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From www.danielpipes.org | Original article available at: www.danielpipes.org/article/4099

In 1796, U.S. Vowed Friendliness With Islam

by Daniel Pipes
New York Sun
November 7, 2006

Has the United States ever engaged in a crusade against Islam? No, never. And, what's more, one of the country's earliest diplomatic documents rejects this very idea.

Exactly 210 years ago this week, toward the end of George Washington's second presidential administration, a document was signed with the first of two Barbary Pirate states. Awkwardly titled the "Treaty of Peace and Friendship, signed at Tripoli November 4, 1796 (3 Ramada I, A. H. 1211), and at Algiers January 3, 1797 (4 Rajab, A. H. 1211)," it contains an extraordinary statement of peaceful intent toward Islam.

The agreement's 11th article (out of twelve) reads: As the government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian Religion, - as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion or tranquility of Musselmen, - and as the said States never have entered into any war or act of hostility against any Mahomitan nation, it is declared by the parties that no pretext arising from religious opinions shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony existing between the two countries."

In June 1797, the Senate unanimously ratified this treaty, which President John Adams immediately signed into law, making it an authoritative expression of American policy.

In 2006, as voices increasingly present the "war on terror" as tantamount to a war on Islam or Muslims, it bears notice that several of the Founding Fathers publicly declared they had no enmity "against the laws, religion or tranquility" of Muslims. This antique treaty implicitly supports my argument that the United States is not fighting Islam the religion but radical Islam, a totalitarian ideology that did not even exist in 1796.

Beyond shaping relations with Muslims, the statement that "the government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian Religion" has for 210 years been used as a proof text by those who argue that, in the words of a 1995 article by Steven Morris, "The Founding Fathers Were Not Christians."



Joel Barlow (1754-1812), a U.S. diplomat, promised "harmony" between his country and Muslims.But a curious story lies behind the remarkable 11th article. The official text of the signed treaty was in Arabic, not English; the English wording quoted above was provided by the famed diplomat who negotiated it, Joel Barlow (1754-1812), then the American consul-general in Algiers. The U.S. government has always treated his translation as its official text, reprinting it countless times.

There are just two problems with it.

First, as noted by David Hunter Miller (1875-1961), an expert on American treaties, "the Barlow translation is at best a poor attempt at a paraphrase or summary of the sense of the Arabic." Second, the great Dutch orientalist Christiaan Snouck Hurgronje (1857-1936), reviewed the Arabic text in 1930, retranslated it, and found no 11th article. "The eleventh article of the Barlow translation has no equivalent whatever in the Arabic," he wrote. Rather, the Arabic text at this spot reprints a grandiloquent letter from the pasha of Algiers to the pasha of Tripoli.

Snouck Hurgronje dismisses this letter as "nonsensical." It "gives notice of the treaty of peace concluded with the Americans and recommends its observation. Three fourths of the letter consists of an introduction, drawn up by a stupid secretary who just knew a certain number of bombastic words and expressions occurring in solemn documents, but entirely failed to catch their real meaning."

These many years later, how such a major discrepancy came to be is cloaked in obscurity and it "seemingly must remain so," Hunter Miller wrote in 1931. "Nothing in the diplomatic correspondence of the time throws any light whatever on the point."

But the textual anomaly does have symbolic significance. For 210 long years, the American government has bound itself to a friendly attitude toward Islam, without Muslims having signed on to reciprocate, or without their even being aware of this promise. The seeming agreement by both parties not to let any "pretext arising from religious opinions" to interrupt harmonious relations, it turns out, is a purely unilateral American commitment.

And this one-sided legacy continues to the present. The Bush administration responded to acts of unprovoked Muslim aggression not with hostility toward Islam but with offers of financial aid and attempts to build democracy in the Muslim world.

From www.danielpipes.org | Original article available at: www.danielpipes.org/article/409

November 12, 2006
Entrepreneurs See a Web Guided by Common Sense

By JOHN MARKOFF
SAN FRANCISCO, Nov. 11 — From the billions of documents that form the World Wide Web and the links that weave them together, computer scientists and a growing collection of start-up companies are finding new ways to mine human intelligence.

