Who the Ottomans Were

     Given the role they played in getting us to where we are, most of us really ought to know more about them. Modern Turkey is what’s left of their Empire. It once included Greece and essentially all of the Balkans, Egypt and North Africa, Bulgaria and most of Asia Minor and Southwestern Europe.  Their navy was unchallenged anywhere in the Mediterranean or the Black Sea for more than a century. Twice they laid siege to Vienna. In the aftermath of WWI the victorious British and French sat down and carved up Mesopotamia and The Levant, all that was left of the Empire save Turkey itself. From those conferences came lines on the map laying out what are today Jordan, Israel, Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, Saudi Arabia, and Iraq. It can be fairly said that the twenty first century War on Terror is a legacy of Britain, France, and the Ottoman Empire.
     So let’s talk about Ottomans. First, they weren’t that old. Tradition holds that the dynasty began with a tribal chieftain who led a band of 400 nomadic horsemen from Central Asia into Western Anatolia sometime in the thirteenth century. Thirty five successive generations of Sultans followed. The first ten established the Empire and led it through an astounding series of military victories culminating in the capture of Constantinople by Mehmet the Conqueror in 1453. In 1529 Suleiman the Magnificent failed at the first siege of Vienna and initiated a long decline. Winston Churchill famously called the Empire the sick man of Europe but it was Tsar Nicholas II who first used that term. Ottomans survived for two centuries longer than they should have for their value as a buffer in the “great game” as England and Russia jockeyed for position. Young Turks reduced the Sultan to a figurehead at the beginning of the twentieth century. Mustafa Kemal Attaturk sent the last one, Mehmet VI, into exile at the founding of the Turkish Republic.
     A bizarre aspect of the Sultanate was the manner of succession, essentially a process of fratricide. The first prince to learn of his father’s death would declare himself Sultan and immediately send assassins to strangle his brothers. The first Mehmet even had it codified into Ottoman law, in the public interest since there could be only one Sultan. A group of deaf mutes were kept on hand for the purpose and adopted as their symbol the silken bowstring, the traditional implement for the deed. The practice was modified in later centuries. Potential rivals were allowed to live imprisoned in the harem in what became known as the cage. Some went insane. More than one poor devil was dragged from the cage after many years and, mad or not, made Sultan in a palace coup.
     Like the Abbasid Caliphs before them, most Sultans didn’t bother to marry, preferring concubinage. Some of the harems numbered in the thousands. This was not technically a violation of Muslim law. A man can have only four wives but as many slaves as he can afford and there is nothing wrong with using them as concubines. Muhammad himself had at least one. However, since a Muslim cannot be made a slave it is ironic that not only did the Sultans have precious little Turkish blood, most of their mothers were Christian.
     This was the institution that Attaturk abolished. Good riddance. Attaturk is widely reviled among today’s Arabs but the Republic he founded has remained stable and more or less democratic. There is little else good that ever came of the Ottoman Caliphate. Arabs would do well to look again.

Regional Transit Funding

     I see the North Texas toll way authority has voted to build a road in Southwest Ft. Worth that won’t generate enough revenue to pay for itself, even after 30 years. That means we will have to cover the shortfall with money from busier roads. I’ve got a problem with that. I’ve lived here since 1973 and for all of that time we have had enormous road construction projects under way and we still have not been able to keep up with traffic. Now, instead of concentrating on reducing congestion officials want to spend precious funds on a road that apparently won’t be very busy. And the state is jumping into the act trying to get their hands on our money to spend it someplace else.
     I understand and support the need for regional, statewide, and national transportation systems. I also understand that we need roads in rural areas that will require a disproportionate share of funding. That’s what the gasoline tax is for. But the gas tax hasn’t been sufficient to support the enormous growth in North Texas so we’ve had to look for other sources of money, including tolls. But those tolls only get public support when they are earmarked for specific projects. At least that’s the only time they get my support. When officials start looking at them as a general source of revenue that they can use for projects they don’t have to justify to users the deal is off.
     When I first came to North Texas the Dallas Ft. Worth Turnpike was a toll road. The toll had gotten public approval with the proviso that the revenue be used to pay off the necessary construction bonds. Once the bonds were repaid the tolls were to end. When the day came the tolls were ended and the turnpike authority disbanded over howls of protest. It’s the only time I’ve ever seen that happen. When something similar came up with the Dallas North toll way the tolls were kept in place to extend it to State Highway 121. I was ok with that and I think most affected people were. Now we are extending it further through Frisco and I’m ok with that too. The population has continued to expand to the north and there is a clear need for it. But I don’t remember any suggestion that those tolls be used to fund other roads. We recently approved the reconstruction of Highway 121 from McKinney to DFW as a toll road because otherwise it would take many years to complete it. I believe it. I’ve been driving to and from DFW regularly since it opened in 1976 and Route 121 has been under construction all of that time. We approved construction of the George Bush Turnpike as a toll road for the same reason. All of those were local projects that got public support for specific purposes. I didn’t approve any toll road in Ft. Worth, nobody asked me about and if my money is going to be used to pay for it I most certainly do not approve. Let people in Ft. Worth pay for their boondoggle.
     When the Route 121 project was under discussion there was a lot of concern that the revenues would be diverted. It turns out the concerns were justified. I just don’t like the idea of paying tolls for roads I’m not using. Taxes are one thing. There is a legislative process for that. Tolls are user fees that should be used for the user’s convenience. Maybe it’s time we reconsidered our participation in the regional authority.
     

