Sebastian Gorka: We Will Lose a “Winnable” War Against Jihad If We Refuse to “Talk About the Enemy as They Are.”

Dr. Sebastian Gorka: We Will Lose a “Winnable” War Against Jihad If We Refuse to “Talk About the Enemy as They Are.” By John Hayward. Breitbart, April 11, 2016.

Dr. Sebastian Gorka. Interviewed by Stephen K. Bannon. Audio. Breitbart News Sunday, April 10, 2016. Soundcloud.

Hayward:

Breitbart News National Security Editor Dr. Sebastian Gorka, author of Defeating Jihad: The Winnable War, appeared on Breitbart News Sunday to answer host Stephen K. Bannon’s challenge that, contrary to the title, his book doesn’t make the war against jihad sound very “winnable” at all.

Gorka said he was motivated to write the book because he has seen “sixteen years of right-wing Administrations and left-wing Administrations punt the ball, or completely drop the ball, on this war.”

“But we can win it, if we have the leadership,” he contended, saying his book contains “the recipe to win this war rapidly.”

Gorka argued that the “history of modern jihad” began in 1979.  “If you want to understand September the 11th, if you want to understand the Boston bombing, the Ft. Hood massacre, the recent massacre in San Bernardino, the recent attack in Brussels, it all begins in 1979,” he said.

“It begins with the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan that triggers the first organization that predates al-Qaeda, which was the Arab Services Bureau, the mujahadeen.  That’s where al-Qaeda begins in 1979.  Then we have the Iranian revolution, hugely important because we have one nation-state that says Islam can be re-integrated into politics.  It’s the Shia, yes, but this is a model for all Muslims: we can create theocracies, and be successful, and reject the Western model of politics,” Gorka continued.

He added a third highly significant event from that era, which most Americans haven’t heard of: “Three hundred jihadis, in 1979, armed with automatic weapons, sieged and captured the most important site in all of Islam, the Grand Mosque at Mecca.  And it is the consequences of that siege, in which the Saudi regime signed a pact with the devil, if you will, with the extremist fundamentalist clerics in Saudi Arabia — that’s where it all begins.”

The understanding between the Saudi regime and jihadis had the effect of turning both violent terrorism and Islamist ideology outward, buying peace for the Saudis at the rest of the world’s expense.  As Bannon noted, the siege was also a huge media event across the Muslim world, giving the radicals who captured the Grand Mosque a platform to express their beliefs and win converts.

Gorka proposed two reasons why the Western media has never assigned the proper historical significance to the siege of Mecca: it’s too complicated to explain for a mainstream press interested primarily in quick sound bites, and it reflects poorly on America’s nominal ally, Saudi Arabia.

“We made a strategic decision after World War II that Saudi Arabia would be our partner, would be our so-called ally, so we don’t want to talk about the fact that Saudi Arabia is, in part, responsible for the export of the most totalitarian ideology active today, which is global jihadism,” he said.

“During the siege, the King managed to identify the fact that these aren’t just a bunch of Koran-beating yahoos.  These 300 jihadis had the blessing, had the support, of key members of the Saudi clerical class, the ulamaa, the wise theologians – who said, ‘yep, Islam’s lost its way, we’re surrounded by apostates, the King is a puppet of the West, and we need a holy war to cleanse Islam,’” Gorka explained.  “When the King found that out, he invited these clerics to the palace for a little chat, and he said to them, ‘Gentlemen, I know who you are, and I know your connection to these jihadis.  Let me offer you a deal.  If you guarantee for me that my nation — my country, Saudi Arabia, and my family — will never, ever be threatened again by this kind of extremist violence, this jihadism, you will become the court ulamaa.  You will become the clerics to the House of Saud. You, your sons, and your grandsons will have jobs for life.’”

Crucially, the Saudi monarchy also offered the help finance the export of jihad ideology around the world, “and for the last 25 years, we have been paying the price for that deal,” Gorka said, counting among those toxic imports Salafism, Wahabbi Islam, and the Deobandi sect, which is far more influential in European and American mosques than most outsiders realize.

Gorka said it was crucial for Western leaders to “jettison this fantasy that you hear all the time, after 9/11, that Islam needs a ‘Reformation.’”  As he explained, the Christian Reformation was driven by the urge to “get back to basics,” such as studying the Bible and developing a fundamental understanding of the faith.  That is precisely the message of the Islamic “extremists” and jihadis of today. In their eyes, they are the Reformation.

The “dirty little secret that nobody wants to tell you,” as Gorka put it, is that the Islamist ideology of al-Qaeda or ISIS “is not fundamentally un-Islamic because it is the Seventh Century interpretation of Islam that comes straight from the Koran.” 

“The second half of the Koran is uber-violent.  It’s about killing infidels,” he explained.  “As a result, we don’t need more reformation to get back to basics because then we will empower the jihadis.”

In order to cut through political correctness and Washington static, Gorka had a provocative request for listeners: “Every American citizen who cares about the republic, after 9/11, you don’t have an excuse.  Buy a Koran.  Don’t listen to the conventional wisdoms that are being spewed out by the mainstream media.  Go to the primary source, and make a judgment for yourself about this religion.”

He also stressed the importance of understanding that, unlike the Bible and most other religious texts, the Koran is meant to be the unchallengeable word of God, dictated to Mohammed by the archangel Gabriel, rather than a series of stories and prophetic revelations that might be subject to reinterpretation by later authorities.  Gorka suggested it might be helpful to think of the entire Koran as if it were the Ten Commandments — except, of course, that the Koran is much more comprehensive, detailed, and particular than the rather terse Commandments.

In a similar vein, he challenged the common talking point that “jihad” refers to constructive, non-violent internal struggles against temptation by noting that on “twelve times as many occasions in the Koran, when the word ‘jihad’ is used, it’s not about peaceful inner striving,” but instead describes “martial war, kinetic war, defeating and suppressing the enemy until they convert to the One True Faith, or until you have successfully destroyed them.”

He noted that jihad is certainly understood that way by terrorists and Islamist leaders, such as ISIS, which waged an aggressive war of conquest to re-establish the Islamic “caliphate” abolished by Turkish leader Kemal Ataturk a century ago.

