Regarding Russian (though possibly grassroots rather than state-sponsored) virtual attacks on Estonian web infrastructure, Robert Farley remarks that “lots of work has been done on “cyber war”, the promise and vulnerability of networked military organizations” but:

Less attention has been paid to the economic prospects of cyber warfare, and to the ability of states to exert power and coercion through a new set of tools. When Russia tries to coerce its neigbors through threatening to destroy their economic and governmental activity, it becomes a problem for NATO and consequently the United States.

Of course, like many things all this could be anticipated by close readers of William Gibson‘s sprawl trilogy which clearly has just such a clash (between the US and Russia, even) as part of its backstory. I’m fairly confident that if this Neuromancer movie ever happens it’s going to suck, though.

I decided to skip to the end of Paul Berman’s monster essay and I see he winds up talking about Ayaan Hirsi Ali. She, of course, is every western secularist’s favorite Muslim precisely because she’s, well, not a Muslim. And, of course, from the point of view of western secularists it would be great if we could just partner up with secularists born in Muslim countries and together quash the menace of radical Islamist terrorism.

The trouble, of course, is that politics is the art of the possible, and history shows that it’s frequently not possible to do very much of anything with secularist politics. That’s why, for example, seeking arguments against Female Genital Mutilation in the Koran seems like an obviously smart move. In countries where large numbers of people believe FGM is required by Islam, arguments of the form “Islam requires FGM, FGM bad for women, therefore Islam should be abandoned” aren’t going to get off the ground. Arguments of the form “FGM is not required by Islam” or, even better, “FGM is condemned by Islam” are, pragmatically speaking, much more useful. But an argument like that is only going to be credible coming from a serious Muslim, probably one whose general beliefs are wildly too culturally conservative for my taste or that of any western feminist.

Here’s an interesting paper from Marina S. Ottaway and Amr Hamzawy: “Fighting on Two Fronts: Secular Parties in the Arab World”:

Without strong secular parties, political competition in the Arab world could be reduced to a dangerous head-on confrontation between Islamist parties and the incumbent governments. Yet secular parties—a broad term referring to organizations that do not embrace a political platform inspired by religious ideals—are clearly facing a crisis in the Arab world as they struggle for influence, relevance, and in some cases, survival. . . .

Voters see little reason to support secular parties that offer neither the patronage of government parties, nor the vision and social services of Islamist movements. As a result, they have become second-tier actors who cannot compete successfully for voter support. Their leaders, in turn, feel victimized by authoritarian governments that allow little legal space for free political activity and believe they cannot compete with the grassroots mobilization by the Islamist movements. . . .

The crisis of secular parties is emerging as a major obstacle to democratic reform in the Arab world. “The weakness of secular parties is leading to a curious blurring of the lines between government and opposition, with many secular parties looking to the government for protection against the rise of Islamists, even as they try to curb the power of those governments.”

Trying to think in a bit of a comparative context, the question is what the social and ideological basis of an Arab secular democratic political party would be. The answer, typically, is “labor unions and socialism” or else in the case of the US Democratic Party “labor unions and a high level of religious pluralism.” Nationalism could also plausibly work. And, of course, the Arab world used to be shot through with secular socialist and nationalist parties — Nasserism and Baathism and the like — but the US didn’t like it very much at the time. And there’s the rub.

Neither Islamism nor Arab nationalism nor aggressive socialism are the sort of things the US government is likely to be enthusiastic about, but it’s very hard to imagine what the social basis of support for the sort of political parties Americans usually say they want to see in the Arab world would be.

Why does Rep. Darryl Issa (R-CA) hate America? Dhimmitude is just around the corner.

I suppose I’m just an optimist at hear, but reading about how the People’s Republic of China is going to execute to former head of the PRC food and drug regulatory agency tends to confirm my belief that China’s going to find it extremely difficult to continue on the path of prosperity and autocracy.

You reach for these kind of extremely harsh punishments when you recognize that you have a lot of people getting away with a brand of crime that you think it’s very important to curb. China, in short, has a large corruption problem, and very little success at catching corrupt officials. Thus, executions. But this sort of law enforcement strategy rarely works. It’s much better to catch a large proportion of violators and mete out a moderate punishment than to catch only a small proportion of violators and then clamp down super harshly. But the only even vaguely effective means of clamping down on public corruption is to allow for a free press and competitive politics; the things that create institutions with incentives to expose corruption.

Recently, we’ve been facing the collision of the following truths:

A. GOP members say they can’t keep supporting the war unless the surge shows signs of success by September.
B. Conditions in Iraq never improve.
C. Republicans will never stop supporting the war.

Well, Julian Barnes reports that “U.S. military leaders in Iraq are increasingly convinced that most of the broad political goals President Bush laid out early this year in his announcement of a troop buildup will not be met this summer and are seeking ways to redefine success.” Success has, however, already been redefined plenty. If you’d predicted back in February 2003 that the US would be in the mess we’re in by May 2007 you would, rightly, have been viewed as someone who was predicting failure.

There’s a lot to be said about David Patten’s Middle East Quarterly article denying that Iraq is in a civil war, but let’s just quote this for now: “However, it does not follow that Iraq is in a civil war. While the government is weak, there is no political force presenting it with a serious challenge. Iraq is, indeed, an unstable nation, but there is little danger of regime change, the ultimate purpose of a civil war.”

While current conditions in Iraq don’t otherwise resemble the American Civil War, it should give Patten cause that he could have been standing in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania in July 1863 saying “there is little danger of regime change, the ultimate purpose of a civil war” and concluded that only unpatriotic and ill-informed elements in the news media would want to say the USA was in a civil war.