Q: Let’s start with a definition. What exactly do you mean when you talk about “liberalism”?

A: I see the liberal idea as one of autonomy. We should be in charge of our lives. Crucial decisions about how we should live properly belong to us, and are not determined by God or written in our genes. What’s good for one person has to be good for every person. If we’re talking about a society in which only a few lead an autonomous life, that’s not a liberal society.

In some ways, liberalism is the sort of automatic by-product of all the forces we call modernity—industrialization, urbanization, cosmopolitanism. These produce a world in which self-directedness or autonomy become the only way to live.

Q: That sounds like something a lot of people could get behind. But you write that the book grew out of a sense that liberalism needed defending. From what or whom?

A: One of the places where I see the liberal idea really threatened is in sociobiology or evolutionary psychology, whatever you want to call it. The bestseller lists are dominated by books that tell us how we always make the wrong choices. That’s on the left end of the spectrum. Then you have this revival of conservative religion in the United States, which says that God chooses these things. I’ve found the need to defend the liberal idea against both science and religion. Read More

Interview by Paul Gleason for Progressive Book Club

Q: When did you start to write The Unforgiving Minute?

A: When I returned from Afghanistan I was assigned to the Old Guard, a unit right outside Arlington National Cemetery. It kept triggering a lot of memories—some of them painful—from Afghanistan and of the folks we had left behind. I wanted to write those things down as a way of taking command of the painful experience, rather than letting it intrude on me when I didn’t want it to.

Q: Has it helped you deal with the things you saw?

A: It helped me come to a degree of closure, and helped me to communicate with the other guys from my platoon. In many ways our memories and recollections conflicted. I was the one person who could sit down with all the maps and radio logs and lay out a chronology. And it gave me a vehicle for opening up correspondence with Evan O’Neill’s parents. He was a private in our platoon who was killed in that firefight just three days after arriving. I had a hard time mustering the courage to speak with his parents, until I finally had a manuscript I could share with them. I went up to visit them in Andover and had no idea how they were going to react. They told me a couple of things. First, they said, It’s not your fault. I can understand that intellectually and rationally, but emotionally it was something that took a lot longer. I sort of needed their forgiveness. Second, they said, Thank you for writing this book. No one is dead until they’re forgotten, and by capturing this Evan’s memory will persist. Read More

Q. You write that American civilization is “a palimpsest of world experience” but also unique in world history. What’s distinctive and what’s inherited?

A. The United States has been from the beginning a nation of immigrants that is open to foreign ideas and lawful people.

Q. What are the most important currents that fed into American civilization?

A. European ideas.

Q. You describe American civilization as utopian and cosmopolitan. What do you mean by that?

A. Because America is cosmopolitan and free to absorb world ideas as well as freedom for its people it strives toward a utopian condition. It is not finished yet.

Q. In Beyond the Revolution you are writing consciously against a tradition of historical writing that defines American civilization in terms of the open frontier. How did you come to disagree with that view?

A. The frontier offered a vast area for population but intellectually the ideas germinated in the east where communications were more accessible.  In “Army Exploration in the American West,” I showed that the federal government laid out the ways west and the army built outposts that became towns and cities. Read More

Q:  In Engaging the Muslim World you set out to debunk myths and misconceptions about the Muslim world.  Talk about a few.

A: I think there was an attempt by politicians and pundits, especially after September 11th, to reconfigure the Muslim world as a kind of monolithic block. And of course the Muslim world is not monolithic.  Nor is it unrelentingly hostile to the United States; in fact, I can’t think of another culture region outside Europe that has as many active allies as the Middle East does or as the Muslim world does.

Q:  You have a chapter titled “The Wahhabi Myth,” referring to the puritanical strain of Islam most prevalent in Saudi Arabia. What is the Wahhabi myth?

A: The thing I was concerned to dispel [in that chapter] is the idea of Wahhabism as some sort of special nexus for the rise of Muslim terrorism or radicalism.  I can’t find a stronger connection between the Wahhabi tradition and the terrorist groups than I can with regard to the Sunni Muslims of say Egypt or Syria or the Shiites of southern Lebanon or Iraq and Iran. Often nowadays in Washington people say Wahhabi, and they really mean “terrorist.” Of course, they’re reading off Osama Bin Laden as a Saudi, but actually his family is from southern Yemen and I’m not even sure he is a Wahhabi. Read More

This article was originally published at Progressive Book Club in June, 2008.

