Cowboy Boots

Title: An array of boots at the F.M. Light & Sons western-wear store in Steamboat Springs, Colorado.  Library of Congress photographs.

A long, long time ago on this site, I started a thread on  cowboy boots.  Maybe as long ago as three years, or so. That's not as unusual as it might seem, a lot of threads linger as drafts on this site long before they're published.

19th Century cowboys. their boots are not very visible in this photograph, but where you can see them, they are very high shanked boots.

What is unusual is that I lost it.  But I don't think I'd gotten very far in it before I deleted it.  So, here we are starting afresh, which in this case is pretty much the same as starting.

I like cowboy boots.  I often wear them to my office job, but I've also worn them in the role for which they're actually intended, so I have pretty strong opinions on them.  And  they're also sort of bizarrely tied into the period which we've been looking at, in the context of how they've changed over time and what we now think they are.  I also frankly think that a lot of the history that gets circulated about cowboy boots is frankly wrong.

That history, if you've looked into it at all, generally holds that cowboy boots basically didn't exist until some time after the Civil War, at which time they came into being, sort of all of a sudden, in the 1870s or 1880s. Well, not so much.  Indeed, what we call "cowboy boots" had basically been around a lot longer than that.  

Yep, I'm claiming that the common story of the cowboy boot is flat out wrong.

I guess, with that being the case, we have first ask, what is a cowboy boot?

Well, in its proper form, a cowboy boot is a pull on riding boot with a high, scalloped, heel that's designed for use in a wooden stirrup.  Steel, iron or brass stirrups actually are not the same as wooden stirrups at all, in use, so perhaps we should start there.

Author, riding Wade tree stock saddle, with broad wooden, tin clad, stirrups.

Jonathan Wainright being promoted to General at Ft. Myers Virginia, 1938.  Wainright would be transferred to the Philippines prior to World War Two and would go on to serve as a captive of the Japanese after the fall of the island to the Japanese.  He received the Congressional Medal of Honor.  Here you see the two types of stirrups in use by the U.S. Army at the time. Wainright is riding a flat, English style saddle (likely an officer's pattern then in use) while the two  officers next to him are riding M1928 McClellan saddles equipped with wooden stirrups and stirrups hoods.  Wainwright's boots are not visible but are most likely the field boot then in use.  The officer on the right is wearing M1923 lace up cavalry boots.

Metal stirrups, and wooden stirrups, go relatively far back, although we would do well to note that stirrups themselves came into wide use during the Middle Ages.  Indeed, not only did they come into wide use at that time, they were a technological revolution that greatly enhances the fighting ability of a mounted man allowing the Age of Chivalry, i.e., the mounted knight, to basically be possible.  This isn't to say there weren't cavalrymen before that.  There certainly were, but once the rider could keep his seat with the aid of his feet, his utility and fighting ability was greatly enhanced.  Indeed there is a "stirrup theses" that deals with the revolutionary impact of the stirrup upon mounted combat in Europe, and hence upon history in general.

This isn't  history of the stirrup, but we should note that relatively early on there were wooden and steel stirrups.

 

Wide wooden strirrups are a feature of this Wade Tree saddle. Here they are clad with sheet metal on the outside.

 

Wooden stirrups, as a general rule, tend to be more "rustic". If there's an economy of resources we tend to see wooden stirrups.  Saddles are mostly, at least classically, wood and leather, so keeping on keeping on with wooden stirrups makes sense if that's the material you have at hand.  And if you don't have that at hand, you probably aren't making any saddles to start with.  Assuming that, you don't really need that much metal otherwise.

Leather wrapped wooden stirrups on an Association tree saddle.

Riding with wooden stirrups presents some different considerations than steel stirrups, the principal one for our purpose being that wooden stirrups tend to be quite large.  That's fine, but that presents another problem. . . keeping your foot from going through the stirrup.  If that happens you have a true disaster in progress.

 

Why cowboy boots have the shape that they do.

The solution albeit a partial one, for this problem has always been proper footgear.  Indeed, proper footgear is or should be a major consideration for any rider.  People who ride in tennis shoes should be flogged, as its dangerous.

