Category Archives: Reviews

Decoration Day

by Jonathan Rue Posted on July 25, 2012

No other country has vexed U.S. presidents over the last thirty years quite like Iran.

Jimmy Carter watched Iran go from stalwart ally to implacable foe when Iranian students stormed the U.S. embassy in Tehran. The ensuing hostage crisis sunk his reelection bid. Ronald Reagan sold Iran a bunch of surface-to-air missiles in an ill-fated attempt to free American hostages in Lebanon. At the same time, Reagan waged a low-level war against Iran in the Persian Gulf as the U.S. Navy sought to keep shipping lanes open and oil flowing. George H.W. Bush searched fruitlessly for the “elusive Iranian moderate.” Bill Clinton entered office deciding such a search was a waste of time, but left office having found that moderate in Iranian president Mohammad Khatami, only to have efforts at rapprochement thwarted by hardliners in the office of the Supreme Leader, Revolutionary Guard Corps, and the U.S. Congress. After cooperating briefly with Iran over post-Taliban Afghanistan in 2001, George W. Bush decided Iran was an “axis of evil” and refused to negotiate directly with it on any subject. As the U.S. became bogged down in Iraq, the Bush administration watched helplessly as the Iran provided Iraq’s Shia militias with powerful roadside bombs; Iran also restarted uranium enrichment. Barack Obama extended an olive branch, but when Iran burned the olive branch, he used it as leverage at the United Nations and instituted the most severe economic sanctions to date.

In The Twilight War, David Crist chronicles the ups and (mostly) downs of the troubled U.S.-Iranian relationship since 1979. During that time, the superpower and regional pretender have alternated between uneasy peace and de facto war. The relationship has always been long on emotion and short on understanding. Neither side understands the other because, as Crist said in a recent interview, “both sides are captive to history.”

To be sure, it’s a complex history, with both sides contributing to the impasse. Crist weaves together the narrative threads of the U.S.-Iran relationship in a way that illuminates why this struggle continues with no signs of resolution. Blood has been spilt by both sides: 241 sailors, soldiers, and Marines died at the hands of the Iranian proxy Hezbollah in Beirut, while 290 Iranian civilians died when the USS Vincennes accidentally shot down Iran Air flight 655. American troops have been killed in Iraq by Iran-funded militants. Iranian nuclear scientists have been killed on the streets of Tehran, and although U.S. involvement has not been conclusively proven, in the eyes of the Iranian regime it hardly matters. Perception is reality in this case.

Trust has always been hard to come by. After stating in his inaugural address “goodwill begets goodwill,” George H.W. Bush reneged on promises he made to Iran in return for the freedom of the last American hostages in Lebanon. Iran continues to enrich uranium in defiance with UN Security Council resolutions and refuses to come clean about prior work done on weaponization.

And even in moments of relative calm and clear-headedness, negotiation offers have been refused. In 2003, Iran sent a fax to the State Department via the Swiss ambassador offering to put everything on the table, including their opposition to Israel and support for Hamas and Hezbollah. The Bush Administration refused to negotiate, believing the regime was on the brink of collapse. In 2009, Barack Obama offered to negotiate with Iran, but Iran thought the offer was meant solely to buy time for more sanctions and so refused.

This sweeping chronicle comes at a critical moment. The U.S. and Iran are (again) seemingly on the march to war. Defiant in the face of economic sanction, Iran continues to enrich uranium and fund terrorist groups throughout the Middle East. It’s also threatening to close the Strait of Hormuz. Meanwhile, the United States political elite is debating—for at least the umpteenth time—whether or not to bomb Iran’s nuclear facilities. It has 40,000 troops and an armada of aircraft carriers, guided missile destroyers, and submarines patrolling the Persian Gulf. Yet despite this build up of punditry and equipment, the elites of DC seem oddly unaware of the nuances of our history with Iran – and thus the value of Twilight War becomes clear.

