CJC.org

b2search has been revised, with some minor changes: no alterations of the database or the any existing concordance data is required. The changes only affect the processing of search requests.

This version addresses the following:

One other change is to add in a hidden input in the form that does the “submit”, so that an MSIE user hitting ENTER after typing the search term will get results.

There’s a persistent problem where hitting submit without any terms in the search text box will cause MSIE to hang. I may not be sending a termination in the PHP processing, or something along those lines, even though there are trailing HTML tags. On the other hand, it seems to work under lynx.

The distribution file is available at http://www.cjc.org/blog/files/b2search.zip

Here’s an interesting book review by Stephen Holmes critiquing liberal interventions. His primary focus is Samantha Power’s A Problem From Hell, about the world’s reaction to genocide. Power highlight’s America and the world’s failure to act on humanitarian impulses to stop genocide, and argues that multilateral institutions and legalisms have only gotten in the way of preventing mass killings. It wasn’t the UN that ultimately intervened in Bosnia and Kosovo, but NATO:

Be this as it may, the proponents of humanitarian intervention, in the 1990s, were among multilateralism’s least forgiving critics. Power writes in this spirit. Clinton embraced ‘consultation’, she tells us, whenever his Administration lacked a clear policy of its own. In that sense, too, multilateralism is a sign of weakness. When it comes to atrocities, she implies, the US should simply have told its allies what it was going to do.

Holmes’s concern is that the advocates of humanitarian intervention allowed Bush to let slip the dogs of war.

By denouncing the US primarily for standing idly by when atrocity abroad occurs, they have helped repopularise the idea of America as a potentially benign imperial power. They have breathed new life into old messianic fantasies. And they have suggested strongly that America is shirking its moral responsibility when it refuses to venture abroad in search of monsters to destroy. By focusing predominantly on grievous harms caused by American inaction, finally, they have obscured public memory of grievous harms caused by American action.

Given this, Holmes ponders whether the prevailing historical analogy for American policymakers of the coming decade will be Munich or Vietnam, and whether the moralistic crusade and the free application of military power will lead us to another My Lai down the road.

Holmes also wonders if the interventionists are too concerned with the spectacle of humanitarian catastrophe: does this lead to short term military strategies to address the immediate causes — Hutu militias, Serbia paramilitaries — but fail to do the hard work of trying to build a humane society after we intervene? Does it cause the public — and through the public, political support — to lose interest in reconstruction? If so, then the moral cause is ephemeral. “Regime change”, as it’s currently bandied around, unfortunately means merely destroying the wicked, and not replacing it with something better that has a chance to endure.

What does all this mean now? Holmes wrote his review in late 2002, and now the Iraqi war has come and gone, and we are in the midst of a reconstruction that’s faltering. I want to believe that we’ll be able to pull off this reconstruction, even though it may take many, many years: even if it’s just a first step on a long path, it may be our only way towards safety in the end. So what do we do? Can we pressure the Bush Administration to take are of the unfinished business of rebuilding before it embarks on further adventures? Can we find a Democrat with a chance of winning, who’s actually interested in foreign affairs and believes that pouring more resources into a liberal Iraq is a necessity?

I seem to be putting down notes for the books I’ve read in reverse of the order I read them. I finished Berman’s Terror and Liberalism most recently. The book before that was Pollack’s Threatening Storm, which is strangely a history book despite being published last year in anticipation of future events. Perhaps not so strangely in that, though: the strangeness was more in terms of predictions that came true, and the unusual, unheard-of proper nouns sprinkled throughout the book that came to prominence during the news coverage (Sadaam Fedayeen, Nasiriyah, Uday).

The war was ultimately fought with fewer troops than Pollack anticipated. It also took less time and cost fewer American lives. Pollack also dismissed the notion of a mass Shia uprising the moment American troops crossed the border: his account of the disasterous uprising of 1991 and how, ultimately, fewer than a few tens of thousands of Shia took part in that intifada (most of whom were killed), argues against jubiliant crowds of Iraqis appearing until it was clear that Saddam was finished. He also noted that Baath loyalists and Fedayeen would probably be a strong point of resistance, though he didn’t predict how the Republican Guard would give up without a fight (with American psychological operations coupled with monetary bribes working extremely well).