A Fundamentally Dishonest Book

Review of War and Decision by Douglas Feith

By Matthew Yglesias

Few Bush administration officials have escaped their time in government service with their reputations intact, but nobody has done as much to make himself despised as former Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Doug Feith. Famously dubbed “the stupidest fucking guy on the face of the planet” by General Tommy Franks, Feith achieved a level of notoriety unusual for a subcabinet official. The policy shop, generally regarded as the number three post at the Pentagon, has a wide range of responsibilities for developing the Defense Department’s thoughts on big-picture strategic issues and relationships with other countries. From that vantage point, Feith became known as a kind of less-sympathetic version of his bosses, Paul Wolfowitz and Donald Rumsfeld.

His book will do little to dispel the sense that his role in the presentation of pre-war intelligence claims was deliberately dishonest, since he’s produced a fundamentally dishonest book. The problems start in the third sentence of the introduction, where he claims he has “aimed not to write a polemic, but rather to make a contribution to history, extensively documented and as accurate as one person’s account can be.” The book is, in fact, very much a polemic — a lengthy exposition of a point of view that’s had little play in the press or the political system, namely that the serious problems in Iraq have stemmed not from the president listening too much to the extremist views of the civilian defense department officials of the first term, but from listening to them too little. Read More

A Crime Against Truth, Decency and Democracy

Review of Obama Nation by Jerome Corsi

By Eric Alterman

How do you solve a problem like Jerome Corsi? Put yourself in the position, momentarily, of Mary Matalin, who heads up Threshold Editions, the conservative imprint of Simon & Schuster. (The publisher has no “liberal” imprint.) He has a manuscript he wants you to read about Barack Obama. The first thing you’d do, if you take your own reputation—as well as that of the publishing house you represent—seriously, would be to do a little research on the fellow.

In the case of Jerome Corsi, that’s not exactly heavy lifting; the man is all over the place. Max Blumenthal, writing in The Nation, pounded a little (entirely proverbial) pavement and discovered that Corsi has a history of running a shadowy investment venture in Poland that, in 1995, lost his investors $1.2 million and invited an FBI investigation. Corsi also has written quite a few books. His most famous effort, “Unfit for Command,” a dishonest account of John Kerry’s military service is well known. Others included one with “prophecy expert” Michael Evans, called “Showdown with Nuclear Iran,” which demanded an US attack on that nation, while another of his tomes, called, Black Gold Stranglehold, purported to debunk the “enslave[ing]” Americans: “the belief that oil is a fossil fuel and a finite resource.” Yet another was called “The Late Great USA: The Coming Merger with Mexico and Canada.” You can guess what that one is about.

Corsi also has an extensive publishing history. Blumenthal unearthed a column he authored for the WorldNetDaily*, in which he revealed John McCain to be a dangerous rube who “has enjoyed strong support from a lobbying group that backs…a Muslim terrorist group with ties to criminal drug networks and Al Qaeda.” Meanwhile, his buddy George W. Bush, he has explained has allowed “communist China” to “run its gunboats up the Mississippi.”

Should any of these published works and comments have provoked your interest, you might have decided to do a little digging. Here, for instance is an Internet positing your aspiring author put up under the screen name “jrlc.” “Anybody ask why HELLary couldn’t keep BJ Bill satisfied? Not lesbo or anything, is she?” This one too: “Isn’t the Democratic Party the official SODOMIZER PROTECTION ASSOCIATION of AMERICA–oh, I forgot, it was just an accident that Clintoon’s [sic] first act in office was to promote ‘gays in the military.’ RAGHEADS are Boy-Bumpers as clearly as they are Women-Haters–it all goes together.”

Ok, you get the point. Corsi is not exactly the kind of fellow who’d be welcome at a Matalin/Carville dinner party, much less one attended by the higher-ups at Simon & Schuster, home of many of America’s most respected and admired authors and editors. He is, at the very least, the kind of author for whom—-again, if you cared even slightly about your reputation-—you would demand airtight sources for every accusation he made. Read More

Ideology Over Ideas

Review of The Conservative Mind by Russell Kirk

by Alan Wolfe

With the campaign run by John McCain and Sarah Palin in 2008, the world saw what conservatism had become—and the sight was not pretty. McCain’s decision to reject the positions on immigration that once gave him the reputation of a maverick, Palin’s memorization and delivery of talking points supplied to her by the McCain camp, the absurd adoption of Joe the Plumber as a wise man, all showed the extent to which conservatism had become little more than catechism. Name any issue—guns are good, tax cuts are essential, our enemies are evil—and the candidates mouthed all the expected platitudes. Nothing was original, nothing daring, nothing unexpected. Conservatism, the message was clear, knows what it believes and has stopped thinking.

Was conservatism always like this? Surely there must have been a golden age in the past when right-wing ideas attracted great minds curious to explore the paradoxes of human existence. The brilliant Edmund Burke, after all, was a conservative. So were leading American politicians such as John Adams and John C. Calhoun. Major twentieth-century poets like T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound held right-wing views, and we still admire them for their art, although not their anti-Semitism. If we go far enough back into the past, conservatives, or so one hopes, can offer up ideas more nuanced than the platitudes of Palin.