Crist’s sources are top notch – recently declassified documents and personal records and interviews with all the major characters you’ve never heard of – and that’s just on the U.S. side. His sources in Iran’s political and military elite are every bit as good. He logged thousands of miles conducting over 400 interviews in the U.S. and throughout the Middle East. The senior historian for the Joint Staff and Marine Reserve officer, Crist is at his best when describing in amazing detail the almost minute-by-minute account of the Tanker War. In fact, he spends roughly one third of the book recounting it. Those looking for comprehensive analysis of the major decisions and flashpoints of the relationship may be disappointed as Crist keeps his own cards close to his chest, only revealing some of them at the end. This, however, is a real strength of the book. There’s no angle and he’s not pushing policy. It’s simply a rich history of two antagonistic countries struggling to figure each other out.

Finding a way out of permanent hostility will take a diplomatic miracle, not to mention a large dose of political courage. As Crist notes, “neither side has much desire to work to bridge their differences. Distrust permeates the relationship. Three decades of twilight have hardened both sides.” In other words, the U.S. and Iran are the Hatfields and McCoys of international politics – caught in a cycle of distrust and animosity that feeds on itself. The actions of the last thirty years have shaped the political, foreign policy, and military elite of both countries.

Iran specialist Afshon Ostovar recently commented that the majority of leaders on both sides don’t want war. He’s right, but if the last thirty years are any indication of the future, neither side really wants peace either.

Buy the book, which I highly recommend, here.

Posted in Iran, Middle East, Reviews, War | Tagged , | 1 Comment

Borum’s “Radicalization into Violent Extremism I”

by Daveed Gartenstein-Ross Posted on May 18, 2012

The Journal of Strategic Security recently produced a special issue focusing on radicalization, which should be of immense interest for those of us studying the subject. One essay I’d like to highlight is Randy Borum’s “Radicalization into Violent Extremism I,” which reviews social science theories on the subject. It is an extremely incisive literature review, which raises several points that are well worth considering for those who do work in, or related to, this field of study.

  • Borum notes that “a focus on radicalization … risks implying that radical beliefs are a proxy—or at least a necessary precursor—for terrorism. We know this not to be true. Most people who hold radical ideas do not engage in terrorism, and many terrorists—even those who lay claim to a ’cause’—are not deeply ideological and may not ‘radicalize’ in any traditional sense.” This is not an original point, but is worth bearing in mind when considering the study of radicalization. I will also say, without contradicting Borum’s assertion, that one important aspect of assessing a lack of deep ideology on “many” terrorists’ part is making sure we get the metrics right for measuring their ideological beliefs. I took Jessica Stern to task a couple of years ago for a Washington Post op-ed she wrote that used rather inappropriate metrics for evaluating the religious commitment of those within al Qaeda.
  • The article has an interesting discussion of debates over the role of Islam. Borum accurately notes that “when countries cannot delineate which specific ideas they oppose, their reassurances” that their problem is not with the faith itself “lack credibility.” This points to the generally poor discussion of religion that tends to predominate within the field. Nuanced discussion of Islam is not completely lacking in the West, but tends to be the exception rather than the rule, including within the academic sphere. Borum outlines different schools of thought on this problem. On one hand, he points to a school of thought that distinguishes between Islam and Islamism. In this understanding, Islam refers to “a religion that conventionally-at least in modern practice-does not overtly encourage hatred of non-Muslims and neither mandates nor justifies killing of civilian non-combatants.” In contrast, the term Islamism “refers not to a religion, but to a totalitarian political ideology driven by strong anti-Western and anti-democratic sentiment.” On the other hand, he points to the contrasting view “that core Islamic texts and teachings mandate subjugation of and warfare against non-Muslims.” He concludes that “there are profoundly different strategic and tactical implications … for whether we identify the religion, its holy text, or a narrower ideology as the core threat to global security. These divergent views need to be discussed openly, not with the aim of determining a winner and loser, but to clarify security-related policy objectives.” I’m not optimistic that such a discussion could occur reasonably or productively, but Borum’s point that discussions of radicalization often fail to reference specific ideas that are seen as objectionable is in my view important. Bear in mind, too, that our definition of what views are “radical” and hence problematic may differ from the domestic context to global context.
  • Borum debunks the idea that we should look for a general theory of terrorism. He quotes the respected scholar Walter Laqueur, who noted, “Many terrorists exist, and their character has changed over time and from country to country.” It is certainly instructive, when studying concepts like radicalization or terrorist recruitment, to understand how these concepts have functioned across a range of groups. But recruiting strategies or radicalization processes for the Baader-Meinhof Group or IRA might differ significantly from those of al Qaeda. And even within a group like al Qaeda, there are different pathways to violence. Borum quotes John Venhaus’s division of foreign fighters who sought to affiliate with al Qaeda-related movements into four major types: the revenge seeker, the status seeker, the identity seeker, and the thrill seeker. I question whether this division may give short shrift to the ideologue as a type, but Venhaus’s observation that there are different radicalization pathways even for al Qaeda-related violence is certainly correct.