Commanders of the Faithful

     Al Qaeda’s avowed goal is to set up a new theocracy in Baghdad and complete the world conquest begun by Muhammad and never finished. None of it is going to happen but it is worth thinking about what these yahoos mean when they say they want to reestablish the Caliphate. Now I have to say that two years ago I had no idea what a Caliph was beyond some vague recollection of 1001 Arabian Nights. Then I started trying to understand what on earth the Arabs were so mad about. You don’t get very far in that before you come across the Caliphs.
     A little history is in order. The original Caliphs ruled over the entire community of Muslims and any territory they conquered, through most of their history governing far more Christians and Jews than Muslims. Only the first four were universally accepted, the Rightly Guided Caliphs. Those four had been companions of the Prophet. They lived simple, egalitarian lives within the community and are thought to have faithfully passed on Muhammad’s teaching. Along with the Koran their lives, sayings, and customs, and those of Muhammad constitute the most fundamental authority in Islam even today. They were elected to the office by the community and while they held it were regarded as God’s representative on earth, acknowledged by all Muslims to hold divinely given authority.
     Not so their successors. After the assassination of Ali, the last of the four, the community split into two camps, Shia and Sunni. Ali was Muhammad’s son-in law, cousin, and closest surviving male relative. The Shia contend that only descendents of Ali, and thus descendents of Muhammad, those they call the Imams, have rightful claims to be named Caliph. The Sunni believe Caliphs should be selected from the ablest and most worthy of the community without regard to family. Both groups have a problem. Depending on how you count, there were either seven or twelve generations of Shia Imams in a direct line. The “twelvers” believe the last of them never died and will one day emerge to take his rightful place. Sunnis on the other hand were compelled to accept a Caliph who took the office by force and turned it into a dynasty. There were several of these dynasties in turn. The last of them to rule over all Muslims were the Abbasids, who extended their realm from Spain to India. The most famous was Harun al-Rashid, he of Arabian Nights. Beginning with the end of the ninth century the Muslim world fragmented with different dynasties ruling over different regions at different times, none of them with the kind of reach the Abbasids had until the rise of Ottoman Turks. The Ottomans were the last to make a serious claim to the title Caliph.
     After Ali, religious authority passed to an elite group of scholars who gained credibility largely through the strength of their personal reputations. Even the Caliphs went to them for rulings on major decisions. Until the Iranian Revolution these people have generally avoided direct roles in government, preferring to maintain an aura of independence. Al Qaeda has no such qualms, witness Afghanistan under the Taliban. That’s part of why I don’t think there is much chance it will happen. The Muslim community at large really doesn’t like the idea of mixing religious and temporal authority. Even the Iranian Ayatollahs have been lowering their profile as rulers, holding on to power but trying to make it less obvious. I doubt it will last another generation. Iranians have a history of deciding for themselves who will govern.

Constantinople

     Lynne and I celebrated our 35th wedding anniversary by taking a cruise. It was to be our first and we wanted to make sure it was a good one so we settled on the Greek Isles, leaving from Athens and arriving in Istanbul. It was a wonderful choice. The ship was close to perfection, every stop was a treat, and Istanbul turns out to be one of the world’s most beautiful cities. The skyline as seen from the Bosporus is absolutely breathtaking. I knew the city had a rich history but not much more than that so I decided to read up on it when I got home.
     Rich isn’t the word. It has been one of the world’s most important cities for at least 2500 years. For much of that time it was the capital of one or another of the worlds great empires, three of them altogether if you don’t consider the Byzantine Empire an extension of the Roman. It was there the Persian King Xerxes built a pontoon bridge in 480 B.C. and led an army of 150,000 men to annihilate 300 Spartans at Thermopylae. The Persian Wars collectively represent what may be the most decisive events in Western Civilization. Athens’ ultimate victory in a naval battle at Salamis made the Golden Age of Pericles possible, not least because it left Athenians in control of sea lanes through the Bosporus to grain fields around the Black Sea. 146 years later Alexander crossed the Bosporus in the other direction at the outset of his eleven year campaign in Asia.
     In the early 4th Century A.D. Constantine moved his capitol to Byzantium and renamed it for himself. Greeks never called it Constantinople. They always referred to it simply as “the city.” To Arab traders the Greek words sounded like Istanbul and that’s what they always called it. Ataturk officially changed the name at the founding of the Turkish Republic.
     Justinian built the Hagia Sophia in 532, at the time the grandest Church in Christendom, later one of Islam’s great mosques, and still one of the world’s great buildings. From the Hagia Sophia Greek Patriarchs vied with Popes for Christian Supremacy for over nine hundred years. The Franks of the 4th Crusade sacked the city in 1204, installed a Latin King and tried to deliver Greeks to the Latin Rite. They failed but they did accelerate a decline that left the city vulnerable to Ottoman conquest in 1453. Sultan Mehmet the Conqueror took the city by storm, made it his own capital, and converted the Hagia Sophia to a mosque. Ottomans would rule from Constantinople right up until the Young Turks took over the government in the years preceding WWI. As Defenders of the Faithful if not always Commanders, they would be the last line of Caliphs.
     What makes it so special? To paraphrase Bill Clinton’s first campaign theme, it’s the geography stupid. Not much wider than the Mississippi at New Orleans, the Bosporus is not only a convenient crossing from Europe to Asia, it is the only outlet from the Black Sea to the Mediterranean and thus represents a major trade route that gives the city enormous economic advantages. Bounded on three sides by water Constantinople was readily defensible in a day of walled cities. Russian Tsars from Peter the Great on coveted the city for its naval value. Fears that Russia would gain control of the strait prompted England’s alliance with Ottomans in the Crimean War. Fears of German control figured in Russia’s entry into WWI. This city has some history.  Did I mention it is beautiful?

Bad Governance

Today, with its attendant demonstration in Washington, is the 35th anniversary of an act of judicial excess that has had disastrous consequences. In addressing one abomination, the back alley abortions of the 1960s, the court created another, the unrestrained abortion mills of today. They also tore a hole in the fabric of society that has yet to heal. The morality of life and death aside, abortion was and remains one of the great social issues of the day. In deciding Roe v. Wade, the court attempted to remove it from the political processes that make representative democracy work and resolve it by fiat. In finding a right to abortion in the constitution they not only amended that document, they left legislatures unable to exercise critical functions and effectively gave the people they serve no redress. I also believe that like Galileo’s inquisitors they will ultimately be unsuccessful. We will decide what sort of society we wish to be. It’s far too important to leave to a nine member gerontocracy. This is about the rule of law.
Roe and a whole range of other decisions where judges have taken it on themselves to change the law have put us on a dangerous path. Both left and right have come to view the courts as places where they can advance agendas that cannot survive the rough and tumble of legislative process. What happens when the Supreme Court is dominated by people who believe as I do that a baby’s right to life should trump its mother’s right to an abortion?  Do they finally send the issue back to congress and the several states or simply read the baby’s rights into the constitution? Is it just up to them? That is precisely what the recurring nomination fights are all about. The left has dominated for fifty years. The right thinks it is payback time. Is this really how we want to be governed? If courts are to decide the most important social and moral issues without effective restraint we begin to look a lot like a theocracy.
New laws tend to have unintended consequences. Legislators can and do spend a lot of time and energy addressing problems with earlier actions. We expect it of them and it isn’t unusual for laws to be repealed altogether. Not so with the constitution. The framers wisely made the constitutional amendment process a difficult one. I think they would be appalled to see how courts have subverted it. When judges find new provisions in that document they tend to become sacrosanct. It is very difficult for even the judges themselves to admit errors in earlier reasoning, witness the mess they’ve made with the death penalty since they placed a moratorium on it in the Furman decision. They have the same problem the Inquisition had, once something becomes revealed truth it can be hard to come to terms with reality.
The judicial system is in need of reform. My favorite proposal is to replace the lifetime appointment system with single terms of 18 years and no eligibility for reappointment, except possibly for those appointed to fill unexpired terms. Stagger the terms so that one new Supreme Court Justice is appointed every other year, always in non-election years. That would give every President the opportunity to appoint at least two and no more that four. It would still provide judges a measure of insulation from the whims of public opinion without allowing them unrestricted opportunity to rule by edict. It would also provide a mechanism for removing judges who tend to stay on far into their dotage.

