to bind us but to protect us.

Newsweek Misses a Religion Story

Newsweek starts its story on Baby boomers and religion this way:

How different would the world be today if George Harrison, the introspective Beatle, hadn't chanced to pick up a sitar during the filming of "Help!" and start plinking away at it? Well, maybe not all that different. But it might have made a difference in the life of Janet Hoffman, who was a college sophomore in 1968 and, while visiting a friend at Berkeley, got dragged to a course in Transcendental Meditation.

The story by Jerry Adler and Julie Scelfo then covers several of the major spiritual movements during the last few decades: Jesus Freaks, The Unification Church, Marharishi Mahesh Yogi’s Transcendental Mediation, Scientology, the Promise Keepers, Werner Erhard’s est (now Landmark), and Hare Krishna.

They missed a major story: the Institutional Church’s response. The Trappist monks at St. Joseph’s monastery in Spencer, Massachusetts responded to this widespread spiritual seeking by retrieving Christian practices of contemplation and formulating a method known as Centering Prayer.

Centering Prayer is a method of prayer, which prepares us to receive the gift of God's presence, traditionally called contemplative prayer. It consists of responding to the Spirit of Christ by consenting to God’s presence and action within. It furthers the development of contemplative prayer by quieting our faculties to cooperate with the gift of God’s presence.

Centering prayer groups are found in mainstream churches throughout the country.

I'm tempted to put Adler and Scelfo's oversight down to journalisms general ignorance of mainstream religion. In fairness, they were writing a story about alternative spiritual movements in popular culture. Maybe they will do another story on mainstream religion's response, or lack thereof.

Did You Hear a Labor Day Sermon?

I didn’t. If you did, was it about the value of work or social justice for working people. Here are some thoughts from Mike McLoughlin on Why are Churches So Silent When It Comes to Labour Day?

I think the main reason Church ministers don’t mention work is simply because they live in an entirely different world than most of their congregations. For them the only important work is that which builds the Kingdom of God which is by their definition religious work such as evangelism.

So, although this is the day that our society honors work, very likely you did not hear a sermon or message this past Sunday on work. If this past weekend we had celebrated Father’s Day or Mother’s day you would be pondering the importance of such a role as exhorted by your pastor, but despite the fact there are far more workers in congregations than fathers or mothers, you probably did not hear a peep about work. Too bad!

On Holy Thursday we heard a homily on the washing of the feet as a symbol of service. Then we prayed for all those who serve in their capacities as lectors, Eucharistic ministers, catechists, etc. For every one of us who got up on Friday and went about our lives of service, one of us served within the confines of the parish. The other 99 served as teachers, construction workers, lawyers, taxi drivers etc. None of the 99 had a prayer offered for them the previous night. Call it the parable of the 99 overlooked servants.

I think Mike gives a good explanation as to why this happens.

Terrorism: Less Dangerous than We Think

One of my sons likes to use this as an example of irrational risk assessment: On hearing the word “shark”, beachcombers run into their cars, light up cigarettes and drive home. While running away from a small but unfamiliar risk they willingly accept two much larger risks that they think they can control.

    Our response to terrorism is similar. In his lead essay lead essay in the September 11 issue of Cato Unbound, John Mueller compares both risks and costs:

At present, Americans are vastly more likely to die from bee stings, lightning, or accident-causing deer than by terrorism within the country. That seems pretty safe.
….
Outside these war arenas, the number of people worldwide (few of them American) who have been killed by such terrorists may have gone up a bit since 9/11, but in five years the number killed in explosions set off by Al Qaeda or Al Qaeda types stands at 900 or so—notably smaller than the number who have drown in bathtubs (300-400 per year) in the United States alone during the same period.
…
"Homeland security cannot be had on the cheap," proclaims Senator Joseph Lieberman. The problem is that it cannot be had on the expensive either. It is possible to make any individual target—like the Washington Monument–more secure from terrorism. But, unless funds are infinite, society can't defend against every possibility—or even against a large number of them. To be blunt (and obvious), it is simply not possible to protect every bus, every shop, every factory, every tunnel, every bridge, every road, every mall, every place of assembly, every mile of railroad track.