 

Cowboy with jeans tucked in boots, using taps over his stirrups.  Very traditional set of cowboy gear.  This photograph was taken at the 2010 Sheepherders Fair.

Anyhow, the traditional riding boot for wooden stirrups is a high topped boot (which all real riding boots are, as a rule) with high heels made from leather sections, with leather soles, a somewhat pointed toe, and a scalloped heel. The boot is designed as much to let you get your foot out as anything else.  That's why its pointed, that's why its normally a leather sole, and that's why the heel is scalloped.  If it goes through in a disaster, maybe the scallop will let the boot back out. . . maybe.

 Cowboy Ned Coy on "Boy Dick".  Coy is wearing a Boss Of The Plains hat and scalloped boots.  From the popular threads on hats and caps.

It isn't laced either, due to an economy of resources, because it isn't meant to be walked in all  that much, because it is meant to allow your pants to inside the boot, and it might be capable for the boot to be jerked away in a really bad disaster.

This sort of boot has existed for a really, really, long time.  And its existed in more than one location for a really long time.  Indeed, I've even seen photographs of Afghan riders, well before the tragic Soviet period when things were less mess up there, using a boot roughly of this description.

And I've seen at least one photograph of a Civil War Army officer wearing a boot of this exact type, during the Civil War, with huge rowled spurs.

Don't tell me, therefore, that these came about after the Civil War. They did not.

They were around in some form a long time before the Civil War.

They were popular with riders in the West who were employed in cattle work quite early on for obvious reasons.  Western stock saddles uniformly featured wooden stirrups and still tend to.  Cowboys, moreover, did very little ground work if they could avoid it. And their horses tended to be rank.  A boot of that type is exactly what they needed.

They were distinct, however.  Mostly this was because most riding boots in the United States mid 19th Century were low heel, or partially low heel.  Most stirrups east of the Mississippi were steel or iron.  Not all, but most.  And  most men who wore boots, and it was mostly men, were were doing a lot of ground work as well. So, most boots reflected that.

Indeed one big user of horses, the U.S. Army, didn't even officially issue a riding type boot until late in the Civil War.  Otherwise, it simply issued its ankle high shoe to everyone. That says something about the focus that generally existed on the topic.  It probably also says how much more riding had started to go in the service during the Civil War.

 Cavalry orderly wearing low topped riding boots.  These boots may or may not have been an issue pair, as there was never an official Civil War general issue pattern of cavalry boot.

Union cavalryman, Civil War.  He's likely not wearing riding boots at all, but rather the issue ankle high service shoe.

Union cavalry officer.  Officers purchased their uniforms, but the pattern of boot shown here became very common during the war and was ultimately issued to enlisted men.  High topped, somewhat scalloped heel.

After the Civil War the Army determined to issue riding boots to cavalrymen and started to do so. As I'm not an expert on this topic, and as this isn't the history of the military riding boot of the 19th Century, I won't try to detail it, but a variety of high topped, medium heeled boots were issued all the way through the remainder of the 19th Century until the 1890s, when the service shoe for cavalrymen oddly came back in.  

 Detail from Edgar Paxson's meticulously researched Custer's Last Stand.  Paxon here depicts the cavalry boot in use in 1876 very well.  A very high topped boot than ran up over the knee to protect the knee, square toes (they had no left or right) and slightly high heels.  This boot, while a good design, was commonly regarded as uncomfortable by soldiers which may, in part, have been because they were built by Federal prisoners who had, therefore, relatively low motivation.

The common story on the cowboy boot accordingly holds that men went home wearing their boots from the Union and Confederate armies and then went into livestock work, and the cowboy boots was born.

Not so much.

For one thing, the story is really probably more the other way around. Confederate cavalry men were at first drawn from stock working men anyhow and they were already wearing riding boots.  If the boots made it through the war, a doubtful proposition, they just went home wearing what they'd left with.  If their boots wore out, they would have been lucky to get a good replacement pair of riding boots.  No doubt some did, but those boots would have been of no discernible pattern and they would have really just been riding boots.