Jimmy Carter’s Good Intentions

     Ronald Reagan and Pope John Paul II get way too much credit for winning the Cold War. Jimmy Carter gets way too little. Carter doesn’t get enough credit either for replacing the Cold War with the War on Terror. Just think back to 1979. That year produced not one but two monsters that haunt us today; the Iran hostage crisis and the Afghan Mujahideen, both of them on Carter’s watch.
     First the hostage crisis: Anyone old enough to remember it probably has an enduring image of Carter helplessly flailing at student revolutionaries who invaded the American embassy in Tehran and held its staff for more than a year. Every major news outlet in the world counted the days, all 444 of them, with the headline “America Held Hostage,” or something like it. It was Muslim Iran twisting the lion’s tail and paying no price for it. Not that Carter had a lot of options; the American military had been all but emasculated after Vietnam. The darkest moment of the entire escapade came when a military rescue expedition collapsed in chaos with helicopters colliding in blinding desert sand. That was the low point for us. Carter left office complaining of an “American malaise.” It took Reagan to restore the nation’s pride. The trouble is too many Muslims don’t see Reagan. They still see Carter, representative of a giant, but a spineless one. The image has been reinforced often enough to keep it alive in spite of an American record that is pretty remarkable when you think about it. The 25 years since Carter left have seen American forced or inspired regime changes in Granada, Panama, the Philippines, Serbia, Afghanistan, and Iraq; not to mention the spectacular expulsion of Saddam Hussein from Kuwait in the Gulf War. Still the image remains. It’s amazing how much harm can be done by any sign of weakness, as in say Somalia.
     Carter was a victim in Iran but the creation of the Mujahideen was a calculated act of war. He could not have imagined that it would bring the Soviet Union to the brink of the collapse finally precipitated by his successor, and yes the Pope. When Carter and National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski decided to sponsor the Afghan resistance they knew the Russians would likely intervene, in fact they were counting on it. They weren’t interested so much in Afghan independence as in handing the Soviets their own Vietnam. Did it ever. By 1988 when they agreed to withdraw the Mujahideen were an inspiration to radical Muslims throughout the world. The Berlin Wall fell the following year. We may credit Reagan and the Pope but jihadis credit God. He was back in the field and had led a rag tag band of holy warriors to victory over a super power. Now He would finally lead an Islamic army to complete their rightful conquest of the world.
     Carter was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002 and to give credit where it is due he has worked hard for peace. Nevertheless most of those efforts have come a cropper. Only the Camp David accords between Egypt and Israel have been a lasting success. Those perennial belligerents have refrained from open conflict. But today’s Al Qaeda is the heir to Carter’s Mujahideen and he has been a major contributor to North Korea’s nuclear weapons program. North Korea and Iran are both now on the verge of threatening the world with bombs in the hands of madmen. Jimmy Carter’s legacy isn’t one of peace. It is of war and the threat of cataclysm.

Defining Victory

     George Bush drew a lot of flak in the last presidential campaign for saying the War on Terror could not be won. He was quickly forced to “clarify” his remarks by saying that it could not be won in the “conventional sense.” I think he was right without the qualifier. Individual terrorists can be hunted down and killed or captured but the Islamic extremism that inspires them will live on until enough Muslims decide to stop allowing hate filled rhetoric in their Mosques and madrasas. Lash out as we may; only Muslims can change the conditions that produce terrorism. The best we can do is help the process along.
     It seems to me the idea that the invasion of Iraq was a distraction from the more important pursuit of Osama bin Laden is really an argument that when he is captured or killed the war will be over. I subscribe to a different view. Bin Laden didn’t start this war; he is a product of it. He came to prominence in the aftermath of the Soviet rout in Afghanistan and the chaos that put the Taliban in power. That gave rise to the renewed notion among many Muslims that it is God’s plan for them to complete the world conquest left unfinished by Arabs in the 8th century, and by Ottoman Turks in the 17th. Their goal is the subjugation of all the world’s non-Muslims. Bin Laden may be their most important symbol but when he is gone someone will step up to take his place. This will continue until the idea loses credence in the Muslim community at large.
     Taliban defeat in Afghanistan was a body blow to Islamic militants but not a knockout. That bin Laden remains at large gives them hope of resurgence, so it is important that he be removed. I just don’t think that we will be able to call it winning. The insurgency in Iraq is another beacon of hope. If they can beat Americans there, force them to withdraw in ignominy as the Russians did from Afghanistan, God will be back in the field. If not, if a reasonably strong government emerges in Iraq, one that is on friendly terms with the U.S and can provide its own security, it will cause a lot of Muslims to question whether God is behind this after all. It has caused a lot of them to question it already. If God were leading this army how could they be suffering so many losses?
     The best single argument against the whole idea has got to be the Arab Israeli conflict. After eight decades of unremitting terrorist campaigning punctuated by at least three all out wars Israelis have gotten only stronger, Palestinians only weaker. The one real hope Palestinians have of ever gaining supremacy is demographic. If they one day outnumber Jews in a democratic Israel they will be able to vote themselves into power. Jews have to hope that by then economic realities and the rule of law will protect them. It could happen but the level of thugery still dominating Palestinian politics is not encouraging. Arab capacity for self destruction seems to have no bounds, witness the trashing of greenhouses in Gaza after the Israelis withdrew.
     A number of outspoken Muslims have begun to point this out, and not just in Palestine. They believe proselytizing is the way to spread Islam. Terrorism gets in the way.  As their influence grows, Islamic jihadists will decline. In the meantime we really need to make sure a rag tag band of extremists doesn’t produce another superpower rout.

     

Bloody Borders

A Violent Civilization?

It isn’t just us and it isn’t just the Arabs. Muslims are in conflict with seemingly every religion and culture they come in contact with. In any given week one would not be surprised to see headlines about violent incidents involving Muslims and their neighbors in any of more than a dozen countries in almost every region of the world. They are at war, have recently been at war, or are on the verge of war, in Iraq, Palestine, Lebanon, India, Pakistan, Chechnya, Armenia, Indonesia, Philippines, Malaysia, Bosnia, Serbia, Croatia, Afghanistan, China, Cyprus, and the Sudan. Their antagonists include Jews, Hindus, Buddhists, and Christians; Catholic, Protestant, Orthodox, and Maronite. Even among Muslims there is the spectacle of Iraqi Ba’thists trying to instigate civil war between Shiites and Sunnis, preferring chaos to order in that sad place. Saddam’s invasion of Iran produced one of the most awful wars of the past 50 years. Most of the conflicts aren’t really religious in nature, most of the protagonists are actually quite secular, and the underlying issues usually have historic roots with political or nationalistic origins. What they all have in common is Muslims on one side and people with a different religious background on the other, even if the difference is Sunni vs. Shiite. So does that mean Islam is a violent religion? That’s a very interesting question.