“The Islamic State now holds territory in multiple countries of the Middle East and Africa,” Gorka observed.  “This is stunning.  They hold territory in Iraq, in Libya, in Syria, and now Boko Haram has become part of the caliphate, which means anything that belongs to Boko Haram in Nigeria is part of the new caliphate.  That means we have more than six million people living on the territory of the new Islamic empire.”  He further noted that empire boasts some 76,000 fighters, many of them foreign recruits, and is making between $2 million and $4 million per day, with income streams ranging from banditry to legal taxation.

In Gorka’s estimation, the refusal of Western political leaders to understand the unique nature of Islam, and the significance of such historic events as the Grand Mosque siege, lies at the heart of the leadership vacuum that might cause us to lose the war against jihad, despite our enormous military, technological, and economic advantages.

For example, Western leaders have deliberately blinded themselves to the penetration of Western mosques by radical imams, refusing to ask critical questions about where immigrant clerics were educated.  Gorka said the Obama Administration is also politically aligned against one of the few successful examples of de-radicalization in the Middle East, the “coup” conducted against the Muslim Brotherhood by President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi in Egypt.

“We have to support those regimes, whether it’s Egypt or whether it’s King Abdullah in Jordan, who have a different understanding of Islam and modernity,” Gorka urged.  “We need more people like Ataturk — people who say, ‘Look, I’m the democratically elected head of this country, and I don’t care what the Koran says about killing infidels right now.  We don’t do that because we like America, we like the West, and I’m going to tell you what Islam is.’  The State Department doesn’t like to hear that because they want to have freedom of religion, but if you’re dealing with Islam that has a Seventh Century original version that is violent, we cannot do that.”

The Department of Homeland Security doesn’t like to hear that, either.  Gorka related an astonishing story of being approached by a DHS official, after he delivered an eight-hour presentation on jihad to law-enforcement officials, who told him the real threat facing America was not Islamist terror but “right-wing extremists” and offered the 21-year-old Oklahoma City bombing as evidence of this imminent threat.

“I doubt the average law-enforcement officer, or American taxpayer, would agree with the government line in Washington,” he observed.

Gorka compared that government line on Islamism to the authorities informing American troops to avoid potentially offensive terms like “Nazi” as they were preparing to storm the beaches of Normandy on D-Day, or the authorities in the Fifties telling law enforcement to avoid terms like “white supremacist” when dealing with the Ku Klux Klan because they were really just “misguided Democrats.”

“Today we can’t use the world ‘jihad.’  We can’t talk about religion.  It is banned.  And if you can’t talk about the enemy, you will not win,” he warned.

It’s no laughing matter that the enemy shares no such reticence when it comes to discussing us.  Gorka discusses Islamist godfather Sayyid Qutb and his landmark book Milestones, which can be downloaded in its entirety from The Gorka Briefing.  He remarked on how Qutb offered a savage critique of America as a land of decadence that had to be destroyed by the jihad –and he was writing in the 1950s, after visiting idyllic, wholesome small towns in the West.  Qutb’s work is almost universally read by jihadis, who, he noted, tend to be far better educated and deliberate in their ideology than the U.S. State Department gives them credit for.

“It is a totalitarian ideology that defines itself against us,” Gorka said of jihad.  “We are the antithesis.  Everything America stands for — individual liberty, based on the dignity of the human being made in the image of God — that is what must be destroyed or enslaved.  This is not random acts of violence.  It has a plan.  It has a strategy.”

In other words, and in summation, jihadis believe they are in a war, and they believe they have a workable strategy to win it.  Those are the two elements most sorely missing from the West’s political leadership, which, Gorka noted, does not like to speak in terms of defeating a jihadist enemy and is often profoundly uncomfortable with using terms like “enemy,” “victory,” or “war.”

“Think about one thing.  This is provocative, but I believe it.  Why do we have 22 vets commit suicide every 24 hours in America?” Gorka asked.  “Why do we have unprecedented levels of PTSD in this nation?  Our grandfathers saw some bad stuff in World War II, especially in the Pacific, especially when they liberated the death camps. But when they came home in the 1950s, they didn’t eat the barrel of a 1911.  Why?  Because they knew they were on the side of the angels.  Their President, their commander, told them, ‘This is a war against evil, and what you are going to see may be nasty, but it’s okay, guys, you’re on the side of Right.’  We don’t say that anymore.”

“If we don’t have a sense of victory, if we don’t talk about the enemy as they are, we could lose this war,” Gorka warned before sadly concluding that Europe, from whence he hails, has already lost it.  “America is ten years behind Europe, if you look at the threat internally, and not just from terrorism… We’ve got, tops, five years.  If the next Administration doesn’t go to war — with our Muslim allies — against the jihadists, we could lose this, either kinetically, or from the inside through subversion.  Five years, maximum.”

Breitbart News Sunday airs each week from 7 to 10 P.M. Sunday night on the Patriot Channel, channel 125 on the SiriusXM network.

You can listen to the full interview with Dr. Sebastian Gorka below:

Islam and the Radical West. By Bret Stephens.

Islam and the Radical West. By Bret Stephens. Wall Street Journal, April 11, 2016.

Stephens:

Years ago I had a chat with three young Muslim men as we waited in a Heathrow airport lounge to board a flight to Islamabad. I was going to Pakistan to report on the fallout from a devastating earthquake in Kashmir. They were going there to do what they vaguely described as “charitable work.” They dressed in white shalwar kameez, wore their beards in salafist style and spoke in south London accents.

I tried to steer the conversation to the earthquake. They wanted to talk about politics. Had I seen Michael Moore’s “Fahrenheit 9/11”? I avoided furnishing an opinion about a film they plainly revered. The unvarnished truth about Amerika—from an American. Authority and authenticity rolled into one.

I think of that exchange whenever the subject of Islamist radicalization comes up. There’s a great deal of literature about how young Muslim men—often born in the West to middle-class and not particularly religious households—get turned on to jihad. Think of Mohammed Emwazi, the University of Westminster graduate later known as Jihadi John. Or Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, of Fort Hood infamy. Or Najim Laachraoui, who studied electrical engineering at the prestigious Catholic University of Louvain before blowing himself up last month in Brussels. Or Boston’s Tsarnaev brothers and San Bernardino’s Syed Farook.

