Black Mass: How Religion Led the World into Crisis
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43. See, for example, M. F. Burnyeat, ‘Sphinx without a secret’, New York Review of Books, 30 May 1985.
44. F. Dostoyevsky, The Devils, London, Penguin, 2004, p.404.
45. For an account of Khalilzad’s early days as a student in Chicago, see Anne Norton’s excellent Leo Strauss and the Politics of American Empire, New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 2004, pp. 185–6.
46. Albert Wohlstetter, ‘Is there a strategic arms race?’, Foreign Policy, no. 15, summer 1974, pp. 3–20.
47. For Angleton’s life and career, see Tom Mangold, Cold Warrior: James Jesus Angleton, the CIA’s Master Spy Hunter, London and New York, Simon and Schuster, 1991.
48. For an authoritative analysis of the methods and errors of the B Team, see Anne H. Cahn, Killing Détente: The Right Attacks the CIA, University Park PA, Pennsylvania State University Press, 1998. See also her article, ‘Team B: the trillion dollar experiment’, Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, vol. 49, no. 3, April 1993.
49. Gary Schmitt and Abram Shulsky, ‘Leo Strauss and the World of Intelligence (By Which We Do Not Mean Nous)’, in Kenneth L. Deutsch and John A. Murley (eds.), Leo Strauss, the Straussians and the American Regime, New York, Rowman and Littlefield, 1999, p. 410 et seq.
50. Schmitt and Shulsky developed their view of intelligence methods more systematically in Silent Warfare: Understanding the World of Intelligence, 3rd edn, Washington DC, Brassey’s, 2002.
51. For the remarks of the Bush aide, see Ron Suskind, ‘Without a doubt’, New York Times, 17 October 2004.
52. Bob Woodward has provided an account of the deception and delusion surrounding the war in the White House in his brilliant exposé, State of Denial: Bush at War, Part III, New York, Simon and Schuster, 2006.
53. George Packer, The Assassins’ Gate: America in Iraq, New York, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005, p. 105.
54. For a report on the ‘Iranian Directorate’, see Laura Rozen, ‘US moves to weaken Iran’, Los Angeles Times, 19 May 2006.
55. For a well-sourced account of the formation and operations of the OSP, see Seymour M. Hersh, Chain of Command, London and New York, Allen Lane and HarperCollins, 2004, pp. 207–24.
56. Joan Didion, ‘Cheney: the fatal touch’, New York Review of Books, 5 October 2006, p. 54.
57. Schmitt and Shulsky, Silent Warfare, p.176.
58. For a report suggesting intelligence analysts feared émigré claims of Iraqi WMD may have been disinformation, see Bob Drogin, ‘US suspects it received false arms tips’, Los Angeles Times, 28 August 2003.
59. ‘Bush and Putin: best of friends’, BBC News, 16 June 2001.
60. David Brooks, ‘The CIA: method or madness?’, New York Times, 3 February 2004.
61. Michael Ledeen, ‘Creative destruction’, National Review Online, 20 September 2001.
62. Czeslaw Milosz, ‘Dostoyevsky’, in To Begin Where I Am: Selected Essays, New York, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002, pp. 281–2.
5 ARMED MISSIONARIES
1. Robespierre’s speech can be read at http://faculty.washington.edu/jonas/Text/ParisRomeProgram/Readings For a superb account of Robespierre and his part in the Terror, see Ruth Scurr, Fatal Purity: Robespierre and the French Revolution, London, Chatto and Windus, 2006.
2. David Rieff, At the Point of a Gun: Democratic Dreams and Armed Intervention, London and New York, Simon and Schuster, 2005, p.180.
3. Robert L. Hirsch et al., Peaking of World Oil Production: Impacts, Mitigation and Risk Management, p.64. The report can be viewed at http://www.projectcensored.org/newsflash/The-Hirsch-Report-Proj-Cens.pdf
4. There is a growing literature on the geo-politics of oil. The best studies of which I am aware are Michael T. Klare, Blood and Oil: The Dangers and Consequences of America’s Growing Petroleum Dependency, London, Penguin, 2004.
5. The full text of Cheney’s speech can be read in the Energy Bulletin at www.energybulletin.net/559.html
6. For an account of the State Department’s paper and its fate, see M. W. Shervington, ‘Lessons of Iraq: Invasion and Occupation’, Small Wars Journal, vol. 5, July 2006, pp. 15–29. The journal can be accessed at www.smallwarsjournal.com
7. Ten days before the US-led invasion, I wrote that the Bush administration’s ‘view of the aftermath of the war is muddy in the extreme … There is a risk that the Iraqi state, a rickety structure cobbled up by departing British civil servants, will fracture and fragment in Yugoslav or even Chechen fashion.’ See ‘America is no longer invincible’, New Statesman, 10 March 2003, reprinted as ‘On the Eve of War: American Power and Impotence’, in John Gray, Heresies: Against Progress and Other Illusions, London, Granta Books, 2004, p. 140.