Their goal is to add a layer of meaning on top of the existing Web that would make it less of a catalog and more of a guide — and even provide the foundation for systems that can reason in a human fashion. That level of artificial intelligence, with machines doing the thinking instead of simply following commands, has eluded researchers for more than half a century.

Referred to as Web 3.0, the effort is in its infancy, and the very idea has given rise to skeptics who have called it an unobtainable vision. But the underlying technologies are rapidly gaining adherents, at big companies like I.B.M. and Google as well as small ones. Their projects often center on simple, practical uses, from producing vacation recommendations to predicting the next hit song.

But in the future, more powerful systems could act as personal advisers in areas as diverse as financial planning, with an intelligent system mapping out a retirement plan for a couple, for instance, or educational consulting, with the Web helping a high school student identify the right college.

The projects aimed at creating Web 3.0 all take advantage of increasingly powerful computers that can quickly and completely scour the Web.

“I call it the World Wide Database,” said Nova Spivack, the founder of a start-up firm whose technology detects relationships between nuggets of information mining the World Wide Web. “We are going from a Web of connected documents to a Web of connected data.”

Web 2.0, which describes the ability to seamlessly connect applications (like geographical mapping) and services (like photo-sharing) over the Internet, has in recent months become the focus of dot-com-style hype in Silicon Valley. But commercial interest in Web 3.0 — or the “semantic Web,” for the idea of adding meaning — is only now emerging.

The classic example of the Web 2.0 era is the “mash-up” — for example, connecting a rental-housing Web site with Google Maps to create a new, more useful service that automatically shows the location of each rental listing.

In contrast, the Holy Grail for developers of the semantic Web is to build a system that can give a reasonable and complete response to a simple question like: “I’m looking for a warm place to vacation and I have a budget of $3,000. Oh, and I have an 11-year-old child.”

Under today’s system, such a query can lead to hours of sifting — through lists of flights, hotel, car rentals — and the options are often at odds with one another. Under Web 3.0, the same search would ideally call up a complete vacation package that was planned as meticulously as if it had been assembled by a human travel agent.

How such systems will be built, and how soon they will begin providing meaningful answers, is now a matter of vigorous debate both among academic researchers and commercial technologists. Some are focused on creating a vast new structure to supplant the existing Web; others are developing pragmatic tools that extract meaning from the existing Web.

But all agree that if such systems emerge, they will instantly become more commercially valuable than today’s search engines, which return thousands or even millions of documents but as a rule do not answer questions directly.

Underscoring the potential of mining human knowledge is an extraordinarily profitable example: the basic technology that made Google possible, known as “Page Rank,” systematically exploits human knowledge and decisions about what is significant to order search results. (It interprets a link from one page to another as a “vote,” but votes cast by pages considered popular are weighted more heavily.)

Today researchers are pushing further. Mr. Spivack’s company, Radar Networks, for example, is one of several working to exploit the content of social computing sites, which allow users to collaborate in gathering and adding their thoughts to a wide array of content, from travel to movies.

Radar’s technology is based on a next-generation database system that stores associations, such as one person’s relationship to another (colleague, friend, brother), rather than specific items like text or numbers.

One example that hints at the potential of such systems is KnowItAll, a project by a group of University of Washington faculty members and students that has been financed by Google. One sample system created using the technology is Opine, which is designed to extract and aggregate user-posted information from product and review sites.

One demonstration project focusing on hotels “understands” concepts like room temperature, bed comfort and hotel price, and can distinguish between concepts like “great,” “almost great” and “mostly O.K.” to provide useful direct answers. Whereas today’s travel recommendation sites force people to weed through long lists of comments and observations left by others, the Web. 3.0 system would weigh and rank all of the comments and find, by cognitive deduction, just the right hotel for a particular user.

