Islamic Societies Review WEEKLY

Sunday, January 08, 2012

Outlawing diplomacy with Iran comes with dangerous repercussions

Sunday, January 08, 2012 No comments

By Jamal Abdi

For a bill being sold as a last best alternative to military confrontation, H.R.1905 sets a destructive precedent that will silence our diplomats, endanger our troops, and dangerously intensify the danger of war with Iran.

The bill contains a provision—inserted without debate in committee after garnering the majority of its cosponsors—that would outlaw contact between U.S. government employees and certain Iranian officials. This would not just tie the hands of our diplomats, it would prevent U.S. troops in the field—particularly members of the U.S. Navy operating in the tense Persian Gulf—from making military to military contacts with their Iranian counterparts.

Why is this so dangerous? Because in the Persian Gulf, near run-ins between American and Iranian vessels are averted more frequently than many realize. If the no-contact provision were enacted, it would outlaw the U.S. Navy’s bridge-to-bridge communications with Iranian vessels in the Persian Gulf – communications that are crucial to enabling safe transit and preventing confrontation in the often crowded waterways through which 20% of the world’s oil supplies flow.

Friday, January 06, 2012

Review: The Unconquered

Friday, January 06, 2012 No comments

by Julia Heath

Sydney Possuelo is on a mission to find the last uncontacted tribes in the Amazon. A passionate and radical explorer and ethnographer, Possuelo has devoted his life to the preservation of indigenous and uncontacted Amazonian tribes, in addition to creating a team of likeminded activists called the Sertanistas. Possuelo is also the main character in Scott Wallace’s new book, The Unconquered, which chronicles the antics that ensued during a three-month mission into the Amazon to locate an uncontacted tribe called the Flecheiros (Arrow People). Wallace accompanied the group as a National Geographic journalist as it mapped the villages and wanderings of the Flecheiros using a Global Positioning System (GPS).

Thursday, January 05, 2012

Urging Obama to Stop Rush to Iran War

Thursday, January 05, 2012 No comments

by Ray McGovern and Elizabeth Murray

President Obama needs to put an abrupt halt to the game of Persian Roulette about to spin out of control in the Persian Gulf. If we were still on active duty at the CIA, this is what we would tell him:

This informal memorandum addresses the escalating game of chicken playing out in the waters off Iran and the more general issue of what can be done to put the exaggerated threat from Iran in some kind of perspective.

In keeping with the informality of this memo and our ethos of speaking truth to power, we may at times be rather blunt. If we bring you up short, consider it a measure of the seriousness with which we view the unfolding of yet another tragic mistake.

The stakes are quite high, and as former intelligence analysts with no axes to grind, we want to make sure you understand how fragile and volatile the situation in the Gulf has become.

We know you are briefed regularly on the play by play, and we will not attempt to replicate that. Your repeated use of the bromide that “everything is on the table,” however, gives us pause and makes us wonder whether you and your advisers fully recognize the implications, if hostilities with Iran spin out of control.

You have the power to stop the madness, and we give you some recommendations on how to lessen the likelihood of a war that would be to the advantage of no one but the arms merchants.

If your advisers have persuaded you that hostilities with Iran would bring benefit to Israel, they are badly mistaken. In our view, war with Iran is just as likely in the longer term to bring the destruction of Israel, as well as vast areas of Iran — not even to mention the disastrous consequences for the world economy, of which you must be aware.

Incendiary (but false) claims about how near Iran is to having a nuclear weapon are coming “fast and furious,” (and are as irresponsible as that ill-fated project of giving weapons to Mexican drug dealers).

In our view, the endless string of such claims now threaten to migrate from rhetoric to armed clashes to attempted “regime change,” as was the case nine years ago on Iraq. You know, we hope, that influential — but myopic — forces abound who are willing to take great risk because they believe such events would redound to the benefit of Israel. We make reference, of course, to the reckless Likud government in Israel and its equally reckless single-issue supporters here at home.

Wednesday, January 04, 2012

Devaluing the Think Tank

Wednesday, January 04, 2012 No comments

by TEVI TROY

One of the most peculiar, and least understood, features of the Washington policy process is the extraordinary dependence of policymakers on the work of think tanks. Most Americans — even most of those who follow politics closely — would probably struggle to name a think tank or to explain precisely what a think tank does. Yet over the past half-century, think tanks have come to play a central role in policy development — and even in the surrounding political combat.