It should be noted that Pollack himself didn’t foresee the war happening this year when he wrote the book. His only timetable was to finish Iraq before Saddam acquired nuclear weapons, something not likely to happen in, say, four years. Between now and then, he argues that the United States should have seriously degraded Al Qaeda and helped rebuild Afghanistan, all the while trying to build the broadest possible international coalition for the upcoming war and reconstruction. Obviously, the war came before two of these conditions were achieved; whether Al Qaeda has been seriously degraded remains to be seen, though we may be hopeful of that. Ultimately, Bush’s war was not Pollack’s war, though, given America’s diplomatic failures of the past year, war was in many ways necessary this year (though I’m nervous about invoking the Vietnam-era word, “credibility”).

And ultimately Pollack argues for a real reconstruction of Iraq, rather than the mess we’re seeing right now. We won the war with fewer troops than anyone outside of air power theorists and RMA advocates would have thought. However, the air power theorists and RMA advocates, while having correctly observed that American warfighting capabilities are greater than most analysts have thought, have forgotten that military occupation and pacification are not the same as war fighting, and are bloody, labor-intensive endeavors. And if we fail in the reconstruction of Iraq, we may have squandered a once-in-lifetime opportunity to remake the Middle East.

Eizan-ryu jujitsu in New York is having a spate of springtime advancement tests. Monday night, we had a yellow belt test, a second brown belt test and a third brown belt test.

I’ve only been to class a couple of times between my test and this test. I feel I’m out of shape, haven’t been virtually chained in front of the computer over the past month because of a work project. Sensei Coleman noted that long episodes of office work must be similar to what Lovecraftian nightmares are made of: the protagonist has an out of body experience, journeying to unknown Kadath or some other unnatural realm, and returns to find that his body had died and decayed in his consciousness’s absence. Lethargy, lethargy, lethargy.

Anyway, I didn’t know there was going to be a test until I innocently showed up the day before, and people asked if I was going to be there on Monday. I said, probably not. Oh, you’re going to miss the test! Test?!

I uke’d a couple of times during the test. This was the first time I’ve worn my hakama for anything beyond standing around, and almost tripped a couple of times during warm up. On my first uke round, I gave straight punches to Sempai Jenny, and presumably would have done roundhouse also, but my hakama had started to fall apart and I was told to go fix it before it disintegrated completely. Knife with Sempai Jenny worked better: my outfit stayed together.

I didn’t stay for the whole thing and left shortly after the start of knife/stick work: I had to get to work early the next day. Adi, who was on the sidelines, took these pictures with my digital camera. We figured out that using the camera’s SCN mode wasn’t a good thing — just straight, non-color-corrected shots were perfectly good.

Here’s a piece of (recent) military history, discussing the battle of Jenin and the IDF’s tactics there. Fundamentally, the IDF showed stunning restraint in using their superior firepower to dislodge Palestinian fighters from the town and refugee camp. Risk to IDF soldiers was subordinate to sparing civilians, even though many of these civilians may have been participating in the battle by serving as runners or lookouts. Soldiers would announce ahead of time that they were entering a building, and would check to make sure there were no civilians in a room before clearing it out. This is in contrast to the usual method of letting a grenade clear out a room before entering. The final result was that fewer civilians were killed than IDF soldiers.

Here’s an article on SQL Server dynamic sql. Stored procs and such.

Slashdot has a review of this book. I want to keep this in mind when I get around to revamping the company’s intranet to be more useful. Maybe something like http://www.php.net

Slate has a wacky series of articles about a trio of Americans riding around on Segways in Paris. How do you get such an assignment?

My brother got his MBA from Georgetown on Friday. We got there a bit late for the general graduate school ceremony — rain and traffic — but most of the business school students didn’t show up for that one, anyway. It looked like it was meant more for Arts & Sciences, as well as Public Health, etc.

We were in plenty of time for the MBA ceremony itself: the usual stuff with a processional, speechifying, sheepskin bestowing, and recessional. Looking at the photos, I feel that Grace was right and I should have brought my (film) SLR, though it would have taken a few more days to get the pictures. I took a bunch of shots, and most of these didn’t come out very well because of camera limitations. (sigh)

Anyway, the photos at first show the very crowded gymnasium for the general ceremony, then the MBA part, and a final shot from a post-graduatation dinner at a Roslyn Chinese restaurant.