8. See The Nation, 14 April 2003, for Rumsfeld’s comment.
9. For an authoritative account of Bell’s life and career, see Georgina Howell, Daughter of the Desert: The Remarkable Life of Gertrude Bell, London, Macmillan, 2006.
10. James Mann, Rise of the Vulcans: The History of Bush’s War Cabinet, New York, Viking, 2004, p. 367.
11. Thomas E. Ricks, Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq, London, Penguin, 2006, p.162.
12. The Lancet analysis is summarized in ‘655,000 Iraqis killed since invasion’, Guardian, 11 October 2006. A more detailed summary can be found on the website of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, which carried out the survey, at http://www.jhsph.edu/public healthnews/press-releases/2006/burnham-iraq2006.html For details of the UNreport on torture in post-Saddam Iraq, see ‘New terror stalks Iraq’s republic of fear’, Independent, 24 September 2006.
13. See Rupert Smith, The Utility of Force: The Art of War in the Modern World, London, Allen Lane, 2005.
14. The American use of chemical weapons in Fallujah has been confirmed in the US Army’s Field Artillery Magazine, March/April 2005. See ‘US Army article on Fallujah white phosphorus use’, Scoop, 11 November 2005, http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL0511/S00173.htm
15. ‘US tactics condemned by British officers’, Daily Telegraph, 10 April 2004.
16. ‘CIA chief sacked for opposing torture’, Sunday Times, 12 February 2006.
17. For a report and analysis of the opposition of American military judges to the Bush administration’s authorization of torture, see Sidney Blumenthal, ‘The torture battle royal’, Guardian, 21 September 2006.
18. For a discussion of the cultural aspects of American foreign policy, see George Walden, God Won’t Save America: Psychosis of a Nation, London, Gibson Square, 2006.
19. George Santayana, The Birth of Reason and Other Essays, New York, Columbia University Press, 1968, p.87.
20. Michael Ignatieff, ‘The burden’, New York Times Magazine, 5 January 2003.
21. Paul Berman, Terror and Liberalism, New York and London, Norton, 2004, pp. 189–90.
22. The remark is quoted by Robert Kaplan in Imperial Grunts: The American Military on the Ground, New York, Random House, 2005, p. 205.
23. Emmanuel Todd, After the Empire: The Breakdown of the American Order, London, Constable, 2003, p. 197.
24. ‘Cheney condemned for backing water torture’, Guardian, 28 October 2006.
25. See Walter Pincus, ‘Waterboarding historically controversial’, Washington Post, 5 October 2006.
26. On the use of sleep deprivation in Stalinist Russia and Guantanamo Bay, see Vladimir Bukovsky, ‘Torture’s long shadow’, Washington Post, 18 December 2005. As the article relates, Bukovsky was himself tortured when he was a Soviet dissident. For sleep deprivation in Guantanamo, see also ‘The real victims of sleep deprivation’, BBC News, 8 January 2004.
27. See Deborah Sontag, ‘A videotape offers a window into a terror suspect’s isolation’, New York Times, 4 December 2006.
28. I have analysed liberal legalism more fully in Two Faces of Liberalism, Cambridge, Polity Press, 2000.
29. See S. M. Lipset and J. M. Lakin, The Democratic Century, Norman OK, University of Oklahoma Press, 2004.
30. ‘Security firms abusing Iraqis
’, BBC World News, 30 October 2006.
31. Martin van Creveld, The Changing Face of War: Lessons of Combat, fromthe Marne to Iraq, New York, Ballantine Books, 2006, p. 229.
32. See ‘Campaign in Iraq has increased terror threat, says American intelligence report’, Guardian, 25 September 2006.
33. For Donald Rumsfeld’s conception of the Long War, see ‘Rumsfeld offers strategy for current war: Pentagon to release 20–year plan today’, Washington Post, 3 February 2006. The US Army and Marine Corps Counter-insurgency Field Manual, published in December 2006, contains a more sophisticated analysis. See www.military.com, 16 December 2006, ‘New counter-insurgency manual’.
34. See, for example, David Frum and Richard Perle, An End to Evil: How to Win the War on Terror, New York, Random House, 2003.
35. Samuel P. Huntington presented the theory of ‘clashing civilizations’ in his The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, New York and London, Simon and Schuster, 1996. I have assessed it at greater length in ‘Global utopias and clashing civilisations’, International Affairs, vol. 74, no. 1, January 1998, pp. 149–63.
36. Robert A. Pape, Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism, New York, Random House, 2005.
37. I consider the evolution of al-Qaeda in the new Introduction to my Al Qaeda and What it Means to be Modern, 2nd edn, London, Faber, 2007.
38. For a superb narrative and analysis of the development of al-Qaeda, see Lawrence Wright, The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11, New York, Knopf, 2006.