“The system will know that spotless is better than clean,” said Oren Etzioni, an artificial-intelligence researcher at the University of Washington who is a leader of the project. “There is the growing realization that text on the Web is a tremendous resource.”

In its current state, the Web is often described as being in the Lego phase, with all of its different parts capable of connecting to one another. Those who envision the next phase, Web 3.0, see it as an era when machines will start to do seemingly intelligent things.

Researchers and entrepreneurs say that while it is unlikely that there will be complete artificial-intelligence systems any time soon, if ever, the content of the Web is already growing more intelligent. Smart Webcams watch for intruders, while Web-based e-mail programs recognize dates and locations. Such programs, the researchers say, may signal the impending birth of Web 3.0.

“It’s a hot topic, and people haven’t realized this spooky thing about how much they are depending on A.I.,” said W. Daniel Hillis, a veteran artificial-intelligence researcher who founded Metaweb Technologies here last year.

Like Radar Networks, Metaweb is still not publicly describing what its service or product will be, though the company’s Web site states that Metaweb intends to “build a better infrastructure for the Web.”

“It is pretty clear that human knowledge is out there and more exposed to machines than it ever was before,” Mr. Hillis said.

Both Radar Networks and Metaweb have their roots in part in technology development done originally for the military and intelligence agencies. Early research financed by the National Security Agency, the Central Intelligence Agency and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency predated a pioneering call for a semantic Web made in 1999 by Tim Berners-Lee, the creator of the World Wide Web a decade earlier.

These agencies also helped underwrite the work of Doug Lenat, a computer scientist whose company, Cycorp of Austin, Tex., sells systems and services to the government and large corporations. For the last quarter-century Mr. Lenat has labored on an artificial-intelligence system named Cyc that he claimed would some day be able to answer questions posed in spoken or written language — and to reason.

Cyc was originally built by entering millions of common-sense facts that the computer system would “learn.” But in a lecture given at Google earlier this year, Mr. Lenat said, Cyc is now learning by mining the World Wide Web — a process that is part of how Web 3.0 is being built.

During his talk, he implied that Cyc is now capable of answering a sophisticated natural-language query like: “Which American city would be most vulnerable to an anthrax attack during summer?”

Separately, I.B.M. researchers say they are now routinely using a digital snapshot of the six billion documents that make up the non-pornographic World Wide Web to do survey research and answer questions for corporate customers on diverse topics, such as market research and corporate branding.

Daniel Gruhl, a staff scientist at I.B.M.’s Almaden Research Center in San Jose, Calif., said the data mining system, known as Web Fountain, has been used to determine the attitudes of young people on death for a insurance company and was able to choose between the terms “utility computing” and “grid computing,” for an I.B.M. branding effort.

“It turned out that only geeks liked the term ‘grid computing,’ ” he said.

I.B.M. has used the system to do market research for television networks on the popularity of shows by mining a popular online community site, he said. Additionally, by mining the “buzz” on college music Web sites, the researchers were able to predict songs that would hit the top of the pop charts in the next two weeks — a capability more impressive than today’s market research predictions.

There is debate over whether systems like Cyc will be the driving force behind Web 3.0telligence will emerge in a more organic fashion, from technologies that systematically extract meaning from the existing Web. Those in the latter camp say they see early examples in services like del.icio.us and Flickr, the bookmarking and photo-sharing systems acquired by Yahoo, and Digg, a news service that relies on aggregating the opinions of readers to find stories of interest.

In Flickr, for example, users “tag” photos, making it simple to identify images in ways that have eluded scientists in the past.

“With Flickr you can find images that a computer could never find,” said Prabhakar Raghavan, head of research at Yahoo. “Something that defied us for 50 years suddenly became trivial. It wouldn’t have become trivial without the Web.”

THOMAS P.M. BARNETT: Time for a new generational voice in politics

Scripps Howard News Service
(Published: November 10, 2006)
(sh)- Barack Obama should run for president in 2008 for all the tactical reasons cited by pundits, but primarily because the baby boomers need serious competition from "below" on the vision thing. It's unhealthy to have so much of our political and strategic discourse dominated by the '60s generation.