It’s a long list. And in many cases investigators are able to identify an agent of radicalization. Maj. Hasan corresponded with extremist cleric Anwar al-Awlaki. Laachraoui seems to have come under the spell of a Molenbeek preacher named Khalid Zerkani. The Tsarnaevs took their bomb-building tips from “Inspire,” an online English-language magazine published by al Qaeda’s branch in Yemen.

But the influence of the Awlakis of the world can’t fully account for the mind-set of these jihadists. They are also sons of the West—educated in the schools of multiculturalism, reared on the works of Noam Chomsky and perhaps Frantz Fanon, consumers of a news diet heavy with reports of perfidy by American or British or Israeli soldiers. If Islamism is their ideological drug of choice, the political orthodoxies of the modern left are their gateway to it.

Take the most recent issue of Inspire. Mixed in with step-by-step photos on how to build a timed hand grenade and an analysis of the Charlie Hebdo massacre, there’s a long article on the oppression of blacks in America, starting with the killing of Ferguson’s Michael Brown. The Spring 2013 issue contains a “message to the American nation” from al Qaeda Commander Qassim Ar-Reimy in which he asks whether “meddling in our affairs and installing whomever tyrant agents and lackeys you want who kill and oppress [is] forgivable?”

“Leave us with our religion, land and nations and mind your own internal affairs,” the commander—now Emir—writes. “Save your economy, look after your concerns, for it is better than what you currently are.”

This isn’t the language of Islam, with its impressive tradition of conquest. It’s the language of the progressive left, of what Jeane Kirkpatrick at the 1984 Republican convention called the “Blame America First” crowd. It fits the left’s view of the West as the perennial sinner and the rest of the world as its perpetual victim. It is the language of turning the page on a decade of war, of focusing on nation building at home.

It strikes us as radical only because it comes from the pen of a terrorist. If it had appeared as an op-ed in the Guardian, it would elicit nodding approval from many readers, a dismissive shrug from others, but no big whoop either way.

In the early 1990s my former columnist colleague Thomas Frank came up with the clever phrase “commodification of dissent” to explain how capitalism turned all kinds of countercultural beliefs and radical ideas into just another product in a box, to be sold and distributed through the usual channels. “Fahrenheit 9/11” might have been a political revelation or even a call to arms for some impressionable young Muslims from Tower Hamlets, but to Hollywood it was $222.5 million of box office gold. That made it a winner in the marketplace of ideas, and who can quarrel with that?

The commodification of dissent may have the effect of blunting the impact of all kinds of extreme notions. But it can dull us to their extremism, leaving us astonished when someone turns notion into action. The catharsis of violence seems like an interesting idea in the pages of “The Wretched of the Earth.” In practice, it’s scores of young men and women gunned down in a Paris concert hall.

We’ve become lazy in our thinking about Islam and the West. Whether the Islam practiced by al Qaeda or ISIS is “radical” or merely traditional isn’t the question. It’s whether the West can recognize that the moral nihilism of today’s Jihadi Johns is the logical outgrowth of the moral relativism that is the default religion of today’s West.

The Islamic State of Molenbeek. By Roger Cohen.

The Islamic State of Molenbeek. By Roger Cohen. New York Times, April 11, 2016.

Cohen:

BRUSSELS — There are military trucks parked in Molenbeek, and soldiers with submachine guns patrol the jittery streets of the Brussels district that has been the epicenter of European terrorism in recent months. On the Place Communale idle youths loiter, shooting glances at the police. This is where the Paris and Brussels attacks, with their 162 dead, overlap.

Salah Abdeslam, the only surviving direct participant in the Paris attacks, hid in Molenbeek before his arrest on March 18. Abdelhamid Abaaoud, the suspected chief planner of the Paris attacks, lived in Molenbeek. In all, at least 14 people tied to both attacks were either Belgian or lived in Brussels.

One of them is Mohamed Abrini, a Belgian of Moroccan origin who grew up in Molenbeek and was arrested in Brussels on Friday. He has told the police he is “the man in the hat” caught on surveillance cameras leaving Brussels airport after two accomplices blew themselves up on March 22. Cameras also placed him in Paris last November with the Paris attackers.

Sleepy Brussels: goodbye to that image. Yet even today there’s something soporific about this French-speaking city marooned within Flemish-speaking Flanders, beset by administrative and linguistic divisions and the lethargy that stems from them, home to a poorly integrated immigrant population of mainly Moroccan and Turkish descent (41 percent of the population of Molenbeek is Muslim), and housing the major institutions of a fraying European Union.

It is hard to resist the symbolism of the Islamic State establishing a base for its murderous designs in the so-called capital of Europe at a time when the European idea is weaker than at any time since the 1950s. A jihadi loves a vacuum, as Syria demonstrates. Belgium as a state, and Belgium as the heart of the European Union are as close to a vacuum as Europe offers these days.

Belgium — a hodgepodge of three regions (Flanders, French-speaking Wallonia and Brussels), three linguistic communities (Flemish, French and German) and a weak federal government — is dysfunctional. That dysfunction finds its most powerful expression in the capital, where Flemish geography and French culture do not align. The administrative breakdown assumes critical proportions in Molenbeek, the second-poorest commune in the country, with 36 percent of people younger than 25 unemployed.

As Julia Lynch noted recently in The Washington Post, Molenbeek’s radicalism is not new. It was “home to one of the attackers in the 2004 commuter train bombings in Madrid and to the Frenchman who shot four people at the Jewish Museum in Brussels in August 2014. The Moroccan shooter on the Brussels-Paris Thalys train in August 2015 stayed with his sister there.”

This is an outrage. Splintered Belgium had lost control of Molenbeek. A heavily Muslim district of Brussels had in effect seceded. If this were the extent of the problem, it would be grave. But Molenbeek is just the most acute manifestation of a European failure.

The large-scale immigration from Turkey and North Africa that began a half-century ago at a time of economic boom has — at a time of economic stagnation — led to near-ghettos in or around many European cities where the jobless descendants of those migrants are sometimes radicalized by Wahhabi clerics. As the French prime minister, Manuel Valls, warned recently, an extremist minority is “winning the ideological and cultural battle” within French Islam.