39. Olivier Roy, Globalised Islam: The Search for a New Ummah, London, Hurst, 2004, p. 44.
40. Martin van Creveld gives an account of British strategy in Northern Ireland in The Changing Face of War, pp. 229–36.
41. See Philip Bobbitt, The Shield of Achilles: War, Peace and the Course of History, London, Allen Lane, 2002.
42. Bernard-Henri Lévy, American Vertigo: On the Road from Newport to Guantanamo (in the Footsteps of Alexis de Tocqueville), London, Gibson Square, 2006, p.328.
43. For a realistic assessment of the international system, see the late Paul Hirst’s brilliant short book, War and Power in the 21st Century, Cambridge, Polity Press, 2001.
44. For a report of the changes in US nuclear doctrine, see William Arkin, ‘Not just a last resort’, Washington Post, 15 May 2005.
45. See Paul Rogers, ‘Iran: Consequences of a War’, Briefing Paper, Oxford Research Group, 2006, http://www.oxfordresearchgroup.org.uk/publications/briefings/IranConsequences.htm
46. Fred Charles Ikle, Annihilation fromWithin: The Ultimate Threat to Nations, New York, Columbia University Press, 2006, p. xiii.
6 POST-APOCALYPSE
1. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, London, J. M. Dent, 1914, Chapter 5, p. 20.
2. Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History, Chicago and London, University of Chicago Press, 1953, p.317.
3. For an analysis of Spinoza as a decisive thinker of the early modern Enlightenment, see Jonathan I. Israel, Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity, 1650–1750, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2001.
4. I discuss Spinoza in my ‘Reply to Critics’ in John Horton and Glen Newey (eds.), The Political Theory of John Gray, London, Routledge, 2006. For an illuminating recent interpretation of Spinoza’s philosophy, see Stuart Hampshire, Spinoza and Spinozism, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 2005.
5. See Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion, London, Bantam, 2006, and Daniel C. Dennett, Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon, London, Allen Lane, 2006.
6. I leave aside atheism in Islamic cultures, though the same analysis applies.
7. Tzvetan Todorov, Hope and Memory: Lessons from the Twentieth Century, Princeton NJ, Princeton University Press, 2003, pp. 236–7.
8. Hedley Bull, The Control of the Arms Race, London, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1961, p. 212.
9. For canonical statements of the realist position, see Hans J. Morgenthau, Scientific Man versus Power Politics, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1974; Reinhold Niebuhr, Moral Man and Immoral Society, London, Continuum, 2005; Hedley Bull, The Anarchical Society: A Study of Order in World Politics, London, Palgrave Macmillan, 2002; and Martin Wright, Power Politics, London, Continuum, 1995.
10. A text of Kennan’s telegram setting out the policy of containment can be read at www.learner.org/channel/workshops/primarysources/coldwar/docs/
tele.html
11. Isaiah Berlin, Political Ideas in the Romantic Age, Princeton NJ, Princeton University Press, 2006, pp. 54–5.
12. For authoritative analyses of the scale and speed of climate shift, see James Lovelock, The Revenge of Gaia, London, Allen Lane, 2006; Fred Pearce, The Last Generation: How Nature Will Take Her Revenge for Climate Change, London, Transworld Publishers, 2006; and Jim Hansen, ‘The threat to the planet’, New York Review of Books, vol. 53, no. 12, 13 July 2006. A seminal discussion of global oil peaking can be found in C. J. Campbell, The Coming Oil Crisis, Brentwood, Essex, Multi-Science Publishing Company, 1997. An authoritative analysis of the peaking of oil reserves in Saudi Arabia can be found in Matthew R. Simmons, Twilight in the Desert: The Coming Saudi Oil Shock and the Global Economy, London, Wiley, 2005.
13. The report, authored by Peter Schwartz and Doug Randall, can be downloaded at http://www.environmentaldefense.org/3566–AbruptClimateChange.pdf
14. For an argument in favour of zero-emission fossil fuels as a sustainable alternative, see Mark Jaccard, Sustainable Fossil Fuels: The Unusual Suspect in the Search for Clean and Enduring Energy, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2005.
15. See Lovelock, The Revenge of Gaia, p. 154.
16. Jared Diamond, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Survive, London, Allen Lane, 2005, p.521.
17. Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction, New York and Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1967, p.123.
18. Marcel Proust, The Way by Swann’s, London, Allen Lane, 2002, p. 47.
19. Adam Phillips, Side Effects, London, Hamish Hamilton, 2006, p. 99.
20. I develop the idea of modus vivendi more fully in Two Faces of Liberalism, Cambridge, Polity Press, 2000, Chapter 4.
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Black mass : apocalyptic religion and the death of utopia /
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v3.0
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements
The Death of Utopia
Enlightenment and Terror in the Twentieth Century
Utopia Enters the Mainstream
The Americanization of the Apocalypse
Armed Missionaries
Post-Apocalypse
Notes