17 and 18. Scarlet Surf at Makaha and Hang Dead Hawaiian Style by Patrick Morgan

I will quote what my good friend Mt. Benson had to say, "[n]eedless to say, you get more groovy babe-ballin', ass-kickin' surfer action once again with Bill Cartwright, agent for the secret undercover organization: Operation Hang Ten!" Both Excellent surfing action books.

Coup d'Etat

Coup
Originally uploaded by buzby.

Wow! It's been a long time since we had a good old cold war/third world style coup d'etat. The PM was in New York so the army, allied with the King, came in and overthrew him, took control of the television and radio stations and we're off to the races!

16. Globalized Islam by Oliver Roy

As with many books written in English by Frenchmen this is written in exceedingly complicated English to the point that many sentences deserved a second read.

The main thesis of the author is that Moslems living in Western Europe feel deterritorialized and their paradoxical way of Westernizing Islam is by reaching back to an imaginary super pure form of Islam that has never existed.  Consequently these Western Moslems are becoming even more extreme than their counterparts living in countries with a Moslem majority.

Similarly, Moslems living in the Middle East have become disenchanted with the ossification of Islam in the hands of the ruling elite and are reacting by also reaching back to a similar super pure form of Islam.

I am not educated enough on this subject to be able to tell you that his arguments are sound but they do sound reasonable.

Roy also makes another interesting point.  He explains that Western intellectuals often search for an explanation for the current world in Islam itself and suggest that it is an extreme religion which has always put violence on a pedestal.  He argues that this kind of thinking is wrong.  Instead he posits that the ruling elite of the Middle Eastern countries have taken command of Islam and have prevented it from growing with the times as other Western religions have grown.  He says that Islam has become an instrument of the Middle East elite and is not something that controls the elite.

I firmly believe in this part of his argument.

Shameless!

WASHINGTON -- President Bush acknowledged the existence of previously secret CIA prisons around the world and said 14 high-value terrorism suspects -- including the mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks -- have been transferred from the system to Guantanamo Bay for trials.
Mr. Bush said the "small number" of detainees that have been kept in CIA custody include people responsible for the bombing of the USS Cole in 2000 in Yemen and the 1998 attacks on U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, in addition to the 2001 attacks.
"The most important source of information on where the terrorists are hiding and what they are planning is the terrorists themselves," Mr. Bush said in a White House speech with families of those killed in the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks making up part of the audience. "It has been necessary to move these individuals to an environment where they can be held in secret, questioned by experts and, when appropriate, prosecuted for terrorist acts."

Bush and his cronies are taking liberal democracy turning it upside down and inside out all for the advancment of their own marginal and extreme ideologies.  Absolutely reprehensible.

15. The Foreign Correspondent by Alan Furst

This is the first book that I have read by Furst who, annoyingly, refers to himself as the "pre-eminent historical spy novelist of our time." I don't think so. Notwithstanding his ego, the book is an excellent if short read. It is the story of a group of Italian political resistors living in Paris in 1938 and 1939 as Mussolini strengthened his power in Italy and became ever more closely allied with Nazi Germany. The resistors main business is publishing an underground liberal paper in Italy until the Italian secret service starts killing members of their editorial committee. The resistors are naive in the world of spy craft and almost accidentally get involved in it.

It is a well written book, good summer reading.

Is Rumsfeld such an Idiot?

I preface all of my remarks with a disclaimer that I have never been a fan of Rummy. I find his support for the war in Iraq, going into Iraq without a long term plan, thinking that he is a movie star more than the Secretary of Defense and his general neo-conservativeness quite abhorrent. But I read an op/ed piece that he wrote for the LA Times today and I wholeheartedly agree with this part of his assessment:

"The enemy we face today is different from the enemies we have faced in the past, but its goal is similar: to impose its fanatical ideology of hatred on the rest of the world."

I disagree with how he proposes to deal with "the enemy" but I don't disagree that we face this enemy and we must deal with it. Interestingly, he never actually defines this enemy other than to call it terrorism, maybe he is afraid of offending Arab Americans or our Saudi allies. So, in case anyone is unsure, the enemy he refers to is fundamentalist Islam spread from the Middle East to South East Asia.