Over that period, however, the balance between those two functions — policy development and political combat — has been steadily shifting. And with that shift, the work of Washington think tanks has undergone a transformation. Today, while most think tanks continue to serve as homes for some academic-style scholarship regarding public policy, many have also come to play more active (if informal) roles in politics. Some serve as governments-in-waiting for the party out of power, providing professional perches for former officials who hope to be back in office when their party next takes control of the White House or Congress. Some serve as training grounds for young activists. Some serve as unofficial public-relations and rapid-response teams for one of the political parties — providing instant critiques of the opposition's ideas and public arguments in defense of favored policies.

Some new think tanks have even been created as direct responses to particular, narrow political exigencies. As each party has drawn lessons from various electoral failures over recent decades, their conclusions have frequently pointed to the need for new think tanks (often modeled on counterparts on the opposite side of the political aisle).

After Democrats lost the 2000 elections, for example, some liberal intellectuals and activists concluded that they were being outgunned in the arena of political communication, and created, among other institutions, the Center for American Progress — a think tank with a heavy emphasis on message development. And in 2008, after Republicans lost amid deep concern about the financial crisis and the ensuing economic downturn, some conservatives concluded that they needed more creative economic thinking, and this yielded, among other projects, e21 — a right-of-center economic-policy think tank based in Washington and New York. This trend — which might be summed up as "lose an election, gain a think tank" — has not only increased the proliferation of such institutions, but has also tended to make their work all the more responsive to political needs and developments, for better and for worse.

Today, think tanks are highly influential in our politics; their research and scholars are heavily consulted and relied on by our elected leaders. And in a time of both daunting policy challenges and highly polarized political debates, there is every reason to expect that think tanks will grow only more important in Washington.

As they become more political, however, think tanks — especially the newer and more advocacy-oriented institutions founded in the past decade or so — risk becoming both more conventional and less valuable. At a moment when we have too much noise in politics and too few constructive ideas, these institutions may simply become part of the intellectual echo chamber of our politics, rather than providing alternative sources of policy analysis and intellectual innovation. Given these concerns, it is worth reflecting on the evolution of the Washington think tank and its consequences for the nation.

Marginal revolutionaries: The crisis and the blogosphere have opened mainstream economics up to new attack

Wednesday, January 04, 2012 No comments

POINT UDALL on St Croix, one of the US Virgin Islands, is a far-flung, wind-whipped spot. You cannot travel farther east without leaving the United States. Visitors can pose next to a stone sundial commemorating America’s first dawn of the third millennium. A couple named “Sigi + Ricky” have added a memento of their own, an arrowstruck heart scrawled on the perimeter wall in memory of “us”.

Warren Mosler, an innovative carmaker, a successful bond-investor and an idiosyncratic economist, moved to St Croix in 2003 to take advantage of a hospitable tax code and clement weather. From his perch on America’s periphery, Mr Mosler champions a doctrine on the edge of economics: neo-chartalism, sometimes called “Modern Monetary Theory”. The neo-chartalists believe that because paper currency is a creature of the state, governments enjoy more financial freedom than they recognise. The fiscal authorities are free to spend whatever is required to revive their economies and restore employment. They can spend without first collecting taxes; they can borrow without fear of default. Budget-makers need not cower before the bond-market vigilantes. In fact, they need not bother with bond markets at all.

The neo-chartalists are not the only people telling governments mired in the aftermath of the global financial crisis that they could make things better if they would shed old inhibitions. “Market monetarists” favour more audacity in the monetary realm. Tight money caused America’s Great Recession, they argue, and easy money can end it. They do not think the federal government can or should rescue the economy, because they believe the Federal Reserve can.

The “Austrian” school of economics, which traces its roots to 19th-century Vienna, is more sternly pre-Freudian: more inhibition, not less, is its prescription. Its adherents believe that part of the economy’s suffering is necessary, an inevitable consequence of past excesses. They do not think the Federal Reserve can rescue the economy. They seek instead to rescue the economy from the Fed.