Amongst the very first cowboys driving north Southerners would have been more common than Northerners, but not for long.  Be that as it may, it 's highly doubtful that piles of Union riding boots ended up being worn by discharged Union cavalrymen turned cowboys.  And as noted, riding boots had been around for eons prior to the Civil War with all of their basic details well established.  It was the Army that was slow to adopt them.

Cowboys near chuck and supply wagon.

Rather, after the Civil War the frontier opened up for cattle and the cowboy came onto the Plains.  He was wearing riding boots, and riding a wooden stirrup saddle that was evolved, but not much, from those used by vacqueros in Texas and Mexico.  Their boots reflected that, and fairly rapidly they became to take on some distinct features, although perhaps not as distinct as we might suppose.

It might be noted, and probably should be noted, that cowboy boots are one item that cowboys did not adopt from vaqueros and caballeros.  Mexican agricultural horsemen did not wear cowboy boots, but rather an ankle high pointed toe, moderate heeled, boot.  That's a bit surprising, but when we consider how they dressed perhaps it is not as surprising as it might at first seem.  They tended to wear leather leggins below the knee for protection if they needed it, and they also wore both chapaderos and later half chaps, known to Western horsemen as chaps and chinks, for protection.  They also wore wool clothing almost uniformly.  While I don't know t hat its related, living and working in a hot environment, the high topped boots may have been less attractive to them than to riders further north.  Additionally, most Mexican cowboy gear actually uses an economy of leather, leather being the product which Mexican cattle were actually raised for, and that may have reflected itself in their boots design.  Leather economy can impact boots permanently, as we shall shortly see.

 Emiliano Zapata (seated, center) and his staff.  There's a mix of clothing here, as there typically is in photos of Mexican revolutionaries (the figure on the far left is wearing a type of boot that darned near resembles one we'll address later, the packer) but all the seated men are wearing botin charro, a type of ankle high, pointed toe, riding boot.

So the scalloped heeled boot came to be strongly identified with cowboys, and at the same time cowboys, who tended to invest a lot of their tiny income in their gear, that being their hat, their boots, and their saddle, sometimes bought cowboy boots that had elemental elements.  Farmers didn't buy boots that had any ornamental elements, in contrast.  Spending a lot of money on their limited equipment, they wanted it to look good and distinct when they could. And that caused the Mexican influenced ornamental stitching on cowboy boots to come about.  While it does create a distinct appearance, the boots are really only slightly evolved from other riding boots in common use in the mid 19th Century.

 My regular cowboy boots.  The ones I wear to work, when I wear cowboy boots to work.

My working cowboy boots.

And of course Americans became fascinated with cowboys quite early on.

Cowboy boots basically assumed that form quite early, and indeed they retain it if they're really traditional boots.  A working 20th Century cowboy with high shank boots could walk into a 19th Century camp and pretty much not have anyone take much notice of his footgear, assuming that he went for something relatively traditional.

Well, like a lot of things, the boots changed as a result of a war.  World War One to be exact.

 Stretching leather, about 1915.

Because World War Two was such a colossal war, and because we tend to simply accept the line that the United States was the "arsenal of democracy" during the Great War, we have a pretty skewed concept of American production in the World War One time frame. Simply put, it was a mess.

Not only was the Army trying to raise a force, at breakneck speed (more rapidly by quite some measure than during World War Two) but it was trying to deploy it overnight.  It was also trying to equip it overnight.  The peacetime Army didn't have anywhere near the amount of stuff necessary to equip the huge Army that the US was trying to raise, equip, ship and deploy in 1917.

And this included leather goods.

The US didn't really even know what it needed in the way of leather goods, so it let out contracts for things like saddles and boots in absurdly large numbers.  There's a real reason that M1904 McClellan saddles are so common.  They made so darned many. Same with boots, the numbers made were astounding.  Absurd, even.

With that sort of demand going on for leather goods, the supply became very strained, and cowboy boots were the victims of that. The leather for high topped boots just wasn't there. So, as a wartime measure, bootmakers introduced the "stubbie" or "pee wee" boot, which is what most people, at least those who aren't cowboys, wear today.