Borum’s article notes the underdevelopment of extant academic models for radicalization. Reviewing existing models, Borum writes, “none of them yet has a very firm social-scientific basis as an established ’cause’ of terrorism, and few of them have been subjected to any rigorous scientific or systematic inquiry.” He examines three such models-social movement theory, social psychology, and conversion theory-”with the aim of exploring how each might contribute to asking better questions about radicalization.” His review of these theories is well worth reading for anybody interested in the study of radicalization, particularly Borum’s observation about the applicability of conversion theory to such problems as Internet radicalization. His harsh but justified prognosis: “People writing about radicalization have recently begun to use the term (often quite loosely) ‘self-radicalizing,’ as if it is a new discovery, but conversion researchers were working on this phenomenon long before the Internet.”

This article constitutes a competent literature review with solid ideas for improving the theories and studies that it evaluates.

Posted in Academia, Radicalization, Reviews | Leave a comment

Gimme Shelter

by Jonathan Rue Posted on May 17, 2012

In 1972, Marine captain Francis “Bing” West published an unadulterated account of a Marine Combined Action Platoon in Vietnam. The Village was and remains the seminal account of the Marine Corps Combined Action Program. Born out of lessons learned in the Banana Wars of the early 20th century, the Combined Action Program paired a Marine rifle squad with Vietnamese Popular Force militiamen and assigned the combined platoon responsibility for protecting a village or hamlet. West’s chronicle of fifteen Marines who lived, fought, and died alongside their Vietnamese brothers for 485 days in Bing Nghia offered a trove of lessons for military advisors fighting a brutal counterinsurgency.

Forty years later, Owen West, a Marine reserve major and Bing’s son, has published his own gripping saga of a modern day variant of the Combined Action Platoon – the Military Transition Team (MiTT) – fighting a similarly brutal counterinsurgency in Iraq. The Snake Eaters follows the 3rd Battalion, 3rd Brigade, 1st Division (3/3-1) of the Iraqi Army and their American military advisors – known by their all-too-appropriate radio call sign, Outcast – during the dark days of 2005-07 as they attempt to defeat an insurgency and win the allegiance of Khalidiya, a village halfway between Fallujah and Ramadi. It’s a raw account of a motley crew of reservists called up for duty to fight a war for which they were ill prepared, ill equipped, and ill supported. Through force of bravery and grit, Outcast and their Iraqi brothers-in-arms overcome the enemy and, sometimes, their own chain-of-command.

In a sense, Outcast was lucky. Lieutenant Colonel Mike Troster, the team leader during the hard days of 2005-06 and a Drug Enforcement Agent when he wasn’t moonlighting as a reserve infantry officer, instinctively understood both advising and counterinsurgency – many MiTTs had leaders that didn’t. Troster understood the necessity of constant patrolling. He also knew his MiTT needed to accompany 3/3-1 on every patrol in order to gain credibility so that their advice would be heard and heeded. He knew that in order to run constant patrols with a ten-man team, normal rank protocol went out the window. He flattened Outcast’s hierarchy – every man did every job. The military hadn’t trained him for this, but he knew what needed to be done and did it.

Troster led a team varied in complexion; it was a typical group of reservists. Sergeant First Class Mark Huss ran a plumbing company in Iowa and spent his reserve weekends “teaching soldiers how to maintain laundry facilities.” Sergeant First Class Eliezer Rivera, the team’s senior non-commissioned officer, was a post office supervisor. Specialist Joseph Neary was “a heating technician by day and a rock-and-roll guitarist by night.” Sergeant Shawn Boiko was a flooring manager. None had infantry training.

