WHAT DO BROTHERS JUDD AND MASTERING ARABIC POETRY HAVE IN COMMON?

Why America is losing the intelligence War (Spengler, Asia times, 11/11/03)

Today's intelligence war with radical Islam comes down to a contest for the loyalties of the population of individuals who can move between both worlds. The vast majority of these are university students from Islamic countries in the US or Western Europe, and the remainder are students of Oriental languages in the West. For several reasons, the US is at a vast disadvantage.

Unlike other immigrants, Muslim students in the US neither are poor nor politically disenfranchised. They are there precisely because they belong to the elite of their country, for whom foreign study is a privilege. Few are prepared to abandon their culture, while many resent the West. Because of the cultural divide, the vast majority of Muslims who study in the West read sciences or mathematics. Indian and Chinese foreign students dominate these faculties. No Arab has become a scientist of note since the early Middle Ages, while the universities are full of Indian and Chinese Nobelists. Hell hath no fury like an elite slighted. These circumstances tend to provoke the resentment of Arab and other Muslim foreign students toward the West.

Muslim students attending the most prestigious Western universities, moreover, hear nothing of the merits of Western culture. Instead, what they learn from post-colonial theory, deconstructionism, and post-modernism is that all culture is a pretext for the assertion of power by oppressors. No qualitative difference separates Dante and Goethe from the meanest screed of the cheapest propagandist. What matters is the sub-text, the expression of power relations buried beneath the rhetoric. They learn of the evil US that slaughtered its native population, oppressed blacks and other minorities, degraded women, marginalized the poor, and operates on behalf of plutocratic financial interests.

Not since Kim Philby was an undergraduate at Cambridge has the intellectual elite of the West been so inclined to bite the hand that feeds it. The degenerate view of Martin Heidegger and Ludwig Wittgenstein, which reduces all faith and conviction to capricious existential choice, dominates the mind of the West. From this standpoint it is impossible to challenge another culture, because all differences are arbitrary to begin with. How is it possible under these circumstances to make ideological recruits?

There is not much hope for American intelligence among Western students of the Middle East. General John Abizaid, the commander of US Central Command, earned a master's degree in Middle Eastern Studies in 1981 under Professor Nadav Safran, one of the best academics in the field. But in 1985, the Middle East Studies Association censured Safran for accepting CIA funding, destroying his career, according to Martin Kramer, a right-wing critic of the overwhelmingly left-wing Middle East Studies establishment. That was a generation ago; in the interim, the field has shifted even further toward Heideggerian relativism.

One does encounter exceptions, such as General William Boykin, an evangelical Christian who evidently does not subscribe to the relativism of the academics and who heads the hunt for Osama bin Laden, among others. The evangelicals represent an important force in American politics, but have little to contribute to the intelligence effort. Born-again Christians in some respects seem as if they were born yesterday. Their educational institutions, such as they are, lack the sophistication to produce the sort of training that General Abizaid received at Harvard when it was still available.

American intelligence cannot recruit reliable spies from the available pool of foreign nationals, nor can it train its own. Army Special Forces makes an effort to teach languages to its personnel, but anyone who has met these fresh-faced, well-meaning young people has the impression that they are much better in a gunfight than in a war of ideas. I expect more intelligence failures, more "why-America-slept" exposes, more Congressional committees debating who lost what, and more American casualties. One possible consequence of America's intelligence failures may be a far greater degree of dependency on Israel and India for human intelligence.

Paul Jaminet linked this piece last November, but perhaps it bears a re-read in light of this week's events. The overwhelming might of the U.S. and a simplistic view of history reinforce the popular idea that the justice of the cause is obvious and victory an inevitability only incompetence could prevent. It is fun and comforting to imagine the Islamists as a bunch of wide-eyed crazies dreaming of celestial virgins. It is not so reassuring to see them as committed and educated strategists who spend their days debating how exactly to beat a military titan whose confidence seems shaken when it isn't welcomed by cheering crowds.

Intelligence is just one aspect of the ideological war, as are winning the support of moderates and undermining extremists. Technique is great, but professors of classical Arab poetry are as likely to catch out a Mohammed Atta as trained CIA operatives. The Administration is under more and more criticism for not "getting its message out", as if all would be well if it just hired new communications consultants. But is not the context of this problem a modern failure to understand that a war of ideas can be as grueling, ruthless and even bloody as the dirtiest guerilla fight? Frankly, despite a well-stocked ideological munitions depot, America doesn't seem to be doing all that well against Europe, never mind the Islamic world.

Americans can be too quick to anger, confusion or insult (or even worse, agreement) when the truths that are self-evident to them are challenged by foreigners, or they are subjected to know-nothing taunts from countries of little matter. They should expect these with the certainty they expect an enemy to return fire, and respond with the same cool resolve and superior firepower. Instead of pointing fingers over who should have known what about the antics of thousands of Muslim students nobody knew how to talk to, if they committed to fighting the war of ideas behind enemy lines, good intelligence might follow.