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From the Anchorage Daily News, Oct. 10, 2008: One of the nation’s best-known retired Army generals, Colin Powell, described Sen. Ted Stevens in court today as a “trusted individual” and a man with a “sterling” reputation. “He was someone whose word you could rely on,” said Powell, secretary of state in President Bush’s first term, who self-deprecatingly described himself as someone who retired as the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and then “dabbled a bit in diplomacy.” As opposition to the Iraq War mounted on the Left, a myth began to circulate about the purported secret influence of the political philosopher Leo Strauss in some of the inner circles of the Bush administration. To explore the origins of the allegation would be an adventure in itself: there is some indication that the thesis was first promulgated by Lyndon LaRouche and then amplified in the mainstream media, in Europe and the United States (Le Monde and the New York Times). Is journalism just serial plagiarism? To be sure, there were some kernels of truth: Paul Wolfowitz did truly study at the University of Chicago, where Strauss taught, and . . . well, that’s where the hard evidence abruptly ends and the narration begins. The half-knowledge that Strauss was a conservative thinker (though hardly a “neo-conservative”) and that he had something to do with esoteric philosophizing in relation to political power: this was enough to impute the workings of a nefarious Straussian cabal as a red-blooded conspiracy theory of the Bush administration. It was a great story for everyone who preferred not to think. The paranoid style in American politics, the anxiety about secret plots and shadow governments, had finally moved from the kooky right to the center-left. In an editorial titled “Following [in] Afghanistan’s Footsteps,” published October 8, 2008 in the London daily Al-Sharq Al-Awsat, editor-in-chief Tariq Al-Homayed warned that under Hamas’s rule, Gaza was becoming like Afghanistan—a hotbed of poverty, violence and strife among armed factions. He called on the Arabs to take a firm stand against Hamas, saying that it was undermining the Palestinian cause and was also a real threat to Egypt. Following are excerpts from the article, as it appeared in the English-language edition of the paper. The question is not whether McCain, thanks to the addition of Sarah Palin to the ticket, is going to win the election. That result depends on other variables and is secondary to what her candidacy reveals. Her candidacy is a symptom of a deep mutation in the symbolic order of society—that is, the emergence of a maternal figure to whom the power of the State is offered. From the first distance, it looks like a faintly lurid overspill from the window above, which is full of scattered lights—as if the fragments of rose glass hadn’t quite been able to contain themselves. It hovers over the void below, rather like a flash of Islamic script, perhaps the soft fiery writing of God himself, a muted warning, a tinted fiat. Looking back from the East transept, just glimpsing the pink glint under the Nave bridge, but too far away to make out the words, the bright caption almost looks magisterial, a condensation of the window’s eruption. Islamist terrorism is not disappearing, nor is the challenge to understand its origins. Whenever it began, it catapulted to the forefront of public attention on 9/11 and has been haunting the world ever since. The diversity of its venues makes it a global phenomenon. Successful attacks and foiled plots have taken place in Bali and Bosnia, in China and Indonesia, in Denmark and Germany, in Spain and England, in Israel and Jordan, in Algeria and Argentina, in Egypt, Iraq, Turkey, and Tunisia—demonstrating the wrongheadedness of that simplistic thinking that blamed the massacres in New York and Washington solely on U.S. policies. What we face is a worldwide threat defined by a willingness to use extreme violence against civilians while justifying it with appeals to Islam. The local pretexts vary widely, the organizational structures are loose, and the technical sophistication is uneven, ranging from hypermodern high-tech capacities to archaic decapitations, sometimes in the same event. This Islamist terrorism will remain a primary security threat in the coming decades, demonstrably able to adapt and evolve and to benefit parasitically from competition and contradictions in the international system. |
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