 Tom Mix, 1919.  Mix was an actor, not a cowboy by trade, although the World War One veteran did buy a ranch in Wyoming after the war and he actually ranched here.  Anyhow, actors make notoriously bad examples of what cowboys actual wore, and this is no exception.  The hat is far too large for anything outside of Texas (where sugarloaf sombreros were really large), the pistols are M1873 cavalry models, which had 7" barrels and which were not favored by cowboys, who instead favorted the 5" artillery model. the pants are way too tight. The boots, moreover, are peewees. The heels, however, are just right for the era, and not uncommon amongst working cowhands now.

That was the wartime solution.  And it impacted how the boots were actually worn. Prior to WWI cowboys normally tucked their trouser in their boots, and they still sometimes will, as the photo posted above shows.  This was the routine habit, although sometimes they'd pull their pants down over their boots.  Having worn boots both ways while riding, if I'm going to ride for a long time, I'll tuck them in.  More comfortable, for the long haul.

But you really can't do that very well with pee wees, and cowboys who had to buy new boots during the war were embarrassed by the economy of leather and how it looked, so they took to pulling their pants down over their boots.  Better to wear out your pants and get them dirty than to look like a boofador.

Traditional boots do not go on as easy as peewees.  And you'll want some high socks if you wear them also.  My Olathe traditional mule hide cowboy boots.

Well, cowboy boots have always been regarded as stylish and have received a lot of non working wear by non cow hands.  The peewee boot was tailored made for the person who liked the style, but who didn't ride every day. Indeed, as I have retained the old really high style, I can attest that getting them on and off isn't easy.

And in truth mid height boots worked out okay for a lot of working applications. So the peewee, unless it was really low, quit being a mark of shame and became the common boot fairly quickly, save for the ones that had really low tops (which some did). By the 1920s a boot like that sported by Tom Mix above was pretty common, probably more common than the kind that ran to the knee.  With the spread of this sort of boot on the range, and in town, cowboy boots really entered sort of a new era.  The old style kept on keeping on, but a new style, worn by a lot of people in town, arrived.

 These aren't cowboy boots, they're Wellingtons.  Marketed, however, as "Ropers".

All along a similar low shanked ridingp with your heels, down with your head boot was around as well, the Wellington.  Named after the Duke of Wellington, who favored them, Wellingtons' were a peewee variant of the common Riding Boot, that boot worn by those who rode flat, or "English", saddles. Low topped, and low heeled, they always had a following amonst those who rode a bit or who rode flat saddles but whom didn't favor the knee high boot generally worn by those who used steel stirrups.  They were quite similar, in some fashion, with some of the lower shanked boots worn by Army officers in the 1860s through the 1890s, and therefore had a natural retained following there.  Some European armies, including the English Army, flat out adopted them as riding boots.  At some point in the 20th Century, and at least by the 1940s, the U.S. Army allowed them as alternative footgear for dress wear and they became particularly popular with pilots as dress gear. So much so, in fact, that after the USAF was officially separated from the Army after World War Two black Wellingtons were allowed as private purchase dress shoes for officers.

 

Working rancher with very low heeled boots, perhaps Wellingtons.

 

The popularity of Wellingtons plateaued however until some marketing genius at the Justin company thought of re-branding them as "Ropers'.  Where this idea came from is anyone idea, but it was a marketing stroke of genius.  With the rebranding Wellingtons crossed over into the cowboy boot market and someawht remain there. Their popularity seems to have diminished a bit, but then boots with "walking heels" have increased in popularity as well, with those two boot types occupying each others niche, more or less.

While on this topic, let us dispel the notion that the type of rubber or synthetic boot the English call "wellies" are Wellingtons. They are not.  Apparently the name "Wellington" was applied to them at some point due to a purely superficial relationship they bore to real Wellingtons.  The British users truncated that  name to "wellies", but whatever they are, they are not Wellingtons.  The Duke of Wellington would not be pleased if you thought so.

Wellington at Waterloo. Seriously, the man was not wearing rubber boots.

With cowboy boots as fashion, we do of course see varieties of them.  In some eras, the 50s in particularly it seems to me, the toes became very narrow.  In others, the toes are fairly round.  Square toes were very common in 19th Century boots and have recently returned.  Originally, that was a manufacturing item, as square toes were easy to manufacture and with some boots and shoes there was no left or right.  Now, it's just a matter of fashion.

