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Who to blame (redux)

So it looks like Professor Osgood is helping me make up my mind about who to blame regarding Abu Ghraib. Here is a graf from what he wrote in today ‘s Washington Post: Military sociology has at its core two powerful insights. First, military organizations reflect in many ways the societies from which they emerge. If a society condones brutality and lewdness, you will find soldiers beating prisoners and copulating with one another while their comrades take souvenir snapshots. If a society has no norm of chief executives accepting responsibility for their corporations’ moral and financial failures, do not expect…

The Toll

From Friday’s MotherJones.com, the casualty figures in Iraq are: Number of U.S. service members killed in Iraq since Operation Iraqi Freedom began on March 19, 2003: 732 Number killed since George W. Bush declared an end to “major combat” on May 1, 2003: 594 Number killed this month: 136 Paul Wolfowitz, the man considered one of the architects of this war, doesn’t know that. Is it because we can’t hear the names of the dead? Or because we can’t see them? Despite the recent charges against the guards at Abu Gharib prison, the great majority of men and women in…

Islamic ‘Adl in Orakzai

Glad to see I have a role model in becoming a sardonic old man. It’s not justice or shari’ah, it’s extortion. What surprises me, however, is that none of the maulanas and muftis made an issue of the exact amount of money when so many avenues of argumentation were open to them. Was the amount extorted from the Sikhs right according to all the major schools of Islamic jurisprudence? Wasn’t it less? Wasn’t it more? Shouldn’t the amount be equivalent to the value of a certain weight in gold? And what about the requirement, according to many jurists, that the…