Peter Nolan

Gore no more

My review of Al Gore's book and movie An Inconvenient Truth was published in the Sunday Business Post.  It was fun to write, as you can probably tell.  I enjoyed the feedback as well. 

"The End of History" Man

In March, it was my great pleasure to speak with Francis Fukuyama - who is probably the most acute and serious scholar of politics around today.  I wrote up our discussion and reviewed his latest book on neo-conservatism and the future of American foreign policy for the Sunday Business Post and Beirut's Daily Star.

Imperial Hubris

Just last week, the CIA disbanded its special "virtual station" based at their headquarters and dedicated to analysis and operations against Osama bin Laden, subsuming it into their other uits.  Last year, I interviewed, Dr Michael Scheuer, its founding head, the author of of the book "Imperial Hubris: Why the West is Losing the War on Terror"  for the Jerusalem Post and Magill.  I thought that his analysis, while thorough, overemphasised the support for AQ among Muslims generally.  Also, Dr Scheuer seems to have an overpowering dislike of Israel and its American partisans. 

Dying to win?

As pressaged in last week's post, Patrick Belton and I have just written a review of the University of Chicago political science professor Robert Pape's new book "Dying to win: Why suicide bombers do it?"  I'm proud to be published in this magazine that I've enjoyed reading for so long.  Download it in PDF 

Chinese whispers

I review a new book about the SARS epidemic in today's Sunday Business Post. 

This summer, tourists may not be the only thing travelling by plane. Along with our sun cream and paperback thrillers, our germs will come along for the ride too. This makes air travel the perfect way for diseases to spread across the globe within hours, especially as 80 per cent of the air we breathe on flights is recycled and shared between passengers.

On January 3, 2003, a newspaper in the obscure town of Heyuan in Guangdong, the province in southern China next to Hong Kong, had a startling story on its front page. ‘‘There is no epidemic in Heyuan. There is no need for people to panic. Regarding the rumour of ongoing epidemic in the city, health department officials announced at 1.30am this morning, there is no epidemic in Heyuan.” It was, writes Karl Taro Greenfeld, then-editor of Time magazine’s Asia edition, ‘‘one of the least reassuring assurances I have ever come across’’.

Dying to win

The one-year anniversary of the 7/7 bombings, in which over fifty Londoners died, is coming next Saturday.  Already the media are publishing assesments of the events and their effects.  The monthly Prospect got in first, with its profile of the Swiss-Egyptian Muslim intellectual Tariq Ramadan.  Today's Spectator uses what is probably the defining image, of the destroyed bus in Torrington Place and has a slew of essays. 

However, on the more serious end of the spectrum, the U Chicago political scientist Robert L Pape, like his polemical colleague John Mearsheimer, is taking aim at US involvement in the Middle East in his book "Dying to Win".  I read the US edition when it came out last year and I thought that it was a seriously flawed piece of research.

Pape believes that suicide terrorists are motivated by altruism towards self-sacrifice on behalf of their families and communities.  I think that this might, just about, if you've your eyes closed, just about hold true for some groups like Hamas or Hezbollah. 

However, I can't see it as being true for Al Qaeda or the 7/7 bombers, whose families and wider communities were ignorant or desperately trying to detach them from a deadly sub-culture devoted to jihad and martyrdom. 

Similarly, Pape is completely correct in pointing out that there is nothing inherently Arab or Islamic about suicide bombing as a tactic - Sri Lanka's Tamil Tigers have accounted for more such attacks than any other group ; the Kurdish PKK also use it against Turkey; members of both religious and secular groups in Lebanon took part in suicide attacks against Israelis. 

However, he's unhelpfully blinded by the realists' downplaying of morality or ideology, not noting that while such groups may be diverse in origins, they are united by their attachment to totalitarian ideas for realising heaven on Earth, which are as likely to come from extreme nationalism or Marxism as Islamism, as the Speigel journalist Christoph Reuter found in his journeys among them, where he described one unfortunate Kurdish woman futilely trying to take off her bomb belt or the Tigers enforcing chastity on their "soldiers". 

Pape's analysis also suffers from dismissing the fact that these groups exercise a extreme degree of control over its activists - and that many bombers have undergone a process of coercion and degradation, most visible in the PKK, but also among Palestinian suicide bombers, especially women, as Barbara Victor tells in her book Army of Roses. 

Instead of Iraqis or Palestinians attacking London on behalf of their suffering nations, we got home-grown extremists instead, who would have been as likely to fight Israel in Gaza as they are to play at Old Trafford.  Nevertheless, they are passionately involved to the extent of being willing to give up their lives - like all the most fanatical Man United fans, they act on brand names and not any local loyalties.