Trials and Errors: Why Science Is Failing Us

Wednesday, January 04, 2012 No comments

By Jonah Lehrer

On November 30, 2006, executives at Pfizer—the largest pharmaceutical company in the world—held a meeting with investors at the firm’s research center in Groton, Connecticut. Jeff Kindler, then CEO of Pfizer, began the presentation with an upbeat assessment of the company’s efforts to bring new drugs to market. He cited “exciting approaches” to the treatment of Alzheimer’s disease, fibromyalgia, and arthritis. But that news was just a warm-up. Kindler was most excited about a new drug called torcetrapib, which had recently entered Phase III clinical trials, the last step before filing for FDA approval. He confidently declared that torcetrapib would be “one of the most important compounds of our generation.”

Kindler’s enthusiasm was understandable: The potential market for the drug was enormous. Like Pfizer’s blockbuster medication, Lipitor—the most widely prescribed branded pharmaceutical in America—torcetrapib was designed to tweak the cholesterol pathway. Although cholesterol is an essential component of cellular membranes, high levels of the compound have been consistently associated with heart disease. The accumulation of the pale yellow substance in arterial walls leads to inflammation. Clusters of white blood cells then gather around these “plaques,” which leads to even more inflammation. The end result is a blood vessel clogged with clumps of fat.

Lipitor works by inhibiting an enzyme that plays a key role in the production of cholesterol in the liver. In particular, the drug lowers the level of low-density lipoprotein (LDL), or so-called bad cholesterol. In recent years, however, scientists have begun to focus on a separate part of the cholesterol pathway, the one that produces high-density lipoproteins. One function of HDL is to transport excess LDL back to the liver, where it is broken down. In essence, HDL is a janitor of fat, cleaning up the greasy mess of the modern diet, which is why it’s often referred to as “good cholesterol.”

And this returns us to torcetrapib. It was designed to block a protein that converts HDL cholesterol into its more sinister sibling, LDL. In theory, this would cure our cholesterol problems, creating a surplus of the good stuff and a shortage of the bad. In his presentation, Kindler noted that torcetrapib had the potential to “redefine cardiovascular treatment.”

There was a vast amount of research behind Kindler’s bold proclamations. The cholesterol pathway is one of the best-understood biological feedback systems in the human body. Since 1913, when Russian pathologist Nikolai Anichkov first experimentally linked cholesterol to the buildup of plaque in arteries, scientists have mapped out the metabolism and transport of these compounds in exquisite detail. They’ve documented the interactions of nearly every molecule, the way hydroxymethylglutaryl-coenzyme A reductase catalyzes the production of mevalonate, which gets phosphorylated and condensed before undergoing a sequence of electron shifts until it becomes lanosterol and then, after another 19 chemical reactions, finally morphs into cholesterol. Furthermore, torcetrapib had already undergone a small clinical trial, which showed that the drug could increase HDL and decrease LDL. Kindler told his investors that, by the second half of 2007, Pfizer would begin applying for approval from the FDA. The success of the drug seemed like a sure thing.

And then, just two days later, on December 2, 2006, Pfizer issued a stunning announcement: The torcetrapib Phase III clinical trial was being terminated. Although the compound was supposed to prevent heart disease, it was actually triggering higher rates of chest pain and heart failure and a 60 percent increase in overall mortality. The drug appeared to be killing people.

That week, Pfizer’s value plummeted by $21 billion.

Monday, January 02, 2012

Muslims and the Koran

Monday, January 02, 2012 No comments

In the beginning were the words

Muslims revere the Koran. But its study is not taboo—and is in some quarters increasingly daring

RELIGIONS invite stereotypes, holy texts even more so. Non-Muslims often see Islam as a faith followed by people who hew so closely to an unchanging set of words that they ignore awkward new facts sooner than contradict its message. For critics, this attachment to a text encourages extremists—like Boko Haram, a group that in December attacked Nigerian churches: hotheads can generally find a passage that seems to justify their violence.

Such passages abound in the Koran, just as they do in the founding texts of Christianity, Judaism and many other religions. There is also a long tradition of interpreting such verses in reassuring ways. For example, it is often stressed that the Koran’s injunction to “slay the unbeliever wherever you find him” relates to a specific historical context, in which the first Muslims were betrayed by a pagan group who had signed a truce.