Let me tell you why.

Morris Massey, an expert on conflict between generations, pioneered the argument that "what you are is where you were when ...," meaning all of us reach a point in life where we discover a world larger than ourselves. At that point, we become cognizant of the morals we've developed across our early years, and those morals - or worldview - tend to persist across our adult years.

For most people, that fateful transition occurs in the teenage years, which explains our tendency to stick with the popular music of those years throughout adulthood. Admit it ... you stayed cool enough across your 20s and maybe you faked it deep into your 30s, but then you woke up in your 40s and realized you absolutely hate your kids' music!

Don't worry. It happens to everyone.

So Massey's basic point is that our worldview is essentially formed by the time we hit college. Everything that came before is considered "normal," and much of what comes after is viewed as just plain "weird." Given enough grounding by parents and religion, most people hold on to their "normal" as they grow older, taking in stride the increasingly "weird," but eventually succumbing to nostalgia for the "good old days."

One trick I've learned as a foreign policy strategist is that whenever I encounter somebody with a clear position on something, I simply check out how that issue was playing out back when this person was a teenager. It usually matches up quite well.

Let me give you an example: talk to anybody about China today and you'll typically encounter first impressions formed in adolescence.

For those who came of age in the 1950s (think Korean War), China remains an aggressive communist regime that cannot be trusted, no matter how many stripes that tiger changes.

Fast forward to the '60s crowd and you'll find a lot of China-coming-apart-at-the-seams arguments, meaning the country's rapid rise likely triggers its internal collapse. Coming of age in the 1960s meant your dominant impressions of China consisted of widespread famine ("Eat your dinner! Kids in China are starving!") and the temporary insanity of Mao's Cultural Revolution.

It's really only when you start bumping into children of the '70s like me (born 1962) that you tend to find a more benign view of China's rise. Why? "Our" China has always been opening up to the outside world, starting with Richard Nixon's 1972 breakthrough trip.

So it's no surprise that my generation is the first to be so open to strategic partnership with China in global affairs. To us, that seems "normal."

You see where I'm going with this ....

Following World War II, American politics was dominated by that "greatest generation" for four decades (1952-1992, or from Eisenhower through Bush the Elder).

Following that long reign, the presidency basically skipped the '50s generation (e.g., Mondale, Dukakis) and moved right onto the '60s boomers (first Clinton, then Bush the Younger).

So with regard to China, we've basically moved beyond the reflexive hostility of the early Cold War crowd (now that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's gone) and into the persistent suspicions of aging boomers who still largely favor "containing" China and "hedging" against its rise.

Looking ahead to the prospective field of 2008 presidential candidates, we see it chock full of that '60s mindset, and that's just not good enough given our current strategic situation - namely, too many new enemies and not enough new friends. Iraq is not Vietnam, and the Long War against extremism is not a rerun of the Cold War against communism.

It's time for our debates on national security strategy to draw upon a worldview shaped more by the 1970s-an understanding of international affairs better in line with today's globalization paradigm (e.g., North-South conflicts, oil price shocks, transnational terrorism, global environmentalism).

Boomer politicians obviously care about these issues. I'm just saying how they frame possible solutions is reflected - and too often restricted - by "where they were when ...."

Senator Barack Obama (born 1961) could be the most-needed new voice for 2008.

Thomas P.M. Barnett is a visiting scholar at the University of Tennessee's Howard Baker Center and the senior managing director of Enterra Solutions LLC. Contact him at tom@thomaspmbarnett.com.

Accountability and taking responsibility wait current Iraqi leaders – will they run for cover?
Sonia Chopra
Nov. 11, 2006

The world is fed up with these Iraqi leaders that could only go after Saddam and do thing else. The world is fed up of violence in Iraq. America will now question the credibility of these leaders who does not want even to disarm their own militia.