Once teams like Outcast were assembled, the Army and Marines had to train them. Here too, efforts fell far short. But as West incisively notes, much of this was a result of the divide between ground truth and Washington fantasy about the war’s progress and the nature of counterinsurgency. Early advisor teams received, as they described it to West, “forty five days of ill-conceived classes crammed into ninety.” The classes at Camp Atterbury were taught mostly by people who had never been to Iraq and who had never been advisors. The entire training program was premised on the notion that the advisor teams would be living on large, American run Forward Operating Bases, training Iraqi soldiers in basic soldiering skills and staff work. “It was as if Atterbury was preparing the advisors to defend a log fort against a Sioux attack in 1863,” West writes.

As Outcast brutally discovered in late summer 2005 upon arriving in Iraq, their training had been worthless. The Snake Eaters, the name 3/3-1 gave itself, were coming off six months of hard combat and expected more as they were newly responsible for of the more dangerous areas of Anbar Province. The Iraqis didn’t need classroom teachers – they needed combat advisors.

Outcast shouldn’t have succeeded; at least, not on paper. A disparate group of ten reservists with no infantry training or combat experience is a perfect metaphor for America’s efforts in Iraq. But Outcast conducted over 1,500 combat patrols. Team members like Sergeants First Class Huss and Rivera each logged more than 450 combat patrols in a ten-month deployment. Outcast hit fifty improvised explosive devices. Seven of the ten were wounded. One died.

And yet they persevered, overcoming the normal aspects of hard combat and a Spartan existence on a small combat outpost, devoid the normal accouterments found on the larger FOBs, and even a lack of support from their own side. Outcast looked to Task Force Panther, a National Guard unit – who, it should be noted, was also ill prepared and ill equipped for the mission and fight they were given – that was supposed to “partner” with 3/3-1 and support the advisors. But Panther and its higher headquarters didn’t get it. First, there was the order mandating the Iraqis patrol in armored vehicles. Think about that one for a second. Then there was Panther’s refusal to conduct joint patrols with 3/3-1. And as if Outcast’s existence wasn’t Spartan enough, Panther removed the main generator providing power to Outcast’s small outpost. With insightful vignettes like these, West demonstrates one of the main challenges advisors often face is the U.S. military command.

By the end of the book, it’s clear that many of the lessons gleaned forty years ago were either discounted or forgotten when the U.S. military scrambled to field advisors to the newly rebuilt Iraqi Army in the summer of 2004. This inability to retain lessons learned is somewhat surprising. Combat advising is not a new concept – the United States has been in the business of training foreign militaries for at least 100 years. The Marine Corps, as noted earlier, has a long heritage of partnering with and advising foreign militaries. As all Marines are steeped in the Corps’ history, there is institutional memory and widespread awareness of Marines as advisors. The U.S. Army institutionalized combat advisors by creating the Special Forces; however, the pernicious effect of this decision was to insulate this mission within this small community – regular Army units and commanders came to despise the mission. Since their inception in the early days of the Cold War, the Green Berets have been the principal force for advising foreign militaries. They spend years training, and when it comes to advising, the Green Berets are the best the United States has to offer. Regrettably, the task of building and advising the new Iraqi Army after it was disbanded in 2004 vastly exceeded the capacity of the Green Berets to do alone. The Army and Marine Corps were thus forced to field advisor teams like Outcast.

Unfortunately, the services did so with little understanding or appreciation for the task in front of the MiTTs. As West notes:

Our generals are uncomfortable prescribing advisors as a solution to these twenty-first century wars. Advising a foreign military requires nontraditional training that takes years; soldiers need a wonk’s cultural awareness, the rudimentary language capability of a border cop, a survivalist’s skills, and the interpersonal savvy of a politician. Military hierarchy is built on control, so it feels unnatural for the leadership to dispatch these small bands of advisors, who on paper cannot give orders, to live among foreign, sometimes hostile soldiers in an effort to stabilize their countries.

Indeed, being an advisor requires patience, understanding, and tact – three traits not normally emphasized in military training and culture. Throw in an organizational culture that disdains advising as an inferior mission and promotion policies that delineate a career path to the top – advising is, uh, missing – and the result was an advisor selection and training program that emphasized quantity, not quality.

Advising is a mindset. An otherwise outstanding officer might be a terrible advisor, and the most incompetent infantry corporal might be incredibly effective. It’s less instruction and more persuasion. The Army initially turned to reservists like Outcast and later adopted the Marine Corps model, meeting its requirements by pulling individuals from disparate units across the fleet, which sometimes incentivized commanders to send underperformers. West, in his typically blunt manner, notes, “Selection for advisor duty was not rigorous. Soldiers could not be overly prejudiced, handicapped, or too fat to deploy.”