I won’t go into detail on the war in Iraq. Who knows how many books will be written about that. Same with the War on Terror and the Arab/Israeli conflict, but it seems to me a broader issue is worth exploring. Is there something about Islam that makes it incompatible with a multicultural, multi-faith civilization? It’s not an idle question. I’ve been wondering about it for years. My conclusion is that Islam is, remains, and will continue to be one of the world’s great cultures built around one of the world’s great faiths, and it will take its proper place in the modern world, maybe even in my lifetime. Muslims enter the 21st century with far more than their share of zealots, and as a group they do seem to have a giant chip on their shoulder, but in the past they have lived peacefully alongside all of the people they find themselves so at odds with today. There is every reason to expect they will again. There is also room for reasonable people to disagree. I’ll try to build my case.

First a ground rule; Atrocities and acts of war committed in the name of religion do not necessarily condemn the religion. Else we will all go to hell. If you don’t accept that stipulation you might as well stop reading. I would argue that none of the religions I know anything about are in and of themselves violent. Not Christianity, not Hinduism, not Buddhism, not Judaism, and not Islam. They all have long and bloody histories but they all also have long histories of peaceful coexistence. So if religion doesn’t explain it what does? Well, religion does sometimes explain it, partly. Religion explains the Crusades, in part. It also explains Osama Bin Laden’s virulent brand of Wahabi Islam, in part. It probably explains, at least in part, his desire to rebuild the old Islamic Caliphate. But the crude, murderous Christianity of the Crusades, though widely held, isn’t my Christianity, and the crude, absolutist Islam of the Wahabis, though in ascendance, isn’t necessarily the real Islam. I contend that the roots of conflict more often lie in basic human nature; greed, lust, desire for revenge, and perhaps most of all the need for security. That they so often fall out along the lines of religion has more to do with cultural affinity with people who have much in common than it does with faith. When faith is involved it is usually there to rationalize a conflict that has its origins elsewhere. That may be putting a fine point on it but I think an important point.

I’ll start with Judaism, since it is the oldest of the three religions claming Abraham. I’ll go on to Christianity and then Islam. Truth be told I don’t know enough about Hinduism or Buddhism to really include them in this discussion. There will be those who will hold that I don’t know much about much, and rightly so, but I will proceed never-the-less. I am no scholar but I can read.

Speaking of reading, one has only to read the Old Testament to realize that violence in Judaism began early. Moses brought awful calamities on the Egyptians in the name of God, and the Bible tells us that God did the deeds Himself. We all heard those stories as children and don’t think of them as atrocities but if someone today unleashed a plague on an entire nation we would call it biological warfare and a crime against humanity. If a warring faction, even one with legitimate complaints, took the life of every first born in every family of their enemy we would recoil in horror. We would probably call it genocide. After God drowned the Egyptian army in the Red Sea the Israelite’s wars took a more conventional turn, with God acting as Commander-in-Chief, but the wars were still pretty horrific.  Joshua’s campaigns to establish the Israelites in the Promised Land, also in the name of God, would fit any reasonable observer’s definition of “ethnic cleansing.” Judaism’s (perhaps) greatest hero, David, earned his stripes by slaying Goliath and went on to a lifetime of warfare against the Philistines, history’s Phoenicians (I’ll bet you didn’t know that Goliath, like Hannibal, was a Phoenician.) Does all this make Judaism a violent religion? Anti-Semitic myth to the contrary, most of us would say no. For two thousand years Jews lived more or less peacefully in the Diaspora. For 1500 years before that they lived first in Babylonian captivity, followed by Persian, Greek, and finally Roman rule. They endured persecution, enslavement, pogroms, and even Hitler’s holocaust without serious retaliation. It’s only with the advent of Zionism and the establishment of modern day Israel that a Jewish state has again become a significant military power. Joshua knew that his infant nation could not survive among hostile neighbors and, having taken their land, he could expect them to be hostile. His solution was to kill them all. It’s much the same with modern Israel, though today’s Israelis are less ruthless. But Israeli motives then and now had to do with survival and conquest, not religions persecution. Biblical Israelites needed a place to live and they took it. Modern Jews needed a place to live and they took it. Each time they found a land already inhabited. Each time they found it necessary to expel the people they found there.

Christianity started out differently. Alone among Abraham’s faiths it began as a peaceful religion. Jesus’ message was one of peace. So was Paul’s. Early Christians, like the Jews of the Diaspora, had little choice but to avoid any hint of challenge or rebellion against Rome. But once the Emperor Constantine recognized and legalized Christians, in the 4th century, Christianity became a religion of the sword.  Popes and bishops urged the armies on, in the name of the Emperor as well as God. In 1095 Pope Urban II addressed a great crowd at the Council of Clermont. He urged the knights of Europe to stop fighting each other and instead go to the aid of the Byzantine Emperor, who had lost much of Anatolia to Seljuk Turks. He got more than he bargained for. Europe responded with what became the First Crusade., led largely by Franks. The religion of the Franks was crude, only just emerging from the dark ages. The Frankish knights were enthralled that they could continue their warlike ways and could now do it with God’s blessing. They set out to slaughter what they came to see as God’s enemies, Jews and Muslims. In the process they developed the insane and bizarre anti-Semitism that 850 years later would climax in the holocaust. Since their enemies were God’s enemies, the Crusaders were freed of the constraints of chivalry. Rules of war didn’t apply to Muslims or Jews. Semitic men women and children could be killed like vermin, as though they weren’t even human. When Urban II realized what was happening he tried to stop it but it was too late. The genie was out of the bottle. Later popes didn’t even try. On the contrary, they more or less joined in, eventually canonizing St. Louis (Louis IX, king of France, leader of the last two crusades, founder of the Inquisition, namesake of one of America’s great cities, and perhaps the most vehement anti-Semite ever.) Hitler and his Nazis may have been godless monsters but they were continuing a long and brutal Christian tradition.

After the Crusades, what was once called Christendom would continue in an almost continuous state of war right up through WWII, mostly against fellow Christians, always with both sides claiming that God was on their side. You know much of this history and I won’t recount it in detail but Urban II wasn’t the last pope to meddle in politics with disastrous consequences. Even in the 1990s we found Pope John Paul II urging Catholic Croatia to declare independence from Yugoslavia He must surely have known it would precipitate the bloody campaigns of civil war and ethnic cleansing that followed. I remember a lecture on nationalism in the Balkans at West Point in 1964. A professor of history from Columbia gave a remarkably prescient warning of the potentially violent result if nationalism were to resurface there. Sure enough Croatian armies, supplied and trained by Germany, and encouraged by the Vatican, soon began purging Muslim and Orthodox Christian minorities. They went on to make incursions outside their borders in an attempt to fulfill an old dream of a greater Croatia. The whole thing degenerated into the tragic mess predicted by the professor.