The fact that the jihadis, often Syrian-trained, are a minority, and that many Muslims who immigrate to Europe are leading successful and integrated lives, is little consolation. After the carnage in Paris and Brussels, the laissez-faire approach that had allowed those clerics to proselytize, private Muslim schools to multiply in France, prisons to serve as incubators of jihadism, youths to drift to ISIS land in Syria and back, and districts like Molenbeek or Schaerbeek to drift into a void of negligence, has to cease. Improved intelligence is not enough. There is an ideological battle going on; it has to be waged on that level, where it has been lost up to now. The moderate Muslim communities of Europe need to do much more.

Europe, of which Brussels is a symbol, presents an alarming picture today. The Dutch, susceptible to propaganda from Russia, have just voted in a referendum against a trade agreement with Ukraine for which more than 100 Ukrainians died in an uprising in 2014. The British are set to vote in June on whether to leave the Union. The euro has sapped economies insufficiently integrated for a common currency. A huge refugee flow has raised questions about a borderless Europe. President Putin plots daily to do his worst for the European Union.

There is a vacuum. Vacuums are dangerous. The answer is a reformed, reinvigorated and stronger Europe, not the kind of division that produced Molenbeek — a microcosm of what fragmentation can bring.

My two older children were born in Schaerbeek. My daughter, now a doctor in New Mexico, took some of her first steps at Brussels airport. This is not the Europe I imagined for them.

The GOP Has Two Fevers That Need to Break. By Michael Gerson.

The GOP Has Two Fevers That Need to Break. By Michael Gerson. Real Clear Politics, April 12, 2016. Also at the Washington Post.

Gerson:

Some Trump-obsessed, hysterical nitwits have overstated the case that the Republican Party may be on the verge of self-annihilation. “If Trump were the nominee,” said one, “the GOP would cease to be.”

That quote would be mine. The mood of the moment (not to mention the rhythm of the sentence) was irresistible. But the Republican Party would probably not disintegrate if either Donald Trump or Ted Cruz were its nominee. The reality is both less dramatic and (for those who wish the GOP well) more tragic.

On the whole, the Obama era has been the best time to be a Republican since Herbert Hoover left office. The 2014 election yielded the highest number of GOP House members since 1928, and the second highest number of GOP senators. There are currently 31 Republican governors. The GOP controls 70 percent of state legislatures and enjoys single-party rule in 25 states.

RealClearPolitics election analysts Sean Trende and David Byler put together an index of party strength, based on performance at federal, state and local levels. By their measure, Republicans are doing their best overall since 1928. “The Republican Party,” they conclude, “is stronger than it has been in most of our readers’ lifetimes.”

The overwhelming volume of presidential election coverage creates an illusion that only presidential elections matter. But Democratic decline at the state and local levels has radiating effects — influencing the shape of redistricting, emptying the bench of future electoral talent, and helping to undermine the implementation of Democratic initiatives such as Obamacare.

Consider: If Republicans had fielded a strong presidential nominee this year, who managed to win a winnable election, the party’s success would have been more comprehensive than any since 1980. The tragedy is not that Republicans are on the verge of self-destruction; it is that they were on the verge of victory, and threw it away.

This singular failure is not a small thing for the GOP. The patient is brimming with health and vigor in every way, except for the missing head. Either of this year’s likely Republican failures would complicate the job of candidates down the ticket and alienate demographic groups that are essential to future national victories.

At the presidential level, the GOP has two arguments in desperate need of defeat — two ideological fevers that need to break. The first is the tea party claim that ideological purity is the key to presidential success. Republicans, in this view, have lost recent presidential elections because their quisling candidates, John McCain and Mitt Romney, could not turn out 4 million “missing” conservative voters.

That number, it actually turns out, is a myth, rooted in the slow reporting of vote totals after the 2012 election. “There’s no magic formula,” said Dan McLaughlin of RedState, “no cavalry of millions of conservatives waiting just over the hill to save the day.” A Custer-like loss by Cruz — who has shown little ability to expand beyond his narrow ideological appeal — would demonstrate this point.

The second fever is less common in the United States than in Europe, but it is a particularly vicious strain. This is the claim by right-wing populists that Republicans need to completely reorient their ideology in favor of nativism, protectionism and isolationism in order to appeal to working-class whites. This was the message of Pat Buchanan’s presidential campaigns starting in the 1990s. With Trump, it is back in full force.

The problem? Aside from the fact that protectionism is self-destructive economic policy, and isolationism is disastrous foreign policy, an attempt to pump up the white vote with nativist rhetoric alienates just about everyone else. Trump has secured his stagnant plurality in GOP primaries by earning record-level disapproval from the rest of the country. If Trump were the Republican nominee, winning states such as Ohio, Pennsylvania and Michigan would require an increase in the white working-class vote so vast that the math is essentially impossible.

This is now the subject of many conversations among Republicans: Is it better to lose with Cruz or Trump? The arguments for tea party purity and for “white lives matter” nativism each need discrediting defeat. Unfortunately, they seem to be the two available choices.

Eventually, Republicans will require another option: a reform-oriented conservatism that is responsive to working-class problems while accommodating demographic realities. This is what makes Paul Ryan so attractive as the Hail Mary pass of an open convention. But, more realistically, it will be the work of a headless Republican Party, reconstituting itself in a new Clinton era.

NOVA: Vikings Unearthed.

Vikings Unearthed. Video. NOVA. PBS, April 4, 2016. Also here.

View From Space Hints at a New Viking Site in North America. By Ralph Blumenthal. New York Times, March 31, 2016.

Possible Viking Settlement Discovered in Canada. By Tessa Berenson. Time, April 1, 2016.





Blumenthal:

A thousand years after the Vikings braved the icy seas from Greenland to the New World in search of timber and plunder, satellite technology has found intriguing evidence of a long-elusive prize in archaeology — a second Norse settlement in North America, further south than ever known.

The new Canadian site, with telltale signs of iron-working, was discovered last summer after infrared images from 400 miles in space showed possible man-made shapes under discolored vegetation. The site is on the southwest coast of Newfoundland, about 300 miles south of L’Anse aux Meadows, the first and so far only confirmed Viking settlement in North America, discovered in 1960.