This is a wonderful book. Berman clarifies some of the issues we face today, and elaborates what should be the “liberal” argument for what we should do in the Middle East, even though the principal proponents are neo-conservative/neo-Straussians of the Bush Administration.

Berman argues — and it has been argued elsewhere, primarily on the pages of The New Republic, Slate, The Economist, etc. — that the War on Terror is fundamentally a continuation of the wars liberalism has fought against the totalitarianisms of the Twentieth Century. These totalitarianisms, both secular (such as Ba’athism) and religious (bin Laden’s Islamism), are fruit from the same tree of evil, watered with the blood of 1914 and the romanticism of death that began far earlier. Other fruit from that tree are Nazism, Communism; fascism in its myriad forms, all as a reaction to liberalism.

While the intellectual underpinnings of the Middle Eastern totalitarian movements claim to have arisen separate from Europe — vast bodies of theory have been developed with the specific intent of not coming from the Western tradition — there are recognizably common elements between the movements: these are all cults of death. In all, there is a group of chosen people, be it Aryans, the proletariat or Muslims, and they are under threat by enemies external and internal, be it Jews or class-traitors. And the ultimate fulfillment of their fantasy ideologies requires the deaths of millions and the apocalyptic purging of enemies through the sacrifice of matyrs, all before the pure utopian society is achieved, be it a Thousand Year Reich, the paradise of the proletariat, or the resurrected Caliphate.

But the most startling and compelling chapters deal with liberalism’s response to these cults of death. We liberals embody a particular world view: a belief in freedom, progress, rationality. Because of this, we, at some fundamental level, have difficulty seeing the cult of death for what it is. It’s a “philosophical crisis” for us: we cannot believe that there can be pathological mass movements, fixated by apocalyptic visions, that link paradise with the charnel house. We must come up with a rational explanation for these irrational actions, and will strive mightily to do so, to the point of verging into irrationalism. The French Socalists did this in 1938. The American left did this Lenin and Stalin. And American and European leftists are doing it with the Middle Eastern death cults.

It’s this realization about liberal philosophical panic that informs Berman’s discussion of Palestinian terror and Western sympathy for Palestinian suicide bombers. Because we implicitly rank our responses to the world on rational lines, we have to believe that anyone who would resort to suicide murder must have been driven there by unfathomable oppression. By this logic, the Israelis are worse than South African Afrikaaners, worse than Nazis. For, after all, Nelson Mandela didn’t sink to this level; the Jews didn’t commit suicide murder. What must the Palestinians be suffering if they eschew negotiations (which would have gotten them almost all they could reasonable ask for at Camp David in 2000) and don suicide vests? In this way, the moral standard of Gandhi-esque non-violence becomes, not an admonition for peace, but a fulcrum that elevates the Palestinian cult of death to holiness while sinking Israel’s responses to suicide murder to hell.

And this is the problem we face now. America, as the embodiment of liberal norms and the obvious enemy of the rise of a new totalitarianism, should prepare itself for war. This new war will not require the marshalling of all our material resources, though force of arms will be required from time to time, but it should call for the marshalling of all our intellectual resources, as this will be a war of ideas. We are woefully unprepared for this war because we find it difficult to give any sort of passion to our arguments for liberalism, in part because we can’t comprehend our enemy and understand why we should.

Further, our adversary’s arsenal comes from the rich intellectual history of Islamism. We’re now pitting 30-second commercials against, say, the vast body of writing by Sayyid Qutb, and losing badly. Qutb spent decades coming up with the intellectual foundations of Islamisms beliefs and why the West is the enemy: Western secularism, the horrifying schizophrenia of human nature between the spiritual and the material that comes from earliest Christianity, seduces the Muslim into behaving as if there is a God of the spiritual life and a God of the everyday world, though there is but one God over both spiritual and temporal — God cannot be put into a corner and called forth merely for religious holidays. How does a infomercial counter this? What we need is a second Lincoln, someone to articulate and empassion liberal arguments. Instead, in a historical irony, we have Bush. But this will have to do.