I shouldn’t be too hard on Catholics. The Europe of the seventeenth century was a veritable “hotbed of witch-burning, altar smashing, and public disemboweling” to quote British historian Niall Ferguson. Oliver Cromwell’s horrific revolutionary wars of the 1640s were carried out by the same sect of Puritans that sent pilgrims to Massachusetts, the witch burners of Salem. Thousands of soldiers on both sides of the American Civil War, including most of the generals, went into battle firmly believing they were doing God’s work.

I cite this history to point out that Muslims aren’t unique in having difficulty getting along with neighbors, and that the Taliban weren’t necessarily the worst the world has seen. Christians too have bloody hands. Does that condemn the religion as one of violence? I say no. Jesus’ message of peace remains the Christian ideal. John Paul II’s encouragement of the Croats not-with-standing, most main stream Christian clerics today oppose most wars most of the time. Few modern Christians would want to go back to the intolerance of the Puritans. I would question whether an all loving God would ever take sides in man’s conflicts, whatever our concept of a just war might be. On the contrary, I would argue that when we believe our enemies are God’s enemies, we are engaging in anthropomorphism, assigning human characteristics to things that aren’t human or, in God’s case, assigning man’s prejudices and weaknesses to a God who has no weaknesses, as though an all powerful God could have enemies among mortal man. OK, OK. It’s not a word that trips lightly off the tongue. But it may be one of the most dangerous words in the language. We do it all the time. Usually it’s harmless enough, if silly, as when we say of our pet “he thinks he’s a people.” Sometimes it’s maddeningly ludicrous, as when a pope justifies excluding women from the priesthood on the grounds that they can’t reflect the proper image of God in administering the sacraments, as though God could be limited by the role of gender. If I seem to be picking on popes, I am, but only to make the point that popes are men, subject to the same foibles, temptations, and errors of judgment as the rest of us. When popes speak, or bishops or priests for that matter, and especially when they speak of God’s will, they should be listened too, but not without question, they’ve been on the wrong side of history too many times for that.

Now before I get into too much trouble let me say that I make no claim to special theological or metaphysical insight. My views are those of a layman. My thoughts are my own. I don’t mean to make judgments about the nature of war, or to define my own criteria for a just war. I don’t wish to criticize the motives of those who have advocated war or fought in the name of God. I don’t question their sincerity or piety, or that of any priest, bishop, pope, or saint. I do want to say that I believe they, like me, are all subject to human error and it is reasonable for us to question and challenge them, in this instance when they advocate or engage in violence in the name of God. I would point out the terrible consequences such violence has had in the past, and argue that it is they, not their religion that are responsible.

It’s this “image of God” that is the problem. We Christians are taught to believe, and I do believe, that we are made in the image of God. It’s when we turn that around and try to paint God in our image that it becomes dangerous and can have such tragic results. By all accounts Urban II never meant to unleash the dogs of war on innocent Jewish communities along the Rhine. There is no reason to think he was anything but devout and well meaning. He meant no harm to the Jews. But the Jews suffered never-the-less. The Crusaders transferred their own belligerence to God and used His presumed wrath to justify their own murderous excess. As one consequence a myth of Jewish conspiracy developed in Europe that survives to this day. There was an incident in England involving the disappearance and later discovery of the mutilated body of a child, blamed by the family on local Jews. A servant claimed to have witnessed Jews using the child’s blood in celebrating the Seder meal. The sheriff investigated and concluded there was no evidence to support the charge but the myth took on a life of its own. As with many conspiracy theories details were added over time, eventually becoming a legend that there was a council of Jews in Toledo that each year would select a community of Jews to kill a Christian child and draw its blood for use in holiday rituals. Modern Arabs have borrowed the myth and substituted a Muslim child. It all started with the Crusaders.

I don’t mean to condemn the Crusaders either. The army of the 1st Crusade endured unimaginable hardship in their march through Anatolia, believing that they were doing the work of God. In a climactic battle in what is now western Turkey, a malnourished and disease ridden Christian army faced almost certain annihilation against a superior army of Turks. The night before the battle they prayed and their homilists told them God was with them. The day of the battle they attacked with such zeal that the Turks thought their numbers must be much greater than they were and the Turkish ranks broke. Whether I think God was on their side or not there is no question that it was their faith that carried them through to victory. I’m trying to say that the early Crusaders were doing right as best God gave them to see the right. Trouble is, God gave us all a mind and sometimes we get it wrong. I can’t believe that God’s will was for the victorious Crusaders to go on and commit the atrocities that history records in the holy land.

Same thing with St. Louis, surely one of the most devout Christians of his day and, along with St. Francis, one of the most revered. Dead of dysentery in Tunisia at the end of the seventh and last Crusade, his body was brought back to Sicily for burial. He was canonized a few years later. It is said that his mother surrounded him from birth with only the most pious of companions. He thought he was speaking for God when he famously said the proper way to negotiate with a Jew is to stick a sword into his belly. The Inquisition he founded became the Papal Inquisition in 1233 and became known as the Roman Inquisition. It is perhaps most famous for its condemnation of Galileo. It was not the same as Torquemada’s infamous Spanish Inquisition. That was independent. Burning at the stake was not a common punishment in the middle ages. That came later. Torture did quickly become common and was officially permitted in cases of heresy by Innocent IV. Also common were graft, corruption and simony (buying or selling ecclesiastical favors.) It wasn’t abolished until after the Second Vatican Council, in 1965, when it was replaced by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. It never represented one of the Church’s finer chapters. St. Louis sincerely believed in what he was doing but I believe he was guilty of anthropomorphism and his error had catastrophic, far reaching consequences.

So what about Islam? Unlike its two sister religions it has had a violent history from beginning to now with very little respite in between. The world has never heard a more chilling battle cry than Allah Akhbar! Does that make it a violent religion? As I said, I will argue no. The violence has to do with anthropomorphism, human frailty, the need for security, greed, and the like, not with the nature of Islam. Among the five pillars of Islam, submission to God, fasting during Ramadan, five times daily prayer, the Hajj, and charity, none has anything to do with violence. Some radical Muslims would add a sixth pillar, Jihad, and claim that it is second in importance only to the first, submission. They would argue with justification that the Koran includes calls to violence, and that God’s demand that Muslims build a just society requires it. A similar argument can be made about the bible and, as I have presented here, there have been many who have found in its pages justification for the most heinous crimes. I will still maintain no, but considering the hatchet job I have done so far on Christianity and Judaism, I should in fairness relate a little Islamic history.