Since then, archaeologists, following up clues in the histories known as the sagas, have been hunting for the holy grail of other Viking, or Norse, landmarks in the Americas that would have existed 500 years before Columbus, to no avail.

Douglas Bolender, left, and Sarah H. Parcak, right, looking for evidence of a Viking presence at a remote site, called Point Rosee by researchers, in Newfoundland. If confirmed, the site would be the second known Viking settlement in North America. Credit Greg Mumford.

But last year, Sarah H. Parcak (pronounced PAR-kak), a leading space archaeologist working with Canadian experts and the science series NOVA for a two-hour television documentary, “Vikings Unearthed,” that will be aired on PBS next week, turned her eyes in the sky on coastlines from Baffin Island, west of Greenland, to Massachusetts. She found hundreds of potential “hot spots” that high-resolution aerial photography narrowed to a handful and then one particularly promising candidate — “a dark stain” with buried rectilinear features.

Magnetometer readings later taken at the remote site, called Point Rosee by researchers, a grassy headland above a rocky beach an hour’s trek from the nearest road, showed elevated iron readings. And trenches that were then dug exposed Viking-style turf walls along with ash residue, roasted ore called bog iron and a fire-cracked boulder — signs of metallurgy not associated with native people of the region.

In addition, radiocarbon tests dating the materials to the Norse era, and the absence of historical objects pointing to any other cultures, helped persuade scientists involved in the project and outside experts of the site’s promise. The experts are to resume digging there this summer.

A lump of what scientists say is bog iron ore, and one of the samples being tested from the possible

Viking site at Point Rosee. This roasted ore is a sign of metallurgy not associated with native people

 of the region. Credit Greg Mumford.

“It screams, ‘Please excavate me!,’ ” said Dr. Parcak, an associate professor of anthropology at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, who won the $1 million TED prize last year for her pioneering work using satellite images to expose the looting of ancient Egyptian antiquities and is using it to globally crowdsource new archaeological sites from space.

The NOVA program will stream online at http://pbs.org/nova in the United States at 3:30 p.m. Monday, Eastern time, (along with a BBC program in England), and will be broadcast on PBS at 9 p.m. Wednesday.

Given the dashed hopes of previous searches and the many spurious claims of Viking presence in the Americas, scientists on the project as well as outside experts have voiced caution.

“Tremendous, if it’s really true,” said William Fitzhugh, director of the Arctic Studies Center and Curator in Anthropology at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History in Washington. “It wouldn’t be unexpected,” he said, but added that he wanted to see the data.

“There’s no lock that it’s Norse, but there’s no alternative evidence,” said Douglas Bolender, a research assistant professor at the Andrew Fiske Memorial Center for Archeological Research and the Department of Anthropology at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, who joined the expedition. He said a buried structure there could be a smithy for longboat nails and weaponry, another strong indicator of Viking presence.

“It would just be logical that there’s more than one site,” said Gerald F. Bigelow, a lecturer in history at Bates College in Lewiston, Me., and a specialist in archaeology of the North Atlantic.

One of the satellite images used by Sarah H. Parcak to identify potential Viking settlement sites along North America’s Atlantic coast. Darker areas were seen as potential structures. Credit DigitalGlobe.

Davide Zori, an assistant professor of archaeology at Baylor University in Waco, Tex., and a specialist on Viking expansion in the North Atlantic, called the find potentially “very important.”

Much depends on what else is found at the site. In archaeology, context is everything. A famous prehistoric site in Brooklin, Me., yielded an 11th century silver Norse coin but it is believed to have landed there through trade and not as proof of Viking settlement.

Master shipbuilders and seafarers, warriors, traders and raiders, the Vikings boiled out of the Scandinavian fjords starting around the 8th century, marauding through Asia and the Middle East, North Africa and Europe. The Vikings focused particularly on the British Isles, and west to Iceland and Greenland, as memorialized in oral narratives and later recorded as the sagas by 13th-century Icelandic monks.

Around 1000, Leif Ericson led an expedition to what became known as Vinland at the northernmost point of Newfoundland at L’Anse aux Meadows (the name an obscure corruption from the French) where explorers starting in 1960 discovered remnants of an extensive colony, including dwellings, a forge, and carpentry workshop — the Vikings’ first and so far only known landmark in the New World. They appear to have been routed by indigenous people the Norse called Skraeling.

One intriguing find was the seeds of a butternut tree, which did not grow that far north and hinted of travels to milder climates in the Gulf of St. Lawrence. But evidence of other Viking settlements has been lacking.

Dr. Parcak began her research by using a commercial satellite called WorldView-3, belonging to the company DigitalGlobe, to search known Norse sites on minuscule Papa Stour in the Shetland Islands of Scotland. Using the near-infrared spectrum invisible to the human eye, the satellite detected buried walls, and digging yielded a carnelian bead from India similar to those found at other Viking sites. Dr. Parcak then focused her satellite search on thousands of miles of coastline from the Canadian Arctic to New England.

After two weeks of digging at Point Rosee, an unexpected find in a flooded trench excited the explorers — several seeds, or perhaps blueberries, which were hurriedly sent for testing. The dates came back wildly off — 700 years after the Vikings, maybe even contemporary. They seem to have migrated onto the site much later.

“You feeling nervous, Sarah?” a NOVA reporter asked Dr. Parcak.

“No, I’m not,” she said.

The Eleven Nations of North America. By Colin Woodard.

Up in Arms. By Colin Woodard. Tufts Magazine, Fall 2013.

Woodard:

What’s less well appreciated is how much the incidence of violence, like so many salient issues in American life, varies by region. Beyond a vague awareness that supporters of violent retaliation and easy access to guns are concentrated in the states of the former Confederacy and, to a lesser extent, the western interior, most people cannot tell you much about regional differences on such matters. Our conventional way of defining regions—dividing the country along state boundaries into a Northeast, Midwest, Southeast, Southwest, and Northwest—masks the cultural lines along which attitudes toward violence fall. These lines don’t respect state boundaries. To understand violence or practically any other divisive issue, you need to understand historical settlement patterns and the lasting cultural fissures they established.