But when it comes to parsing holy writ, there is one big difference between Islam and most other text-based faiths. Barring a brief interlude in the ninth and tenth centuries, and a few modern liberals, Muslims have mostly believed that the Koran is distinct from every other communication. As God’s final revelation to man, it belongs not to earthly, created things but to an eternal realm. That is a bigger claim than other faiths usually make for their holy writings.

The Koran may be interpreted but from a believer’s viewpoint, nothing in it can be set aside. Yet, at least in the calm, superficially courteous world of Western academia, debating the precise text of the Koran is increasingly common—as at a conference hosted by the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), part of the University of London, in November. One organiser was Muhammad Abdel Haleem, an Egyptian-born professor who has translated the Koran into stylish modern English, drawing acclaim from many, but grumbles from purists. Other contributors included a professor from Turkey, and a scholar based in Iran. But most were non-Muslims who study the text as they would any other written material—as prose whose evolution can be traced by comparing versions. New techniques, such as the use of digital photography, help compare variations and solve puzzles. All participants implicitly accepted the idea that methods used to analyse Homer, say, or German myths might elucidate the Koran.

Sunday, January 01, 2012

The Optimism Bias

Sunday, January 01, 2012 No comments

by Tali Sharot

Our brains may be hardwired to look on the bright side, says neuroscientist Tali Sharot in this extract from her new book

We like to think of ourselves as rational creatures. We watch our backs, weigh the odds, pack an umbrella. But both neuroscience and social science suggest that we are more optimistic than realistic. On average, we expect things to turn out better than they wind up being. People hugely underestimate their chances of getting divorced, losing their job or being diagnosed with cancer; expect their children to be extraordinarily gifted; envision themselves achieving more than their peers; and overestimate their likely life span (sometimes by 20 years or more).

The belief that the future will be much better than the past and present is known as the optimism bias. It abides in every race, region and socioeconomic bracket. Schoolchildren playing when-I-grow-up are rampant optimists, but so are grown-ups: a 2005 study found that adults over 60 are just as likely to see the glass half full as young adults.

You might expect optimism to erode under the tide of news about violent conflicts, high unemployment, tornadoes and floods and all the threats and failures that shape human life. Collectively we can grow pessimistic – about the direction of our country or the ability of our leaders to improve education and reduce crime. But private optimism, about our personal future, remains incredibly resilient. A survey conducted in 2007 found that while 70% thought families in general were less successful than in their parents' day, 76% of respondents were optimistic about the future of their own family.

Overly positive assumptions can lead to disastrous miscalculations – make us less likely to get health checkups, apply sunscreen or open a savings account, and more likely to bet the farm on a bad investment. But the bias also protects and inspires us: it keeps us moving forward rather than to the nearest high-rise ledge. Without optimism, our ancestors might never have ventured far from their tribes and we might all be cave dwellers, still huddled together and dreaming of light and heat.

To make progress, we need to be able to imagine alternative realities – better ones – and we need to believe that we can achieve them. Such faith helps motivate us to pursue our goals. Optimists in general work longer hours and tend to earn more. Economists at Duke University found that optimists even save more. And although they are not less likely to divorce, they are more likely to remarry – an act that is, as Samuel Johnson wrote, the triumph of hope over experience.

Even if that better future is often an illusion, optimism has clear benefits in the present. Hope keeps our minds at ease, lowers stress and improves physical health. Researchers studying heart-disease patients found that optimists were more likely than non-optimistic patients to take vitamins, eat low-fat diets and exercise, thereby reducing their overall coronary risk. A study of cancer patients revealed that pessimistic patients under 60 were more likely to die within eight months than non-pessimistic patients of the same initial health, status and age.

In fact, a growing body of scientific evidence points to the conclusion that optimism may be hardwired by evolution into the human brain. The science of optimism, once scorned as an intellectually suspect province of pep rallies and smiley faces, is opening a new window on the workings of human consciousness. What it shows could fuel a revolution in psychology, as the field comes to grips with accumulating evidence that our brains aren't just stamped by the past. They are constantly being shaped by the future.