Iraqi Government has acted like that of a typical puppet Government. The net result of that is a new recording attributed to the leader of al-Qaeda mocked US Prez George W Bush as a coward whose conduct of the war had been rejected by US voters, challenging him to keep American troops in the country to face more bloodshed. It is time for Iraqi leaders to show they have some guts. Otherwise they should quit instead making it a bigger farce and fiasco.

The biggest problem with these Iraqi leaders is that for decades these people have preached division. Now they cannot preach unity. Starting from Kurdish President Talibani to the Prime Minister – every one wants to protect their own turf.

The Baker report will suggest more responsibilities for these leaders. For the first time these leaders will face the challenge of running a diverse country like Iraq. First, the Shiites must disconnect themselves from Iran. The Sunnis must understand that every one has a right to live decently and the Kurds must stop creating unofficial autonomy in the hope of a future Kurdistan.

Iraqis must again start thinking they are part of Iraq – not Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds. Iraqi patriotism must return and be the central theme. The foreign Jihadists must be thrown out. Can the Iraqi Government deliver? Will they run for cover again?

Iraq girds for shift in U.S. policy
Baghdad fears changes will be too extensive, too fast

By Aamer Madhani, Tribune staff reporter. Mark Silva of the Washington Bureau contributed to this report
Published November 11, 2006

BAGHDAD -- With President Bush set to meet Monday with a bipartisan Iraq study group co-chaired by former Secretary of State James Baker, Iraqis are bracing for a significant shift in U.S. strategy as the White House considers a range of ideas, proposals and options on how to move forward.

After Tuesday's overwhelming Democratic election victory and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's abrupt resignation, Iraq's parliamentarians and political operatives believe that the U.S. approach to their war-torn country is about to undergo a major overhaul.

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But the view from Baghdad is that many of the proposals floating around Washington--such as a phased withdrawal, using U.S. forces based outside Iraq only in emergencies or persuading Iran and Syria to get more involved--are fraught with problems, none assuring a certain and quick solution.

"It is probably a good thing for Iraq that there has been this big change in Washington, because it will force the Bush administration to consider new ideas," said legislator Haider al-Ebadi of the Shiite Dawa Party. "The concern is that Washington will impose changes too fast and further than the Iraqis are ready to go."

On Friday, Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said the military would be doing its own review of Iraq strategy.

"We have to give ourselves a good honest scrub about what is working and what is not working, what are the impediments to progress and what should we change about the way we are doing it to make sure that we get to the objective that we set for ourselves," Pace told CBS' "Early Show."

Said Stephen Hadley, the president's national security adviser, "The president said the other day that what was going on in Iraq in terms of our efforts [was] not working well enough and not working fast enough. And the question is, that being the judgment, how can we do better?"

The 10-member Iraq Study Group, led by Baker and former Rep. Lee Hamilton (D-Ind.), has made several fact-finding missions to Iraq and has interviewed hundreds of officials and experts since it was formed in March. Before the end of the year, it is expected to hand Bush a set of recommendations on how to accelerate progress in Iraq.

Baker is a longtime confidante and adviser to the president's father, former President George H.W. Bush. Robert Gates, the former CIA director picked by the president to succeed Rumsfeld, also has been a member of the group, although White House spokesman Tony Snow said Friday that Gates would be resigning from the panel.

The group meets Monday with the president, Vice President Dick Cheney and Hadley.

For months, various proposals for an alternative Iraq strategy have been bouncing around Washington, with several Democratic leaders and think tanks forwarding programs. The election results gave the Democrats and administration outsiders an opening to push them again.

Proposal for partition

Even before the panel convened, Joseph Biden (D-Del.) of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and Leslie Gelb, president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations, published a proposal that Iraq be divided into three loosely connected states--Kurds in the north, Sunnis in central Iraq and Shiites in the south--that would share oil revenues.

In the past, Bush has expressed strong opposition to such a plan, and the program has little support in Iraq.