In his history of America’s involvement in Vietnam, Summons of Trumpet, retired Army Lieutenant General Dave Palmer writes: “Another unchanging reality of advising is the more or less constant cocoon of frustration enveloping the advisor. Adjusting to advising is a greater individual challenge than can be easily imagined by anyone who has not done it.” The challenges an advisor faces over the course of a combat deployment are impossible to overstate. Owen West succeeds simply by telling Outcast’s tale. But what really sets The Snake Eaters apart from the other advisor memoirs* to come out of Iraq is his sharp, evocative prose – “a group of jundis who were watering the pavement with spent brass casings” – and his thorough account of the various challenges Outcast faced and their relation to the strategic direction of the war.

When the American military was fielding advisor teams like Outcast in 2004-2005, they could almost be forgiven for forgetting lessons learned from successful advising concepts from wars past. After all, the military did an exceptional job of purging the lessons of Vietnam during the late 1970s and 1980s, and by 2004 Vietnam was but a distant memory. The same cannot be said for our advisory efforts in Afghanistan.

As a part of our campaign plan in Afghanistan, the U.S. is beginning the transition out of the lead for combat operations, just as we did in Iraq. As combat units rotate home, they will be replaced by what the Army is calling Security Force Assistance Teams (SFATs). The good news is that these SFATs will be composed primarily of officers and senior staff non-commissioned officers pulled from the same brigade staff, so there will be a level of familiarity with one another not found on teams like Outcast. More good news is that the SFATs will spend five weeks at their home station focusing on individual and team military skills like land navigation, weapons usage, and patrolling techniques. The bad news is that the pre-deployment training repeats many of the same mistakes from 2004. After the SFATs complete training at their home station, they’ll go to the Joint Readiness Training Center at Ft. Polk where they’ll receive – wait for it – three weeks of advisor training. Three weeks.

Given the spike of so-called “green-on-blue” incidents in the last six months – 22 ISAF deaths in 2012, or 13% of total ISAF KIA, have come at the hands of Afghan security force personnel turning on their advisors – the lack of cultural, negotiation, and language training is troubling. Like the advisors sent to Iraq in 2004-05, the SFATs are not getting the proper training. Green Berets spend years learning how to advise foreign militaries. Even the Marine Corps puts its MiTTs through roughly five months of pre-deployment training, with a heavy emphasis advisor skills like best practices for speaking through an interpreter and cultural do’s and don’ts. These are reinforced throughout the training program so that they become second nature. Of course, this training isn’t perfect, but at least the USMC MiTTs are being set up for success.

The story of American military advisors in Iraq and Afghanistan is not well known. Should Americans read The Snake Eaters and learn more about a little known aspect of the savage wars less than one per cent of their fellow citizens have been fighting, great. But the audiences who will gain the most from reading West’s book are mid-career officers attending the Army and Marine Corps staff colleges in Fort Leavenworth and Quantico. Outcast is a testament that advisors can succeed even when the armed services do not appreciate their mission. The advisor needs robust, appropriate training and the full support of his command as soon as his boots hit the ground because as long as we continue to wage counterinsurgencies as a third party, advisors are our saving grace. As West notes, “No matter how we enter these murky twenty-first century wars, all roads out lead through the combat advisor.”

* Here are the three other memoirs about the military advisor experience to come out of Iraq. Interesting that all four are written by Marine officers.

Folsom, Seth. (2010) In the Gray Area: A Marine Advisor Team at War. Annapolis: Naval Institute Press.

Gray, Wes. (2009) Embedded: A Marine Corps Adviser Inside the Iraqi Army. Annapolis: Naval Institute Press.

Navarro, Eric. (2008) God Willing: My Wild Ride with the New Iraqi Army. Washington: Potomac Books.