Ever since blogging about the James Fallows article in Atlantic Monthly, I’ve been thinking about our response to terrorism. The reason that the Spanish flu killed a disproportionate number of young people was that, being younger, they had a stronger immune response. Older people, having weaker immune systems, responded less strongly – and survived.

    I’m sympathetic to the Libertarian analysis on this. We need to respond to terrorism. Our response, however, must be proportionate to the threat. Over-response can destroy our liberties and economy.

Intelligence Report published

The Senate Committee's Phase II report on prewar intelligence is now available. Since I'm headed out for a Kiwanis family weekend I wont even get started commenting. However, I expect that when I'm done, the conclusion reached by Alan Reynolds will stand: had the administration and Congress read the October 2002 NIE carefully, the would have realized that Iraqi forces were not ready to use WMD's. This does not mean that the threat was non-existent, only that there was no immanent military WMD threat. One does wonder why the NIE failed to state this point more directly.

Wise Words from Ralph

Ralph Peters in today's New York Post

...the world's only hope for long-term peace is for moderate Muslims - by far the majority around the globe - to recapture their own faith.

But a rotten core of American extremists is out to make it harder for them.

The most repugnant trend in the American shouting match that passes for a debate on the struggle with Islamist terrorism isn't the irresponsible nonsense on the left - destructive though that is. The really ugly "domestic insurgency" is among right-wing extremists bent on discrediting honorable conservatism.

How? By insisting that Islam can never reform, that the violent conquest and subjugation of unbelievers is the faith's primary agenda - and, when you read between the lines, that all Muslims are evil and subhuman.

Go ahead, register with the NY Post and read the whole column.

Katrina, the Big Dig & Workplace Spirtuality

Brian Feil, writing in Government Executive has this to say about Katrina and the tunnel collapse in Boston:

The Big Dig highway cost $14 billion and took well over a decade to build. It was complex, involving many federal, state and local agencies and numerous contractors. The New Orleans levee system was similarly complex, involving many agencies and many contractors. These two projects have been the subject of numerous oversight reviews by inspectors general and other watchdogs.

In both cases, the engineering problems that contributed to the deaths were identified by overseers in the past, though the significance of the problems was not understood before it was too late.

Because both projects were messy, complicated affairs with multiple masters over many years, it's hard to pin the engineering failures on any particular player or any particular decision. Perhaps there are lessons to be learned about the need for clear lines of authority, centralized control and oversight methods that not only identify problems but make sure they are solved. Continuity of leadership was missing in both cases.

Once again - and this is a lesson that bears frequent repetition - workplace spirituality is not just, or even first, matter of witnessing one's faith. It is first a matter of rendering service to one's employer and to the public. This requires the practice of ten basic disciplines including attention to quality and challenging one's employer when serious mistakes are being made.

Naming the Powers that Face Us

In March 2004 I was arguing that “war on terror” was a bad metaphor. It clouds thinking, confounds the just war doctrine and fails to deal with the problem of asymmetric combat. The problem is that no one seems to have a better metaphor. This is not just a matter of words. Von Clausewitz insisted that no leader should enter a war without knowing exactly what he intended to achieve by it. We can 't know exactly what we intend to achieve if we can't even name the conflict correctly. (Just War advocates would add that his intention be just. Karl was describing what the leader needed to do, not prescribing what was right.)

Even though much of the conflict depends on first-rate law enforcement, law enforcement against international crime rings isn’t much better as a metaphor

In the TCS Daily, Arnold Kling Arnold Kling puts forth some ideas in the course of reviewing Richard Posner’s Not a Suicide Pact: the Constitution in Time of National Emergency. His approach leads to clearer thinking and a better balance of civil rights and national security.