One person conservatives frequently cite as they consider the major thinkers produced by their tradition is Russell Kirk (1918–94), a Michigan–born-and-bred thinker whose rejection of modern life’s seductions—cars, television, cities, and, toward the end of his life, computers were things he avoided—contributed to his reputation as an against-the-grain critic filled with homespun sincerity. A writer of gothic fiction, an expositor of Burke, and, most importantly, the author of the classic 1953 book The Conservative Mind, Kirk has been undergoing something of a rediscovery in recent years as his writings are reprinted and as conservative foundations promote his work and conservative colleges teach them. Ronald Reagan called him one of his favorite philosophers. Kirk may not be as famous as William F. Buckley Jr., but when young conservatives gathered at a retreat in Santa Barbara in the summer of 2006, Kirk was on the lips of all. Read More

Peter Singer is Ira W. DeCamp Professor of Bioethics in the University Center for Human Values at Princeton University. He is the author of many books, most recently The Life You Can Save.

Which books have most influenced you?

Bertrand Russell’s History of Western Philosophy was the first book of philosophy I ever read. Russell’s style of presenting philosophical issues made me want to keep reading and thinking about philosophical questions; Henry Sidgwick, The Methods of Ethics is simply the best book on ethics ever written; R.M. Hare’s Freedom and Reason was a challenging attempt to show that ethics could include both the elements mentioned in its title; and J.J.C. Smart’s little book An Outline of a System of Utilitarian Ethics (subsequently reprinted as part of J.J.C. Smart and Bernard Williams, Utilitarianism For and Against) showed that utilitarianism was alive and well during my student days.

[Posted by Paul Gleason]

Chapters 20-23

Outside the Window: May 27, 2009. New York, New York. Clouds and misting rain.

Inside the Book: 2003. Gardez, Afghanistan. Dust and “one hundred twenty-eight in the shade, sir.”

So far, Mullaney’s portrayal of the military has been almost uniformly positive. His superior officers especially are, to a man, tough and competent. At West Point, Airborne training, and Ranger School, they provided everything he needed, both the equipment and the know-how. In Afghanistan Mullaney confronts scarcity for the first time and, though he never says so explicitly, shockingly poor planning.

He has an Arabic phrase book. The people of Gardez speak Pashto. He can point out the Helmand River on a globe. The riverbeds around his base are unmapped. He knows the top speed of a running camel spider. The native tribes are a mystery. He has only three functional Humvees. A forth, hidden in a shipping container, is good for nothing but spare parts. In order to patrol with more than 15 men, he has to order some of his troops into an unarmored Toyota pickup. He can ask for new parts, of course, but the Army will place his order behind every broken Humvee in Iraq.

Mullaney catalogues these problems almost without comment. He doesn’t want to seem like he’s complaining, but Afghanistan’s status as the second, or “forgotten,” war clearly bothers him. He also hates the way his patrols, so full of sudden terror and frustration, become nothing more than statistics on PowerPoint presentations in Kandahar airbase. But he reserves his real scorn for the “fly-by” visits from civilian leaders and journalists, noting acidly that the cost of a decent meal is yet another round of the same inane questions (“Do you miss home? Is it very dangerous?”). Read More

[Posted by Paul Gleason]

Chapters 16-19

Outside the Window: May 20, 2009. New York, New York. Sunny and nearly cloudless.

Inside the Book: 2001-2002. Muscogee and Chattahoochee Counties, Georgia. Unbearable heat. Jefferson County, New York. Knuckle-splitting cold.

While reading about Mullaney’s final months of training, I thought of George Orwell—not the middle-aged idealist who went to Spain and fought the fascists in Homage to Catalonia but the middle-aged grump who returned to England and wrote “Politics and the English Language.” In the latter, Orwell argues that vague language has a definite political purpose: it makes the indefensible palatable. Instead of calling (oh, let’s pick an example at random) the act of shackling a man’s arms above his head for two or three days until his legs and ankles swell to grotesque and painful size torture, we might call it an “enhanced interrogation technique.”

I revisited Orwell’s essay because, in The Unforgiving Minute, Mullaney argues that for an infantry officer euphemisms are useful, even necessary. Of the many acronyms he has to memorize, Mullaney writes:

It was a language designed for efficient commands over a radio, but there was another, more serious reason for stripping sentences. The real purpose was to reduce the sensations of panic and fear, to transform confusion into procedural formulas. Reporting “three friendly KIAs” was meant to be less visceral than detailing that Jones, Smith, and Reed were dead and beyond help. … Where people confront chaos and death as situation normal, the ability to constrain panic by procedure and sanitized language was critical to survival and success.

Read More