 

Working rancher with a pair of cowboy boots with a walking heel.

Heel height waxes and wanes as well, although with modern boots you don't seen the really high "doggin" (ie bulldogging) heel nearly as much as you did in earlier eras.  You still see them, however.  As noted, "walking heels", which are basically a conventional shoe heel, are now also common and you see them in use even by working hands.    Every now and then, however, doggin heels will enjoy a comeback, and they never really go away.  As noted, working hands will wear them, and in towns more than a few folks wear lower riding heels.

Indeed, I suppose only a tiny fraction of cowboy boots are worn by people who actually ride. For that reason it'd be interesting to take a census of actual working hands and see what they wear.  By my casual observation, really high topped boots are more common with working hands than a person might suppose, which makes sense.  Medium height boots are fairly common as well, but you do see stubbies and ropers out there, as the photos in this thread attest to.  In town, of course, most folks aren't wearing the really high boots like I do.  Indeed, I'd guess only a tiny fraction of people who wear cowboy boots in town do that.

Cowboy boots aren't the only riding boots, of course, and we'll deal with that on a later thread, to the extent its relevant to this site and the period of time it focuses on.  But cowboy boots are interesting in general, so in looking at footgear, we've started off here.

Lex Anteinternet: The Axe: UW''s elimination list. Considering Football

 

 Women rugby players of the University of Wyoming and the University of Colorado.  Actual student athletes.

This is probably starting to read like "let's pick on UW day" here on this forum, although as the forum doesn't have high readership, I don't expect to receive complaints from the Alumni Association here soon.

Anyhow, this started off today with my questioning the purpose of the Law School in the era of the Uniform Bar Exam and then went on to address the specific cuts being made, which I did here:

Lex Anteinternet: The Axe: UW''s elimination list.: Aeronautical engineering building. . . oops engineering building, at UW.  We've been through this before. Clearly, UW is in econ...

That item closed by questioning football.  I'm going to pick that up here in greater detail in a second.

I guess I should note that I do indeed have sort of a love/hate, I guess, relationship with UW.  I'm a two time UW graduate. Given that, I should fall in the category of individuals who have an unquestioned devotion to UW, but I don't.  I probably ought to ponder why that is.

In part, I think, it's because I grew up in the era of the struggle between Casper College and the University of Wyoming.  Back in the boom of the 1970s there was a serious local effort to make Casper College a four year university.  Pretty much everyone here was in favor of that, but UW, seeing its rice bowl being depleted, was adamantly against it.  So it didn't happen.  Having said that, UW's strategy in the face of this was brilliant, effective, and a good thing.  It went out and partnered with the community colleges to insert some of its programs into them and over time its even been possible to obtain some four year degrees, but not all, at the community colleges.  Over time, I think that its probably a good thing that this occurred and the community colleges stayed two year institutions and UW our only public four year one (a second four year institution exist in the form of Wyoming Catholic College, which frankly I also have problems with for academic reasons, but I'll bother everyone about that in some other post).  But, even while I concede that things turned out right, like a lot of locals I was left with some heartburn about UW.

Beyond that, my four year exposure to the school amplified this, selectively, a little.  It wasn't really the academics of it, which I think were excellent.  My undergraduate geology department was excellent and my law school experience good, in spite of my questioning the remaining viability of that school.  But I never got into the rah rah aspect of the university that so many people do about any university.  That probably says a lot more about me than the university.

Indeed, while a law student I recall receiving a telephone call from a study that was seeking to boost football game attendance. I warned the caller that she was wasting her time with me, but she went through the entire list of things they could do, from free tickets to prizes to bands to hoards of dancing girls, or whatever it was, to which I universally answered that, no, that wouldn't make me attend.  But on game weekends a lot of people with the opposite view, from my prospective, would flood the town and be annoying.  Again, that says more about me, than the university.

Having said all of that, I have never been able to grasp the manic level of devotion to UW football.  Lots of people who live here who never went here are manic devotees of the football program.  It seems weird to me, but then the nationwide devotion to college football baffles me.  

Yale football team of the 1920s.  These student athletes were likely actual students.