When Muhammad died the Caliphs that followed him lost little time in expanding their realm.  Arab armies soon consolidated control over the Arabian Peninsula and then most of Mesopotamia. The Abbasid Caliphate established its capital in then tiny Baghdad. From there they would rule the core of the Islamic world for 500 years. They grew in strength and extended their conquest east and south to Persia, the Hindu Kush and the Indus. To the north and west they took Syria, Palestine, all of North Africa and Spain. In Asia Minor only the heart of Byzantium was strong enough to withstand the onslaught; it would be 800 years before Ottoman Sultan Mehmet the Conqueror captured Constantinople and destroyed the last remnant of that once mighty empire. By the end of the eighth century Caliph Haroun al-Rashid (If the name sounds familiar it should. The al-Rashid is the Baghdad hotel most favored by western reporters) ruled over an Arab empire that was at its zenith. Arab traders were plying the waters of China, Indonesia, India, and East Africa. Their ships were the largest and best equipped in the South China Sea and in the Indian Ocean. Arabs had developed the compass for navigation and salvaged the works of Aristotle and Plato, which would have otherwise been lost. The likes of Thomas Aquinas would never have developed their works of metaphysics. They had developed a financial system that would allow an Arab trader in Canton to write a check to be drawn on his account in Baghdad. Those were the glory days for Arabs. Al-Rashid is as well known to them as King David is to Jews or Henry VIII to the English.

Empires are weighty things and the wars never stopped. There were wars of succession, that’s what the fight between Shiites and Sunnis was originally about; who is the rightful Caliph? Most of the early Caliphs were assassinated. After al-Rashid the Abbasids began losing chunks of territory. Seljuk Turks (the primary opponents of the Crusaders) came from Central Asia, then Mongols. One of Genghis Khan’s Grandsons sacked Baghdad in 1258, reportedly killed 800,000 people in retribution for the city’s resistance, and brought the Abbasid Caliphate to an end. I should point out that although the massacre was one of the worst in history the Mongols weren’t Muslims at the time. Many of them converted later, having retreated to Persia after a Muslim army from Egypt defeated them at Ayn Jalut in Palestine in 1260, not far from where Saladin defeated the Crusaders 73 years earlier. The small contingent of Mongolian soldiers that is part of the American led coalition in Iraq today represents the first to return there in almost 750 years.

Finally the Ottomans came and, for a time, restored Islam (though not Arabs) to glory. They turned the Black Sea into an Ottoman lake and twice laid siege to Vienna. Every year for centuries, the Sultans mounted another campaign. It was as though war were a seasonal sport. Islam’s borders have always been bloody. It was Ottomans, and their successors under Kemal Ataturk, who committed atrocities that produced two of the modern world’s most enduring ethnic hatreds.

The Ottoman Empire, like other empires, ruled over many ethnic groups. They included Christians of all stripes as well as many Jews. Among them were Armenians, several million of them. They inhabited not only what is now Armenia, but a sizable piece of north eastern Turkey. Armenians are predominantly Orthodox Christian and in WWI the Ottoman government saw them as a security threat, natural allies of the Russians and a potential fifth column inside their borders. So they decided to deport them. They didn’t provide much in the way of transportation, or food, or shelter. They just herded them up and deported them. By some estimates as many as 2 million died. Armenians have other grievances against Turks but it is this incident that they are really mad about. The Armenian war with Azerbaijan in the 1990s had its roots in that deportation.

The other involved Greeks. Everybody knows Greeks and Turks hate each other but most have forgotten why. Well of course it goes all the way back to the wars of the Ottomans and Byzantines, and through centuries of Turkish rule, but it was an episode in 1921 and 1922 that turned it into the really bitter hatred of the 20th century. The Ottoman Empire had collapsed. Greece saw an opportunity to regain Anatolia, the same land lost to Seljuk Turks in the 11th century, the loss that precipitated the Crusades, and in the early 20th century still home to a large Greek population. With British complicity (the Brits didn’t want the Bosporus to fall into Bolshevik hands) Greece invaded and within a year seized almost two thirds of modern Turkey. In the process Greeks treated the Turkish population harshly, taking revenge for old grievances. Ataturk rallied the remnants of the Turkish army. The Greek army found itself over-extended, with untenable supply lines. Ataturk pushed them back into the sea. Turks went on a rampage, slaughtering Greeks while the western world looked on in helpless dismay. Those Greeks that could, fled. By the end of 1922 more than 1.5 million had left Turkey never to return. The British and French offered little more that a few ships to aid in the evacuation. At first the British would accept only their own citizens. The French would accept anyone who said he was French, as long as he could say it in French. Eventually, the ships would accept anyone who could reach them. More than any other issue, Greek and Turkish animosity is all about 1921-22.

There is no question that like Christianity and Judaism, Islam has a violent history, more so, it might be reasonably argued, than the others.  Does that make it a violent religion? You know what I will say. Historically, Jews and Christians fared generally better inside Islam’s borders than Jews or Muslims did under Christian rule. Many served honorably in Ottoman armies. Turks may have been callous and brutal in deporting Armenians but they were in a desperate war. Their motive was security, just as America’s was a few years later when they interred Japanese Americans. The massacre of Greeks in 1922 was motivated by revenge, one of man’s more reprehensible urges but not a religious one. Yasser Arafat’s infamous PLO is a decidedly secular organization; it’s hard to see how many of its members, including Arafat himself, could be religious at all. The woman who served for many years as the primary spokesperson for the PLO is Christian. Saddam Hussein’s brutal Ba’th party was fascist, not Islamic. His number two was a Christian. Osama Bin Laden not-with-standing, few of Islam’s many wars have been fought for primarily religious reasons, not that they have been shy about invoking God’s name. Most of them were wars of conquest, nothing more. Large Muslim populations live peacefully in the United States, in Britain, France, Germany and many other countries with nominally Christian majorities. Despite its human rights abuses Turkey has been a generally peaceful liberal democracy for three quarters of a century. If we get it right Afghanistan and Iraq will be too. Indonesia, with the world’s largest Islamic population, has come a long way toward that, and doesn’t share the Middle Eastern history of belligerence.

As I said at the beginning of this essay there is room for reasonable people to disagree. Others may read what I have written and conclude that all three of Abraham’s religions are violent to the core. But for Christians, Muslims, or Jews to call either of the other religions violent is for the pot to call the kettle black. Is it a violent religion? Which one? No, I don’t think it’s the religion that is inherently violent. It’s those who would abuse it. And the next time your neighbor talks baby talk to his dog, don’t smile.