The original North American colonies were settled by people from distinct regions of the British Isles—and from France, the Netherlands, and Spain—each with its own religious, political, and ethnographic traits. For generations, these Euro-American cultures developed in isolation from one another, consolidating their cherished religious and political principles and fundamental values, and expanding across the eastern half of the continent in nearly exclusive settlement bands. Throughout the colonial period and the Early Republic, they saw themselves as competitors—for land, capital, and other settlers—and even as enemies, taking opposing sides in the American Revolution, the War of 1812, and the Civil War.

There’s never been an America, but rather several Americas—each a distinct nation. There are eleven nations today. Each looks at violence, as well as everything else, in its own way.

The precise delineation of the eleven nations—which I have explored at length in my latest book, American Nations—is original to me, but I’m certainly not the first person to observe that such national divisions exist. Kevin Phillips, a Republican Party campaign strategist, recognized the boundaries and values of several of these nations in 1969 and used them to correctly prophesy two decades of American political development in his politico cult classic The Emerging Republican Majority. Joel Garreau, a Washington Post editor, argued that our continent was divided into rival power blocs in The Nine Nations of North America, though his ahistorical approach undermined the identification of the nations. The Pulitzer Prize–winning historian David Hackett Fischer detailed the origins and early evolution of four of these nations in his magisterial Albion’s Seed and later added New France. Russell Shorto described the salient characteristics of New Netherland in The Island at the Center of the World. And the list goes on.

The borders of my eleven American nations are reflected in many different types of maps—including maps showing the distribution of linguistic dialects, the spread of cultural artifacts, the prevalence of different religious denominations, and the county-by-county breakdown of voting in virtually every hotly contested presidential race in our history. Our continent’s famed mobility has been reinforcing, not dissolving, regional differences, as people increasingly sort themselves into like-minded communities, a phenomenon analyzed by Bill Bishop and Robert Cushing in The Big Sort (2008). Even waves of immigrants did not fundamentally alter these nations, because the children and grandchildren of immigrants assimilated into whichever culture surrounded them.

Before I describe the nations, I should underscore that my observations refer to the dominant culture, not the individual inhabitants, of each region. In every town, city, and state you’ll likely find a full range of political opinions and social preferences. Even in the reddest of red counties and bluest of blue ones, twenty to forty percent of voters cast ballots for the “wrong” team. It isn’t that residents of one or another nation all think the same, but rather that they are all embedded within a cultural framework of deep-seated preferences and attitudes—each of which a person may like or hate, but has to deal with nonetheless. Because of slavery, the African American experience has been different from that of other settlers and immigrants, but it too has varied by nation, as black people confronted the dominant cultural and institutional norms of each.

The nations are constituted as follows:

YANKEEDOM. Founded on the shores of Massachusetts Bay by radical Calvinists as a new Zion, Yankeedom has, since the outset, put great emphasis on perfecting earthly civilization through social engineering, denial of self for the common good, and assimilation of outsiders. It has prized education, intellectual achievement, communal empowerment, and broad citizen participation in politics and government, the latter seen as the public’s shield against the machinations of grasping aristocrats and other would-be tyrants. Since the early Puritans, it has been more comfortable with government regulation and public-sector social projects than many of the other nations, who regard the Yankee utopian streak with trepidation.

NEW NETHERLAND. Established by the Dutch at a time when the Netherlands was the most sophisticated society in the Western world, New Netherland has always been a global commercial culture—materialistic, with a profound tolerance for ethnic and religious diversity and an unflinching commitment to the freedom of inquiry and conscience. Like seventeenth-century Amsterdam, it emerged as a center of publishing, trade, and finance, a magnet for immigrants, and a refuge for those persecuted by other regional cultures, from Sephardim in the seventeenth century to gays, feminists, and bohemians in the early twentieth. Unconcerned with great moral questions, it nonetheless has found itself in alliance with Yankeedom to defend public institutions and reject evangelical prescriptions for individual behavior.

THE MIDLANDS. America’s great swing region was founded by English Quakers, who believed in humans’ inherent goodness and welcomed people of many nations and creeds to their utopian colonies like Pennsylvania on the shores of Delaware Bay. Pluralistic and organized around the middle class, the Midlands spawned the culture of Middle America and the Heartland, where ethnic and ideological purity have never been a priority, government has been seen as an unwelcome intrusion, and political opinion has been moderate. An ethnic mosaic from the start—it had a German, rather than British, majority at the time of the Revolution—it shares the Yankee belief that society should be organized to benefit ordinary people, though it rejects top-down government intervention.

TIDEWATER. Built by the younger sons of southern English gentry in the Chesapeake country and neighboring sections of Delaware and North Carolina, Tidewater was meant to reproduce the semifeudal society of the countryside they’d left behind. Standing in for the peasantry were indentured servants and, later, slaves. Tidewater places a high value on respect for authority and tradition, and very little on equality or public participation in politics. It was the most powerful of the American nations in the eighteenth century, but today it is in decline, partly because it was cut off from westward expansion by its boisterous Appalachian neighbors and, more recently, because it has been eaten away by the expanding federal halos around D.C. and Norfolk.

GREATER APPALACHIA. Founded in the early eighteenth century by wave upon wave of settlers from the war-ravaged borderlands of Northern Ireland, northern England, and the Scottish lowlands, Appalachia has been lampooned by writers and screenwriters as the home of hillbillies and rednecks. It transplanted a culture formed in a state of near constant danger and upheaval, characterized by a warrior ethic and a commitment to personal sovereignty and individual liberty. Intensely suspicious of lowland aristocrats and Yankee social engineers alike, Greater Appalachia has shifted alliances depending on who appeared to be the greatest threat to their freedom. It was with the Union in the Civil War. Since Reconstruction, and especially since the upheavals of the 1960s, it has joined with Deep South to counter federal overrides of local preference.

DEEP SOUTH. Established by English slave lords from Barbados, Deep South was meant as a West Indies–style slave society. This nation offered a version of classical Republicanism modeled on the slave states of the ancient world, where democracy was the privilege of the few and enslavement the natural lot of the many. Its caste systems smashed by outside intervention, it continues to fight against expanded federal powers, taxes on capital and the wealthy, and environmental, labor, and consumer regulations.