Friday, December 30, 2011

the man French society loves to mock, Bernard-Henri Lévy, helped vanquish a dictator

Friday, December 30, 2011 No comments

By Benjamin Wallace-Wells

Celebrity doesn’t always travel well. The conditions it depends upon can be too local, too conditional. Try explaining Kim Kardashian to the Germans; try asking the Germans to explain David Hasselhoff to us. Still, the case of the famously self-regarding, righteous, impeccably coiffed French philosopher and media personality Bernard-Henri Lévy is singularly strange. The events of the past year—in which Lévy, operating freelance, seemed to prompt a broke and crumbling Europe into a humanitarian war in Libya—so obviously belong to a different era that Lévy has left in his wake a torrent of historical analogies: Perhaps he is Lawrence of Arabia, as a friendly French review recently suggested. Or perhaps he is Don Quixote.

One year ago, influence like this appeared far beyond Lévy’s reach. He has long been France’s most famous living philosopher, and was once an important one, but his media and social profile eclipsed his intellectual reputation. He was still suffering from the highly embarrassing Botul episode of 2010, in which Lévy had happened upon a philosophical spoof and, assuming it to be serious, cited its arguments as part of a critique of Immanuel Kant. (He had missed the crucial clue, which was that the fake philosopher, Jean-Baptiste Botul, was elaborating a philosophy called Botulism.) His journalism was often called glib, and his big 2006 book on America had been panned on the front page of the New York Times’ Sunday book review. When I called scholars of European ideas at Harvard and Columbia to talk about Lévy, they dismissed him as overhyped and irrelevant, respectively. At the beginning of 2011, Lévy was most frequently in the French press for his New York mistress, the heiress Daphne Guinness, who kept up a public theater of pining for him on Twitter.

But, as Lévy told me recently, “sometimes you are inhabited by intuitions that are not clear to you.” On February 23, the philosopher was in Cairo watching television images of Muammar Qaddafi’s retribution against the rebel towns around Benghazi, which the dictator and his sons had threatened to drown in “rivers of blood.” Lévy is most fully himself in stark humanitarian crises, when defending what he calls “the memory of the worst.” He is also the heir to a vast timber fortune, wealth that allows him a license to act on his instincts, and so he promptly found the name of rebel leader Mustafa Abdel-Jalil, arranged for a cameraman and for a private plane to fly him near the front, and within a few hours was in a hired car, driving off to war.

Lévy was a veteran of mass killing; he had seen it in a half-dozen conflicts, maybe, and driving through the desert towns east of Benghazi, he detected its early signs: blood-smeared walls, passersby wrapping themselves in hoods to keep their lungs free of contaminants. He foresaw a “crawling tragedy. Thirty, 40 dead a day. Maybe worse.” In Benghazi, Lévy spent the hour before their meeting frantically Googling Abdel-Jalil and leaping up to greet anyone walking past who might be the Libyan. When Abdel-Jalil did arrive (“short with a modest smile and the look of a stunned falcon”), Lévy had prepared his speech. “The world is watching,” he began. It was pompous, he realized, but “you have to say something.” He compared Benghazi to the Warsaw Ghetto, to Sarajevo. “Benghazi is the capital not only of Libya but of free men and women all over the world,” Lévy told the rebel leader

Questioning the Arab League's Syrian Monitors

Friday, December 30, 2011 No comments

by CONNOR SIMPSON

Violence continued in Syria on Thursday despite the arrival of the Arab League's monitors, and now the appointed leader of the monitors is being called into question over his own spotty human rights record. Sudan's General Mustafa al-Dabi is the leader of the 100 or so Arab League monitors in Syria right now. Al-Dabi has been accused of committing war crimes in Darfur in the 1990s. From this report in the Guardian, Amnesty International has spoken out against al-Dabi's participation, saying, "The Arab League's decision to appoint as the head of the observer mission a Sudanese general on whose watch severe human rights violations were committed in Sudan risks undermining the League's efforts so far and seriously calls into question the mission's credibility."

Most of the controversy came after comments al-Dabi reportedly made after a recent visit to the "restive" city of Homs. Al-Dabi was quoted as saying the situation there is "reassuring," when there have been reports of protests and violence coming from the city. "Some places looked a bit of a mess but there was nothing frightening," he said, according to the BBC. Some were discouraged by his comments, but Russia, Syria's most high-profile ally, came out in support of al-Dabi's statements. The Russian government gave a statement on their website, and quoted by Reuters, saying, "Judging by the public statements made by the chief of the mission (Sudanese general Mustafa) al-Dabi, who in the first of his visits went to the city of Homs ... the situation seems to be reassuring."