Confederate Heroes Day

     Today is a holiday in Texas to memorialize those who fought for the Confederacy and the Dallas Morning News is editorializing that we should trash it as a tribute to a shameful period in our nation’s history. I resent the implied dismissal of my great grandfathers’ patriotism as no more than racial bigotry. Henry Clay Roberts and Henry McSwain both served as private soldiers in the Confederate Army. Given the casualty rates it is a miracle they both survived. Neither of them ever owned a slave but they saw themselves as Alabamians and when their state needed them they did their duty as best they saw it. It is the editors of the Dallas Morning news who are the bigots. Slavery was and is an abomination but to see the Civil War as nothing more than a struggle to end it is simplistic racism.
     The war was about a lot more than that. To be sure there were advocates of slavery on one side and abolitionists on the other but precious few of the men in either Army cared much about that. What they did care about and were willing to put their lives on the line for were their families, their honor, what they saw as their nation, and their way of life. That my ancestors were on the wrong side doesn’t make me any less proud of them. It wasn’t the only time. Another of my ancestors was a Hessian conscript in the British Army during the Revolutionary War. The family wasn’t welcome in Virginia afterwards. That’s how we got to Alabama. I’m not ashamed of that either and I celebrate Independence Day with as much appreciation for my country as anyone else.
     Another thing, I can’t point to an example but at some point in my family history someone almost certainly owned slaves, and some of us almost certainly were slaves. There is no point in wallowing in it. We can celebrate what was good about the past without forgetting the bad. That Thomas Jefferson had children with Sally Hemings doesn’t diminish his status among the greatest of the founding fathers. That Martin Luther King was a womanizer and an apparent communist sympathizer doesn’t make him any less a hero of the American Civil Rights Movement. My personal heroine is Joan of Arc. That she acted in the service of the petty tyrant Charles VII doesn’t make her any less a saint. There is and never has been any person on earth without fault save Jesus Christ Himself.
     So can’t we get past this endless dwelling on the sins of slavery? That sad institution was an anachronism by 1861. It would have been abolished here with the 1833 Abolition of Slavery Act by the British Parliament had we not revolted a half century earlier. Does that mean we shouldn’t celebrate George Washington’s birthday? The 4th of July? Christopher Columbus introduced slavery to the Americas. Should we change the name of the district that includes our nation’s capital? Can’t we finally stop incessantly apologizing to everyone who ever had an ancestor who was badly treated? Didn’t Bill Clinton do enough of that?
     Except for the Revolutionary War, the Civil War was unlike other wars in that it was an existential conflict and so rightly holds a special place in our memorials. Most states content themselves with celebrating Abraham Lincoln’s birthday. Texas celebrates Confederate Heroes day because so many of her sons died for the South. There is nothing wrong with that. So I say to the editors of the Dallas Morning News, get a life.

Judicial Restraint

     Remember Dred Scott? He was the slave owned by an Army doctor who took his “property” with him as he was transferred from Missouri to Illinois, Wisconsin, Louisiana, and back to Missouri. In 1846 Scott and his wife filed suit in Missouri state court claiming that, because he had lived for seven years in free states and territories, he was free as a matter of law.  The case wound its way through state and federal courts for eleven years before the Supreme Court ruled in a seven to two decision that not only was Scott not free, as an African and a descendent of slaves he was not a citizen and thus not entitled to sue. We read about it in our history classes primarily because it was one of the events leading to the Civil War.
     That war settled the slavery issue but other issues remain; the most important being just what role should the personal prejudices of nine Supreme Court justices play in deciding what the law is?  I don’t think we are likely to go back to war over it but, manifest especially today in the debates over abortion and gay marriage, it produces a level of rancor and incivility in public discourse that is unsettling to say the least. Last week’s spectacle of Judge Samuel Alito’s wife (no one seems to know exactly what her name is) leaving the Senate Judiciary Committee hearings in tears brought the issue sharply into focus. Democrats hector Judge Alito and accuse him of harboring a conservative agenda. Republicans and the Judge respond that personal agendas have no place in the law.
     I don’t know what Judge Alito’s agenda is but the Democrats are right about one thing. If the history of the Supreme Court shows anything it is that the justices can and often do rule not in terms of precedent or clear constitutional wording but in terms of what they think the law should be. They did it in the Dred Scott case. The Warren court showed an astonishing willingness to make constitutional law from whole cloth. I suspect a court will soon do it again with gay marriage. They do it all the time. Sometimes there is no clear law and the judges simply make one up, as in Dred Scott. Sometimes they just don’t like the law and decide to change it, as in Roe v. Wade. Whether we call it justice depends mostly on whose ox is being gored.
     It is reasonable to ask prospective judges to try to put personal values aside and rule according to their best interpretation of the law but to ask judges to ignore their own feelings is to ask them to rise above human nature. It is a problem that in our system of checks and balances there is no effective check on the Supreme Court. They are free to thwart the popular will and subvert the legislative process whenever they wish. The law is pretty much what they say it is and so it remains until they change their collective minds. Impeachment is unheard of. There is not even a practical remedy for a judge who is incompetent or infirm, witness the sad episode of Chief Justice William Rehnquist’s final illness, insisting to the end on holding to his office. Judges are appointed for life, to serve during “good behavior.” I can’t imagine what bad behavior might be.
     There are a number of reform proposals including suggestions for limited terms. They should get serious bipartisan consideration. I doubt they will. We’re too busy shouting at each other.

Passive Resistance

     I’m writing this on Martin Luther King’s birthday and wondering when and where his sort of political movement has been successful in the past, and whether it might have a place in the future. I can only think of four times where pacifism has had a major impact on the course of history; King’s American civil rights movement, Indian independence led by Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela’s South African anti-apartheid campaign, and Lech Walęsa’s Polish Solidarity. All were essentially peaceful in nature, though they had their violent moments, and all were remarkable achievements. That all were also twentieth century phenomena suggests that in the right circumstances pacifism just might be an idea whose time has come. Note that I added the “right circumstances” caveat. I’m not about to adopt the empty philosophy of the “what if they gave a war and nobody came” crowd. Most of history is of peaceful people being dominated by the warlike. But when one’s opponent doesn’t really want to be a brute, passive resistance can be an effective strategy.
     I think modern Palestine may be one of those opportunities. Again don’t get me wrong. I don’t think for a minute the Palestinian cause is a noble one. Their desire to destroy Israel is rooted in religious bigotry of the worst sort. But then so is Zionism, isn’t it? The idea sounds innocuous enough to Christian ears. What’s wrong with re-establishing a Jewish homeland in biblical Judea? This is. Israel can no more survive as a democratic Jewish state with an Arab majority than South Africa could survive as a white democracy with a black majority. When Joshua led his people into the Promised Land three thousand years ago he annihilated the people he found living there. He knew the Israelites couldn’t live peacefully among neighbors they had taken land from. When the walls of Jericho fell he killed every man, woman and child in the city, sparing only the family of Rahab, the harlot who had sheltered his spies. Don’t remember that? Read up on it. Today’s West Bank settlers aren’t practicing genocide but the only way they can survive the long term is to evict Arabs in a twenty first century equivalent of Joshua’s campaigns. Advocates of a greater Israel extending from the Mediterranean to the Euphrates know that. So do the Palestinians.
     So what’s the solution? If Palestinians really want to destroy Israel the way to do it is to let the Jewish expansionists have their way. Let Israel incorporate the remainder of Palestine and start demanding the vote but do it passively. Boys throwing rocks at tanks are a lot more effective than suicide assassins blowing themselves up on buses. Jews have no qualms about retaliating against violence but most of them don’t really want to see themselves as villains. That’s what forced the Israeli withdrawal from Southern Lebanon after a twenty two year occupation. As long as Israelis saw occupation as a security measure they supported it. But when they began to see themselves as aggressors public opinion forced the army to withdraw.
     Not that I see a Palestinian version of Martin Luther King emerging, certainly not any time soon. Hatred is such that a new Yasser Arafat seems more likely. But the Jews do have a demographic problem, even inside their security fence. It seems likely that Israeli Arabs will become a majority within not so many decades and when they do they will almost certainly take over the government. It’s not hard to envision a German style “reunification” somewhere down the road. Maybe it can even happen peacefully.