EL NORTE. The oldest of the American nations, El Norte consists of the borderlands of the Spanish American empire, which were so far from the seats of power in Mexico City and Madrid that they evolved their own characteristics. Most Americans are aware of El Norte as a place apart, where Hispanic language, culture, and societal norms dominate. But few realize that among Mexicans, norteños have a reputation for being exceptionally independent, self-sufficient, adaptable, and focused on work. Long a hotbed of democratic reform and revolutionary settlement, the region encompasses parts of Mexico that have tried to secede in order to form independent buffer states between their mother country and the United States.

THE LEFT COAST. A Chile-shaped nation wedged between the Pacific Ocean and the Cascade and Coast mountains, the Left Coast was originally colonized by two groups: New Englanders (merchants, missionaries, and woodsmen who arrived by sea and dominated the towns) and Appalachian midwesterners (farmers, prospectors, and fur traders who generally arrived by wagon and controlled the countryside). Yankee missionaries tried to make it a “New England on the Pacific,” but were only partially successful. Left Coast culture is a hybrid of Yankee utopianism and Appalachian self-expression and exploration—traits recognizable in its cultural production, from the Summer of Love to the iPad. The staunchest ally of Yankeedom, it clashes with Far Western sections in the interior of its home states.

THE FAR WEST. The other “second-generation” nation, the Far West occupies the one part of the continent shaped more by environmental factors than ethnographic ones. High, dry, and remote, the Far West stopped migrating easterners in their tracks, and most of it could be made habitable only with the deployment of vast industrial resources: railroads, heavy mining equipment, ore smelters, dams, and irrigation systems. As a result, settlement was largely directed by corporations headquartered in distant New York, Boston, Chicago, or San Francisco, or by the federal government, which controlled much of the land. The Far West’s people are often resentful of their dependent status, feeling that they have been exploited as an internal colony for the benefit of the seaboard nations. Their senators led the fight against trusts in the mid-twentieth century. Of late, Far Westerners have focused their anger on the federal government, rather than their corporate masters.

NEW FRANCE. Occupying the New Orleans area and southeastern Canada, New France blends the folkways of ancien régime northern French peasantry with the traditions and values of the aboriginal people they encountered in northeastern North America. After a long history of imperial oppression, its people have emerged as down-to-earth, egalitarian, and consensus driven, among the most liberal on the continent, with unusually tolerant attitudes toward gays and people of all races and a ready acceptance of government involvement in the economy. The New French influence is manifest in Canada, where multiculturalism and negotiated consensus are treasured.

FIRST NATION. First Nation is populated by native American groups that generally never gave up their land by treaty and have largely retained cultural practices and knowledge that allow them to survive in this hostile region on their own terms. The nation is now reclaiming its sovereignty, having won considerable autonomy in Alaska and Nunavut and a self-governing nation state in Greenland that stands on the threshold of full independence. Its territory is huge—far larger than the continental United States—but its population is less than 300,000, most of whom live in Canada.

If you understand the United States as a patchwork of separate nations, each with its own origins and prevailing values, you would hardly expect attitudes toward violence to be uniformly distributed. You would instead be prepared to discover that some parts of the country experience more violence, have a greater tolerance for violent solutions to conflict, and are more protective of the instruments of violence than other parts of the country. That is exactly what the data on violence reveal about the modern United States. 

Mission Failure: America and the World in the Post-Cold War Era. By Michael Mandelbaum.

Mission Failure: America and the World in the Post-Cold War Era by Michael Mandelbaum. Video. SAIS Events, April 5, 2016. YouTube.

Foreign Policy Fueled by Fantasy. By Peter Berkowitz. Real Clear Politics, April 5, 2016.





Berkowitz:

In an extensive interview with Barack Obama in the April issue of The Atlantic, journalist Jeffrey Goldberg recounts a rebuke that the president delivered to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The Israeli leader had been explaining “the dangers of the brutal region in which he lives,” when Obama cut in.

“Bibi, you have to understand something,” the president said. “I’m the African-American son of a single mother, and I live here, in this house. I live in the White House. I managed to get elected president of the United States. You think I don’t understand what you’re talking about, but I do.”

Obama apparently not only believes that his distinctive background and powers of persuasion—rather than, say, a solid grounding in foreign languages, comparative politics and economics, and diplomatic and military history—equip him to understand the geopolitical complexities of tumultuous, faraway regions. Moreover, he and his inner circle also seem to have been convinced since before he was elected president that his personal qualities and special experiences would enable him to change the world. In February 2015 in Foreign Policy, James Traub reported, “Obama, and those closest to him, believed that his voice, his (non-white) face, his story, could help usher the people of the world to a higher plane.”

Notwithstanding his pretensions to have inaugurated a new era in America’s foreign affairs, the 44th president’s conduct of foreign policy represents an unwitting continuation of, and also brings an unintended close to, an era that encompasses the administrations of Bill Clinton and George W. Bush.

That surprising claim is central to Michael Mandelbaum’s superb new book, Mission Failure: America and the World in the Post-Cold War Era. Mandelbaum’s bold title evokes Bush’s speech on May 1, 2003, on the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln—an aircraft carrier recently returned from the Persian Gulf. Scarcely six weeks after American-led forces opened fire against Saddam Hussein’s regime, Bush announced the end of major combat operations in Iraq. The banner behind the president proclaimed “Mission Accomplished.” As Iraq descended into sectarian and religious violence, the banner became a symbol for many of Bush administration naiveté and hubris.

Mandelbaum contends, however, that the failure to bring democracy to Iraq does not distinguish the Bush administration from the preceding post-Cold War administration or the one that followed. Like Bush, Mandelbaum shows, Clinton and Obama pursued foreign policies that elevated the advancement of American values over the pursuit of vital national security interests. In their efforts to transform regimes, Mandelbaum concludes, all three presidents failed.

Mandelbaum is a professor of international relations at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies, a prolific author of serious and accessible books on American foreign policy, and—having been educated at Yale, King’s College, Cambridge, and Harvard, and having enjoyed a long tenure as a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations—a product of the American foreign policy establishment. Yet Mandelbaum’s trenchant assessment of American foreign policy from the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s to the Russian conquest of the Crimea and invasion of eastern Ukraine in 2014 as a series of failures could not be better calculated to outrage the foreign policy establishment.