Even Iraqi President Jalal Talabani, whose fellow Kurds in the relatively peaceful north would have the most to gain from a partition of Iraq, has said that such a plan is unfeasible for the time being. Others have predicted such a plan would destabilize the region and mark a major step to civil war.

Baker and other members of the Iraq panel have tried to keep their observations and conclusions close to their vests. But in public statements, Baker has indicated he opposes an immediate withdrawal of troops but believes there is an alternative to the "stay the course" stance of the White House.

Biden and others have suggested setting a deadline for most troops to be redeployed outside Iraq, perhaps as early as the end of 2007. A Democratic proposal in the U.S. House would begin the redeployment before the end of this year.

Some propose scaling back U.S. troops to an advisory role or pulling them back to Kurdistan or Kuwait and deploying them quickly only when Iraq's own security forces run into trouble.

Delay on withdrawal sought

But Iraqi officials on the ground say it is too soon to think about shifting U.S. troops out of the country.

Various polls, including one commissioned by the U.S. State Department, show that a vast majority of Iraqis want the U.S. military to withdraw. But Iraqi leaders, even from factions opposed to the presence of U.S. forces, say a pullout must come only after a semblance of normality has been established.

Talabani said Thursday he had spoken with Democratic leaders who assured him there are no plans for a quick pullout.

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"One of them told me that any early withdrawal will be a catastrophe for the United States and the world," Talabani told Al Jazeera TV. "We are being subjected to a foreign invasion [of non-Iraqi, anti-U.S. insurgents], and we don't have enough forces to fight this invasion."

Saleem Abdullah, a spokesman for the leading Sunni bloc in parliament, said he has conflicting views about the American presence. Realistically, Iraqis will need U.S. forces to stay seven to 10 more years, he said.

"Personally, it tears at me every day to see these occupiers in our country," Abdullah said. "They are to blame for the broken political system they have put in place and all our hardships. But if they leave too soon it will be chaos."

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), an almost certain contender for the GOP presidential nomination in 2008, has suggested the polar opposite to calls for withdrawal. He says the answer may lie in significantly increasing troop levels in Iraq, at least in the short term, beyond the 149,000 already there.

On Wednesday, McCain told reporters in Arizona he thought part of the U.S. military needs to focus on eliminating anti-American cleric Moqtada Sadr. Sadr controls the Mahdi Army militia and is blamed by the U.S. for much of the sectarian killing in Iraq, but he also enjoys an alliance with Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, a fellow Shiite.

"I believe al-Sadr has to be taken out," McCain said.

Gates, the defense secretary-designate, has said in the past that the U.S. should be open to holding a summit with Iran and Syria to seek their help in securing Iraq's borders from outside insurgents and influencing factions inside the country.

Baker, who recently has met with top Syrian and Iranian officials, has indicated he believes that directly engaging both countries is in the U.S. interest, even though the Bush administration has refused to consider talking to those countries and other perceived enemies.

Baker, who in the past played a significant role in Israeli-Palestinian negotiations, also has hinted that he believes solving broader Mideast issues could help in Iraq.

"It's not appeasement to talk to your enemies," Baker told reporters last month.

Repairing relationships

Abbas al-Bayati, a Shiite legislator, said he hopes the Iraq panel also will push the White House to repair its relationship with much of the European community, which was marginalized in Iraq because of its opposition to the war.

"I think the Baker-Hamilton report will make it possible [for] the approach to solving Iraq's problems [to be] internationalized," al-Bayati said. "I think the Americans and European community understand that Iraq is just a square in the Middle East problem that has to be solved and the international community has an interest in solving it."

Moderate Democrats and others who support the phased withdrawal of troops suggest that only this threat may force Iraqi leaders to make difficult decisions toward promoting national reconciliation.

Bush has expressed opposition to timelines because he believes it would give insurgents the ability to wait out the Americans. Iraqi officials also object.

"To come to this country and leave it without a security force that can protect us ... that would be immoral and would leave us in a very difficult situation," al-Bayati said.

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amadhani@tribune.com