Arabian Renaissance

It is one of the great ironies of history that Arab culture precipitated the European Renaissance. Now it is western culture that is precipitating an Arab renaissance.
The Abbasid caliph Ma’mūn was a student of ancient Greek philosophy, especially mathematics and medicine. Sometime around the mid-ninth century he read that the ancients had calculated the earth’s circumference to be 24,000 miles. He ordered scholars from his court to check it out. They went to the center of the widest flat plain they could find and measured the angle of the North Star above the horizon. Using a system of pegs and string they marched due north measuring the distance as they went until the star rose one degree. They had gone 66 2/3 miles. They went back to the starting point and reversed the process, going south until the star fell one degree. Again they had traveled 66 2/3 miles. They reasoned that the circumference must be 66 2/3 miles per degree times 360 degrees: 24,000 miles. Ma’mūn then sent his scholars to another site to repeat the experiment. Same result. Only then was the caliph satisfied that the Greeks had been right. They were close. The true polar circumference is 23,964 miles
The old Arabs were using what we now know as the scientific method, the rigorous system of observation, hypothesis, and experiment that wouldn’t emerge in Europe for another seven centuries. It’s easy to forget how much we owe the Arabs. It’s no accident we use their numbering system and not even the Greeks understood the concept of zero. The term algebra is derived from the name of the Arab who introduced it to us. Arabs taught us how to use checks to pay our bills. That word too is derived from Arabic. A Moorish philosopher named Avicenna is considered the founder of modern medicine.
By Ma’mūn’s day most of the works of Aristotle, Plato, Hippocrates, Euclid and the other Greek philosophers had been lost to the West. The library at Alexandria had been destroyed centuries earlier and Christian emperors had ordered the Greek schools in Athens shut. But students had taken their treasures to Persia, beyond the reach of Christianity. Arabs found them there and under the patronage of Ma’mūn and others widely translated them into Arabic. That sort of scholarship died out among most Arabs with the rise of religious Madrasas beginning in the eleventh century but it continued to thrive in Andalusia right up until Ferdinand and Isabella drove the last Moors out. By then much of the work had been translated from Arabic back to Latin and was widely available in the great universities of the Renaissance.
Arab descent into their own version of the dark ages began a thousand years ago and they are only now beginning to emerge from them. It is another testament to the dangers of confusing faith, science, and enlightened self-interest. A good part of the descent and a factor in the emergence can be traced to an abysmal attitude towards women. It is often said that a major predictor of one’s lifetime intellectual achievement is the educational level of one’s mother. Arab women are being educated today in numbers never before seen and they are beginning to think for themselves. No wonder so many Arabs see western influence as a threat to their culture. Traditionally illiterate and submissive women are beginning to ask serious questions and all hell is breaking loose. I believe that more than any other single factor it is their women who will drag these people kicking and screaming into the modern era.

American Courage

One of my heroes died last week. If a friend hadn’t pointed me to an article in the newspaper about it I wouldn’t have known. 1st Lt. Hugh Thompson Jr. was the pilot who landed his helicopter in the line of fire at My Lai in 1968 and stopped a massacre. He and his crew got out and risked their lives pointing their rifles at an American platoon run amok. That done, they turned their attention to terrified Vietnamese civilians and began evacuating wounded. Thompson was widely vilified for years because he had exposed an incident that gave credence to malicious anti-war propaganda spread by the likes of John Kerry. I didn’t see it that way. Lt. William Calley and his platoon were the villains at My Lai. They disgraced themselves and every soldier who ever served the nation honorably. I can’t say that what happened there was an isolated incident because I don’t know. I do know I never saw anything like it in my two tours in Vietnam and I know that Calley and his men were not representative of the Army I served. The Thompson crew were. Their kind of courage is what we all dream of seeing in our children. Thompson did the right thing knowing he was placing himself in serious physical danger, and not expecting any thanks for it.
I loved the Army and still do. The people I met there were by and large people I was proud to be associated with. We had our misguided of course, our sycophants and just plain bad actors. But mostly we had people who saw themselves as serving their country, people who were determined to do their duty as best they saw it. They believed in what they were doing. I believed in what I was doing. Leaving the Army was probably the most difficult decision I ever made. In the end I didn’t think I had a choice. I hadn’t yet been married four years and had spent two in Vietnam. I came home to two small children and a young wife who was a virtual stranger. We had almost no opportunity at all to establish a marriage. It wasn’t working. I had to do something different. So I chose my family over my career. I would make the same choice again and again through the years with no regrets but I do miss the Army.
I don’t know why the Calley platoon did what they did. I know from personal experience combat can bring out the best in people, and the worst, sometimes both in the same person. Maybe some sort of mad blood lust came over Calley and his men. It can produce heroism of an unsettling kind, as depicted in the Mel Gibson movie The Patriot. The character played by Gibson frees his son from British captivity in a wild rage and brutally kills an entire British squad. Blood lust is better known for producing the kind of massacre that occurred at Wounded Knee, the kind that was in progress at My Lai.
Whatever happened with the Calley platoon, the real story of My Lai is Lt. Thompson’s. It made me proud to be an American. I suppose atrocities occur in any war on both sides. That isn’t news. The news is that we Americans hold ourselves to a higher standard. Every now and then one of our own reminds us of our ideals. That’s what Lt. Thompson and his crew did for me at My Lai. They reminded me what I was fighting for. God bless you Hugh Thompson.