Posted in Afghanistan, Iraq, Military, Reviews, War | 3 Comments

Review: Will McCants’ Founding Gods, Inventing Nations

by caidid Posted on February 29, 2012

Will McCants’ Founding Gods, Inventing Nations is not a simple history of rulers and conquests but something subtler, a history of the perceptions and cultural contests inside ancient conquests. Concentrating on the Greek, Roman, and Arab empires, McCants looks at the many interpretations and re-interpretations of the roots of culture - cities and medicine and tool use and philosophy and ironwork and geometry and agriculture and astronomy - touching on myths and origin stories in those cultures after outlining some of the culture myths as they existed in more ancient empires such as the Sumerian, Egyptian, Assyrian, Babylonian, and Persian.

McCants uses the lens of these culture myths to try to understand the interactions between conquerors and conquered, how peoples assimilate or assert themselves. He makes the point that times of conquest and the aftermath thereof are periods of flux for all parties involved. Conquerors do not universally impose their will or their way on the conquered. Cultural influence is a negotiation: it goes both ways, and the way culture myths are told, especially at these times of flux, is instructive of the social and political needs of the day. He compares the approaches to culture myths of individuals at the times of the Greek, Roman, and Arab conquests in four categories - divine providence, “firsts,” founders of native civilizations, and the origins of the sciences – and discusses the contexts and motivations in each era for each category.

We can see some parallels in all the periods discussed. All three conquering empires – Greek, Roman, and Arab – soon saw native elites writing histories of their (the natives’) forefathers’ contributions to civilization in their own languages, and for a similar range of reasons: to instill or boost local pride, to show the conquerors what they owed the conquered, to persuade the conquerors to behave like native rulers, to discredit local rivals, or to elevate themselves above other conquered peoples.

However, similar paths could lead to different places in each period. For example, there are lists of ‘firsts’ surviving from all three periods, but the type of activities and inventions on the lists, and the attributions for them, differed greatly. Writers in all three periods dealt with some of the same questions, including whether the Greeks had originated anything or borrowed from other cultures, and whether humans could develop complex sciences on their own or if divine inspiration of some kind was required, but the conclusions they reached depended on the cultural context and requirements of the time.

Perhaps the area of most divergence was on the origin of the sciences, as even within each culture there existed debate on whether the sciences were given to man by divine intercession or earned through his own ingenuity, as well as contention over which civilizations were the first to use certain sciences, regardless of whether the initial providence was human or divine.

I won’t get into his specific conclusions about each conquest, because you should read it yourself, but McCants tells us in his introduction:

In recounting these culture myths, authors worked out their place in post-conquest society. By describing the origin and transmission of science, they tell us where they stand in relation to that tradition, to their contemporaries who practice it, and to those who detract from it. By writing histories of the cultural exploits of ancient heroes, they tell us how they think of their ethnic origins and how others can join or be excluded from their group. By making lists of beneficial arts and sciences, they encode the ideal cultural genealogy of their societies and provide the knowledge needed to navigate it. By demonstrating how God works in the world, they explain how society should be ordered and who should maintain it. These scholarly activities were at no time more important than after conquest, when the place of the conqueror and the conquered were both unstable and in need of mooring to the ancient past.

Though the book’s focus is on ancient times, its insights into power, perception, and persuasion are relevant down to the present day. The early Islamic empires saw both conquerors and conquered grappling with the establishment of an Islamic culture in negotiation with the Qur’anic values of the conquerors, and the established high cultures of the Greeks, Iranians, and others whom they conquered. In the modern post-colonial period, populations are still defining and re-defining Islamic culture, no longer in relation to conquered elites, but to liberalism, democracy, and the legacy of colonial powers. The solutions thus far have included forms of government from Iranian velayat-e faqih to the Turkish secular parliamentary system to the religiously-backed monarchy of Saudi Arabia, with many nations currently in flux; and intellectual approaches that run the whole gamut from salafi movements such as that of Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab which seek to return Islam to a perceived pure original state, to the work of intellectuals such as Khaled Abou El Fadl who seek to derive an Islamic context for democracy. Living within borders drawn and re-drawn by the Ottomans, then the French and British, and living with the legacy of colonial occupiers, as well as contemporary resource issues and the long shadow of American interests, it is again a time of renewal and redefinition.

And it is not just relevant to Islamic culture. This book is not about one single culture, nor does it speak only to the concerns of empires; it is about negotiations between cultures, the projection of power, and the exercise of influence. As an American, I can’t help but consider things in terms of American power. There is food for thought here in how our sway shows in the world at large, and how we in turn can be impacted by the cultures with which we interact, and the culture of those we occupy or influence.