The U.S. inclination to use “the formidable power with which it emerged from the conflict with the Soviet Union” to liberalize and democratize regimes was, according to Mandelbaum, “distinctive and unprecedented.” To be sure, the American impulse to improve others stretches back to the nation’s Puritan forebears who sought to build a political order that would serve as a model to the world, and it extends through the whole of American history. But the traditional aim of foreign policy—to provide security in a dangerous world—dominated American thinking from the nation’s founding through the Cold War, when the aim was “containment” of Soviet communism. The tremendous new power America enjoyed as a result of its victory in the Cold War and its emergence as the world’s lone superpower, however, provided the luxury of embracing a new goal—“transformation.”

Mandelbaum deftly recounts the numerous missions across three presidencies in which America has sought to transform other countries’ internal politics. The Clinton administration sought to foster human rights in China, democracy in Russia, and regime change in Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, and Kosovo. It failed in every case.

The Bush administration endeavored to build free and democratic governments in Afghanistan and Iraq in the hope of transforming the greater Middle East. It failed.

Like the Clinton and Bush administrations, the Obama administration strove to bring peace to the Israelis and the Palestinians. And it failed.

Mandelbaum appreciates the benefits that would accrue to the United States from success in such missions. The problem with the Clinton, Bush, and Obama administrations and the foreign policy elites that advised them, he argues, is that they overestimated America’s capacity to accomplish these goals.

In China and Russia the missions failed, according to Mandelbaum, because Beijing and Moscow “were able to resist the kinds of changes the United States was trying to introduce.” In Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan, and Iraq, the mission failure “stemmed from the absence of the social conditions necessary to support the public institutions the United States hoped to install.”

With the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, three presidential administrations failed because Palestinian leadership—first under Yasser Arafat and for the last 11 years under Mahmoud Abbas—declined to build transparent and accountable political institutions and even encouraged fellow Palestinians to regard a Jewish state of any size or shape in the land of Israel as irredeemably illegitimate.

In sum, three successive administrations have too often viewed the world not as it is but as they wish it to be. Obama’s and his team’s conviction that his multicultural background and electoral success uniquely enable him to conduct America foreign policy is only the latest source of such error.

If Mandelbaum is correct that the rise of Chinese adventurism and Russian irredentism reaffirms the primacy of power politics even as America retains an interest in prudently employing the nation’s highly limited tools to back the forces of freedom around the world, then the United States can ill afford a foreign policy nourished by fantasy.

Why Trump? Blame the Gap Between Elites and the People. By Leon Aron.

Why Trump? Blame the Gap Between Elites and the People. By Leon Aron. Newsweek, April 5, 2016. Also at AEI.

Trump Democrats Explain Themselves to the Conservatives Who Insult Them. By Rush Limbaugh. RushLimbaugh.com, April 4, 2016


Aron:

From Alabama to Denmark and Nevada to the Netherlands, and from Arizona to Sweden and Germany, Hungary and Poland, voters are flocking to right/left populist, nationalist, isolationist and nativist demagogues, parties and movements.

The trend sweeping Europe and the United States is broader and deeper than politics. The attraction of these suddenly popular phenomena appear to stem in a larger measure from an enormous gap between the beliefs of the “post-modern” and largely post-Christian Western elites (political, media, cultural, academic), on the one hand, and their countries’ hoi polloi on the other.

This chasm is not merely ideological. It is ethical, linguistic — almost anthropological.

For the elites, nothing, or almost nothing, is “written in stone.” Everything is fluid, situational, pragmatically determined. As the founder of existentialism, Jean-Paul Sartre put it, “existence precedes essence.” With “God dead,” as Nietzsche famously proclaimed, ethical absolutes are no more. Values are a matter of personal choice — and one is just as good as another. Nothing and no one is better or worse. Just “different.” There is no “truth” but multiple “truths.” And, following another postulate of post-modernism articulated by Nietzsche, “there are no facts, only interpretations.” Hence the on-the-one-hand-on-the-other-hand approach of elite media which gives equal credence to, say, democratically elected governments and unelected dictatorships.

Similarly, there are neither “just” defensive wars nor “unjust” wars of aggression. All are “conflicts” and “violence.” Hence, any “peace” (aka, “political solution”), no matter how strained, short-lived, or outright fraudulent, is preferable to the battle for the victory of good over evil.

Borders and national sovereignty are atavisms. Hence such quintessentially elite bureaucratic projects as the EU, the Schengen “Europe without borders,” and the single European currency. The military is just as obsolete both as an instrument of geopolitics and a means of defending one’s values or those of one’s allies or clients. Ideologies, and the hatreds they inspire, should not exist and, in any case, can be resolved by a “dialogue.”

On the other side of the chasm are millions who crave certainties. They believe that there is an absolute hierarchy of values. That there is “right” and “wrong.” Their moral credos or “essence” shape and guide their “existence,” not the other way around. To them, God is not dead. In President Obama’s words, they cling to their guns and their religion.

They believe that there is truth and that some facts are irrefutable and not open to interpretations. One such fact is that some hatreds are inexpiable, that conflicts they lead to are unappeasable and cannot be resolved by negotiations or concessions but only by a victory of the one side over the other. And in such cases they believe one should strike first. They also believe that borders are sovereign and that militaries exist to be used to defend principles and territories.

They seem to feel that political correctness is rendering their countries incapable of conducting conversations on matters they consider vital. It took a series of simultaneous attacks by Islamic militants in Paris last year for the French president to identify their credo as islamisme radical. But President Obama could not bring himself to define the terrorists in these terms. He called them “a bunch of zealots” and he refused to acknowledge the religious and racial hatred as he described the killing of the shoppers in a Jewish deli as “randomly shoot [ing] a bunch of folks.”

The “cultural” difference between the elites and the “people” has always existed.

The deep weariness of such euphemisms and obfuscations may account for the almost reflexive, near-cathartic enthusiasm (no matter how misguided) for those who are “telling it like it is” – something that a plurality of Donald Trump’s primary voters cite as the key to their support.

This is not to argue for or against each of these Weltanschauungs. The “cultural” difference between the elites and the “people” has always existed. But the size of the gulf today may have rendered populist demagogues on both the right and left dangerously more attractive.

Let us hope that the Western establishment sees the danger and starts adjusting its vocabulary and values to the point where it can talk to its people in ways that the latter will find credible, respectful, and understandable.