I'm not a football fan but that's only part of it.  I don't grasp how it is that university football went from being a game played by students to the farm teams for the NFL.  Indeed, one of the things I admire about baseball is that its farm teams are farm teams.  It doesn't pretend to be recruiting students athletes.  It recruits baseball players.  College football has gone from being a game played by students, on the other hand, to a massively funded farm program for the NFL which the NFL doesn't even have to pay for.

That's stupid.

Anyhow, as part of that stupidity I'd note that after I posted the items below on UW, I saw an item where a Democratic candidate for the state house has gone after the UW football program in the context of the budget cuts and noted that the coach is paid over $800,000 per year.

I don't know if that's correct, but if it is, that's obscene.

But if he is, what that means is that the going rate for Division 1 is that high or higher.  And that's obscene.

But what does it mean, in real terms?  

I don't know that.

What I mean is that I don't know the total cost of UW football, and I don't know if it returns more to the university than it spends.  It might.  

I don't think that any real student cares a whit about their college's football program, unless they want to play football.  There are always a few locals on the UW team.  But the real question is how much is spent on UW  football and how much does the football team bring in?  I have no idea.

I guess if alumni, and others, who are devoted to UW football spend more and bring more in to the university than the program costs, its' economically justified, in the environment in which universities actually exist.  I think that environment, in regards to football, is debased as the idea that a university coach would make that sort of money is insane, but it's a widely spread insanity.  Likewise, the enter system surrounding college football is crazy, but its a nationwide crazy, not a Wyoming one.

So the question is, does it cost us more than it brings in?

The Axe: UW''s elimination list.

Aeronautical engineering building. . . oops engineering building, at UW.  We've been through this before.

Clearly, UW is in economic dire straits.

Cuts are coming, and the proposed list is out.  I just posted on that, proposing that the list of sixteen victims be expanded to seventeen.

Let's look at the rest of the casualty list.   And while we do, let's keep in mind that UW is the state's only university, and a land grand institution.  I.e., we have to protect what we have, but it has to have some purpose that suits us.

Here's the list:

Bachelor’s degrees recommended for elimination are: American studies, Russian, energy systems engineering, art education, modern language education and technical education.

Master’s degrees recommended for elimination are: French, German, neurosciences, philosophy, food science and human nutrition, sociology, environmental engineering, and adult and postsecondary education.

Ph.D. programs that would be eliminated are: adult and post-secondary education, and statistics.

Some additional cost savings measures are as follows:

The proposal calls for the American Studies Program to be consolidated into a Division of Interdisciplinary Studies, along with the Gender and Women’s Studies Program and perhaps others; the Department of Statistics to merge with the Department of Mathematics; and the departments of Philosophy and Religious Studies to consolidate with similar units. The goal is to achieve efficiencies through shared business and administrative services.

The Science and Mathematics Teaching Center, meanwhile, would be shuttered and reconfigured with a broader role in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) education -- becoming a P-16 STEM education center dovetailing with UW’s science, engineering and education initiatives.

Wow.  Tough list.

Let's look at the bachelors degrees first.

Bachelor’s degrees recommended for elimination are: American studies, Russian, energy systems engineering, art education, modern language education and technical education.

I'll be frank, I've never understood what "American Studies" was and what a student is supposed to do with it.  Law school perhaps?  If that's about it, by all means, give it the axe.  I've long thought that law students were much better off with real degrees rather than ones that only entitled them to go to law school.  What if they don't end up lawyers.

Of course, perhaps I just don't grasp what American Studies is.  But then, that'd be part of the problem.  That's a wise decision.

I suppose "energy systems engineering" is simply a specific application of mechanical engineer, so I guess I'm okay with that.  I'm sad to see Russian go, but I suspect it has very few majors, whih is also sad.  I'm not sure I know what "technical education" is, but I suspect that's  a wise decision as well.

The rest of those, however, look like valid fields of education to me, so I'd urge them to reconsider.

On to the Master Degrees.

Master’s degrees recommended for elimination are: French, German, neurosciences, philosophy, food science and human nutrition, sociology, environmental engineering, and adult and postsecondary education.