The author has stated that if you (the reasonably educated reader) can’t understand this book, then he has failed. The book is clearly written, structured in a way that makes sense, and quite digestible in terms of both format and length. McCants does a creditable job of providing enough context that a reader who is not familiar with all of his sources can understand it but not so much that it bogs the book down. You don’t have to be a scholar of antiquity, or religion, or any other particular field in order to benefit from this book.

That being said, my own familiarity with the at least the rudiments of a lot of the material provided me with a good measure of my personal enjoyment of it. For me, the fun of reading diversely is in the connections your mind makes between things, especially things that seem disparate at first glance. It was a pleasure seeing the connections made by McCants - known to many for his expertise in counterterrorism and modern jihadi movements - among many disciplines including ancient history, religion, anthropology, poetry, modern religious scholarship, and mythology. I have a lifelong love of mythology of all kinds, and I have studied ancient history, Middle Eastern history, the Bible, and Islam, so McCants’ wide variety of sources were also a delight. The book is peppered with excerpts from Babylonian tablets, Sumerian poetry, Egyptian scrolls, the works of Homer and Aeschylus and Hesiod and Herodotus, Jewish/Christian apocrypha in which wayward angels sleep with humans and spread corruption, the Iranian epic Shahnamih, the Bible, and the Qur’an, just to name a few.

I would strongly recommend this book to anyone with an interest in history or mythology, or a penchant for thinking about complex ideas like the blurred lines of influence between conquerors and conquered. It is well-written, rich with wonderful source materials, educational on the cultural milieux of these ancient conquests, and thought-provoking in terms of how we perceive culture, power, and influence.

———

My one tiny quibble with the book is purely geekery-based and has nothing to do with writing or scholarship, but I just can’t help myself from mentioning it: McCants devastatingly missed an opportunity to reference the greatest science fiction film ever made (and my favorite movie) Ridley Scott’s 1982 masterpiece Blade Runner, in his conclusion. He uses the phrase “more Arab than Arab” and references a 2002 book’s use of the term “more English than the English” rather than Blade Runner‘s Tyrell Corporation’s motto “More Human Than Human,” an oversight that I’m sure will haunt him until the end of his days.

Posted in Reviews, Uncategorized | Tagged | 1 Comment

Twice the First Time

by Diana Wueger Posted on January 1, 2012

I just finished Will McCants’ lovely little book, Founding Gods, Inventing Nations (not to be confused with his earlier work, Much Ado About Prom Night) (okay, so that’s probably a different Will McCants) (or maybe that’s just what he wants us to think?).

Anyway! I think Caitlin’s planning on a real review, which is good, because one of us has studied religion and history extensively and one of us is me. And Founding Gods deserves a real review, which this isn’t. Instead, I’d like to offer some disjointed thoughts and modern parallels that I’m sure Will did not intend anybody to make. Sorry, friend. You should’ve known better.

Caveat lector of this blog post: I’ve taken a lot of cold medicine just before writing this. Caveat lector of Founding Gods: you need a dictionary handy should you wish to read this (which I recommend you do!) - there are many, many Big Words, some of which Will probably made up. You may wish to have Wikipedia close by as well, unless you’re very familiar with the histories of most early civilizations. Also, I recommend reading this backwards - read the book’s conclusion first, then go back to Chapter 1 and read the conclusion of that, then read the full chapter, etc. Founding Gods is short but dense, and it’s easy to get caught up in the details and lose sight of the broader arguments. This is not the Will McCants who rides around in a banana - this is Serious Academic Will McCants, though he does use the phrase “new kids on the Mediterranean block” and makes a sly reference to “winter is coming” (p. 15) (apparently the ancient conception of that idea requires people to build greenhouses, not armies and fortresses - see, you’ll learn things!).

Will’s central idea - that elites used their interpretations of the origins of culture and civilization to shape their political, social, and intellectual environment - seems fundamentally reasonable. I have no basis of knowledge from which to evaluate his scholarship or evidence as presented, but if the origins of a cultural artifact or technai matter, then it’s logical to assume that elites will interpret or modify those origins to suit their needs. In antiquity, the question of whether a technology or type of knowledge was human-derived (and therefore less acceptable and possibly sinful) or taught to humans by a divine being (and therefore assumed to be beneficial to humanity) was worthy of debate, because the origin of the technology determined the acceptability of its pursuit or study.

