Personal Recollections of the War on Terror (by a member of the State Department)

As a career civil servant I always try to keep partisanship out of my analysis -- even in a private and anonymous memoir of this sort. However, I am sure it is safe to declare as a certain truth, across the three administrations in which I have served, that the events of 9/11 fundamentally reshaped the politics of our globe.

This is not to say that there had not been warning signs earlier. Small scale attempted bombings -- as well, of course, as the far more serious and costly attacks that our allies the United Kingdom had endured, long before the violence reached our shores.

At the time, though, none of us appreciated the magnitude of the new threat facing our shared civilization. The Cold War had been won. Our nation enjoyed unrivaled supremacy of military and economic power, and our values of democracy, prosperity, and industriousness -- the heritage of those immortal theses that had once been nailed to the door of a cathedral in Wittenberg -- appeared to be triumphant.

Akbar Ahmed's "The Thistle and the Drone" (2013): A Review

Akbar Ahmed's The Thistle and the Drone: How America's War on Terror Became a Global War on Tribal Islam is a potentially life-transforming book. It is a book so instantly persuasive and recognizably honest that its findings should be described as obvious -- yet its ideas have never been allowed a foot in the door of post-9/11 U.S. policymaking, and they took me and I expect many others wholly by surprise. It is a book whose insights are reached almost entirely by synthesizing information many of us already half-knew, or quarter-remembered; yet they are insights that -- taken together -- provide a comprehensive reinterpretation not only of the "War on Terror" -- but of modern global history as a whole.

And it is a book, finally, whose conclusions -- though published five years ago now -- have only been borne out since.

Novels of Renunciation

The Mill on the Floss may be the perfect novel. Not my favorite novel. Not the best novel. But the novel that does most classically and quintessentially that which novels -- of all forms of literature -- are best at doing. After all, other kinds of books - ones that aren't novels -- can tell you what to do. They can explain why and how. But novels are the most equipped to accompany you with sympathy when you discover how very little aid this purely preceptial morality is when faced with actual adult human life, with all its passions and incompatible values.

Knowledge v. Acquisition

Human beings are distinctly averse to acknowledging that anyone else might ever (a) know anything that they don't know, or (b) be more skilled at any given cognitive task than they are; thus, the devices for avoiding any such acknowledgement have always been many and ingenious. One of the classic maneuvers is to bite the bullet -- to say, in effect, that yes, someone else might "know" something, but that there is an all-important difference between "knowing" something and really knowing it, you know?

A friend and I were using this tactic the other day on a talk we heard that appeared to contain information that was new to us. This caused a momentary ripple in our self-satisfaction. It was quickly calmed, however, once we discovered that most of the information in the talk had been lifted "straight from Wikipedia." Phew! We breathed a sigh of relief. That person didn't really know it, they were just pulling from an outside source.