Gee, all of these look pretty significant to me.  I guess if nobody is taking them, that's one thing, but again, I'd really urge them to reconsider. Once masters programs are lost, it starts to diminish the entire university and I'm afraid what the implications of this are.

Doctorates:

Ph.D. programs that would be eliminated are: adult and post-secondary education, and statistics.

Same story.  That concerns me.

So I'm worried, I guess, about most of their proposals.  But if stuff must be cut, it must.

I'd encourage them to take a look at things like "American Studies".  I haven't surveyed UW's degree fields, but I really feel that studies that focus on a group or ethnicity are of low practical value to the student, which often comes as a rude shock at the end of the day when they go out for employment.  The classic general degree in Liberal Arts, or in history or a language, including English, likely better serve the student.  Anthropology, for that matter, also serves that end.

And I guess that might also suggest we look at some sacred cows.  Stuff in the athletic department might be a good place to start. And yes, I am a UW grad. What about football? 

Mid Week at Work: The Law Professor

Ellery Cory Stowell, professor of international law at Columbia University and American University, some time between 1915 and 1920.

Posted given as it seems like today I took a shot at this profession, which I really did not.

Advice to the University of Wyoming on elimniating degree fields and programs in this time of budgetary woe. Eliminate the Law School

What?

Are you serious?

Do you seriously propose to eliminate the law school, your alma mater?  Are you insane?

Why yes.  I do, and no I'm not.  

Indeed, shortly after I started thinking this recently, I heard another lawyer, also a UW graduate, with nearly 40 years in suggest the same thing, after the Dean was making his annual tour.  I.e, not only is the question now "why should we give you money", so much as it is "why do you even exist?"

Let's look a the situation objectively.

UW this past week announced that it was considering eliminating sixteen degrees.  According to UW the fields being considered are as follows:

Bachelor’s degrees recommended for elimination are: American studies, Russian, energy systems engineering, art education, modern language education and technical education.

Master’s degrees recommended for elimination are: French, German, neurosciences, philosophy, food science and human nutrition, sociology, environmental engineering, and adult and postsecondary education.

Ph.D. programs that would be eliminated are: adult and post-secondary education, and statistics.

Some additional cost savings measures are as follows:

The proposal calls for the American Studies Program to be consolidated into a Division of Interdisciplinary Studies, along with the Gender and Women’s Studies Program and perhaps others; the Department of Statistics to merge with the Department of Mathematics; and the departments of Philosophy and Religious Studies to consolidate with similar units. The goal is to achieve efficiencies through shared business and administrative services.

The Science and Mathematics Teaching Center, meanwhile, would be shuttered and reconfigured with a broader role in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) education -- becoming a P-16 STEM education center dovetailing with UW’s science, engineering and education initiatives.

So, why not eliminate a seventeenth unneeded obsolete post graduate college, the College of Law?  It's time for it to go, really, as its now obsolete for our state's land grant university, which isn't true of at least some of the fields mentioned above, in my view.

Why would this be true?  Well, with the firm entrenchment of the testing debacle of the Uniform Bar Exam the University of Wyoming College of Law no longer necessary and a waste of money.  What's more, with the current state of the law, just having it is pretty pointless.  Axe the sucker.

Okay, I'm not fully serious, but I am serious that it should, at this point, probably be considered. We can replace it with a different system like we do for doctors or dentists, if we find that we're lacking lawyers around here (unlikely) and we could create a really useful school, like a Veterinary college.  Heck, we could convert the law school into a veterinary college.

Okay, why would I propose such a horrendous fate for my dear old alma mater, the University of Wyoming's cherished College of Law, which educated me in a field that I've worked on for lo' near these three decades, from the flower of my youth to my near decreptude.

Well, because we no longer need it and it serves no useful purpose.  Indeed, at this point its served no useful purposes for several years, since the Un-informed Bar Exam came in, and seeing as there's seemingly no going back, and it doesn't educate for a Wyoming application, it may actually be doing harm by its existence.  

Allow me to explain. 