There’s certainly modern evidence that origins matter. We’re unlikely to debate the divinity of the origins of modern technology now, of course, but the question of etiology, or origination, remains salient. While I don’t wish to engage in the specific debate, the recent back-and-forth between Andrew Sullivan and Ta-Nehisi Coates over the origins and use of intelligence research (1 2 3 4 5 6 7) seems to parallel ancient debates over the acceptability of the use of certain forms of knowledge. While antiquity dealt with more abstract and undocumented innovations such as the invention of clothing, in the Sullivan-Coates debate, the specific question of whence arose research into human intelligence is knowable. For Coates, the ahistoricity of Sullivan’s initial argument is abhorrent, because the history of the research is, broadly speaking, evil - its originators pursued it for racist ends to determine who is considered worthy of society’s resources, and by that token future research into the subject should be pursued carefully, with deep sensitivity to who it impacts. For Sullivan, the history should be noted but should not be allowed to preclude further research. The origins of this research are less important to him, but by engaging and ultimately dismissing Coates’ argument that the research was initially undertaken with evil intent, Sullivan demonstrates the importance of etiology.

Maybe there’s another modern parallel in genetically modified food; there are differing opinions on its origins - OMG Monsanto is evil! v. OMG Monsanto will save the world! - and there are legitimate debates to be had about its use and the implications thereof, which may also feed into value judgements about its origins. In addition to the exchange-of-information value of these debates, they also serve to locate the debaters within their own communities, and to define and reinforce said communities as they jockey for position within broader society and culture.

In short, humans care where their knowledge comes from, and therefore will use the origins of knowledge to for their own ends. That may seem prosaic, and it is, but contrast this with, say, great apes’ use of tools - this is also a technological innovation, but apes seem oddly unconcerned with where, how, or why they gained this knowledge, and do not use the origins of tool-use to promote, say, chimpanzee culture over orangutan culture. I should’ve stopped a paragraph ago, huh?

Switching trains of thought entirely, I found particularly fascinating the ancient ambivalence towards ironsmithing and metallurgy as expressed through cultural ascription of its origins to either a god, an angel, or a human. In a section discussing the Qur’anic depiction of David as a divinely-inspired creator of armor-smithing culture, Will explains how this departed from pre-Islamic understanding of smithcraft:

… This is not something early Jewish and Christian scripture would attribute to God or to a biblical hero. God has nothing to do with iron, and those who originate smithcraft are sinful; moreover, the application of this technology to the crafting of weapons and armor leads to bloodshed and ruin.

The suspicion of smithcraft and of those who practice it went beyond Judaism and Christianity, as may be inferred from Hesiod’s linkage of the deteriorating of the five races and the development of ironsmithing. It was, as Fritz Graf points out, a suspicion held by many in the ancient Mediterranean world. … Prefiguring Qur’an 57:25, Pliny remarks, “Iron is an excellent or detrimental instrument for human life, according to the use we put it to.” But elsewhere he focuses on the destructive results of matellurgy: “Nothing [is] more pernicious (than iron) for it is employed in making swords, javelins, spears, pikes, arrows - weapons by which men are wounded and die, and which causes slaughter, robbery and wars.”

I find it comforting that there’s nothing new to our debates about whether particular technologies or uses thereof are good or bad; in some ways we’re just continuing a long tradition of disagreement (hey, I take comfort where I can get it). Too, norms change; even as smiths were reviled and feared in ancient culture, in colonial America, gunsmiths were prized for their rarity and their talent. In Alexander Rose’s American Rifle, he relates an anecdote from Lewis and Clark’s expedition to the Pacific in which “Le Borgne, a one-eyed Indian chief, threatened to massacre the Corps of Discovery but said he would make an exception for ‘the worker of iron and the mender of guns.’”

To the extent there’s any larger point to be made out of this, it might be that as a unit of culture or technology matures, its origins become less important and its applications matter more. We don’t care who invented ironsmithing anymore; we do care to what use we put said iron. Or maybe the point is just that you should pick up a copy of Founding Gods, Inventing Nations. It’s not an easy read, but it’s rewarding. Yeah, let’s go with that one.

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