The University obtained a law school back in the day when each state truly had its own set of laws and there weren't uniform laws in anything.  This is important, as we'll expand on in a moment, but the creation of the law school served, I suspect, another purpose as well.  When it was founded in 1920, the state was really still trying to find a pair of big boy pants.  That is, we were still sort of struggling with the concept that we were a frontier state. A law school sort of showed we'd arrived, maybe.

Maybe that wasn't part of it at all, but rather was because we actually had arrived. We could now educate our own lawyers who served in our own courts, for our own state.

And that's exactly what the UW College of Law did for many years.  Most lawyers you ran into in Wyoming, including the truly famous ones like Gerry Spence, or Dave Freudenthal, etc. ,were graduates of UW's program.  And many of those individuals likely never would have become lawyers but for the UW College of Law.  I don't know how common it is, but I myself applied only to the UW College of Law, not to any other.

But even by the time I went to UW this purpose was waning.  By my graduating class a fair number of students came from elsewhere to attend it, and went elsewhere, typically Colorado (but not always) upon graduating.  So by this period in time, a person could begin to wonder if the College of Law was serving some purpose other than the state's. . . maybe its own really.

Then came the UBE. 

Since the UBE the state has been inundated with out of state lawyers.  I have cases, for example, in which I'm the only resident Wyoming lawyer in them.  This supposedly wasn't going to happen, but not only is it happening, I suspect it will become more and more the trend over the years and at some point in the next decade the areas of the law outside of local civil, practice for public entities, and divorce will pretty much be the domain of out of state lawyers.

Which brings up one of the reasons that the UW College of Law existed.  Since our law is unique, it gave you an advantage to go there in terms of taking our state bar exam, and it gave you an advantage in actually practicing law here.

Now, neither of those things is true.

It isn't that our law has become uniform, far from it. And it isn't that the UBE is letting out of state lawyers know what our law is, in my experience they continue to act as if the law from their state applies in ours. Rather, our bar exam no longer features Wyoming law and the law school, from what I hear, isn't focusing on it.

Indeed, at least based upon what I told, after I graduated an era came in which the law school, whose professors are by and large not Wyoming lawyers either, at least in a true sense, told students that they weren't focusing on Wyoming law.  Indeed, that would not have served their self conceived notion of being a competing national school.  Princeton's law school doesn't focus on the law of New Jersey, for example, I'm quite sure.  So that decision made short sighted sense.

And, in fact, when a later UW President attempted to make the College of Law's special focus on energy law, something that made sense during the boom but for which we perhaps might be grateful for its failure post bust, there was a College of Law revolt against it. This seemed to include the students who argued that such a transition would deprive them of the ability to focus on local law, which might be true if the school was focusing on that itself.  I get the point, but perhaps it wasn't evident to the students that a school that eschews a regional law focus, let alone a state focus, becomes just one more national school.

And we don't need it.

There are a lot of law schools around.  So many that many are failing.  And if you get no advantage other than cost savings, what other point is there to having it.

UW doesn't have a medical school, dental school, or veterinary school.  Now, it'd be true that there's a lot more lawyers than dentists, doctors, or veterinarians, but that's part of the point.  Now we not only have the in state practitioners but a lot of out of state ones practicing here as well.  So do we really need a school which will encourage people to enter such a flooded area?

Wouldn't it make more sense, at this point, to approach the field of law like we do the field of medicine and simply make arrangements with out of state law schools, which are hurting for applicants, so that our residents can go to them at an instate tuition rate.  It's worked for other professional fields, it'd work for law, particularly when attending UW's College of Law affords no real advantage anymore.  Indeed, part of the mission of the law school, in its view, is to draw in students from elsewhere most of whom go elsewhere.

Perhaps, therefore, it's time to take a page out of Alaska's book. Alaska's population is about the same as ours and it has no law school.  Rather, it has made arrangements with at least one other school to act as that school for Alaska's students who wish to study law.  Sadly, UW sort of saw itself in that role, I'd note, but didn't become that school, for whatever reason.

Now, are there counter arguments for this?  Of course there are. For one thing, the school's been around for a long time so while its hurting, it is established.  And going there does mean that the students are likely in contact with local practitioneres, which might give them an advantage in getting a job. And it means that those who want to study law here might not have to leave their home states to do that.

Balanced against that, graduates are entering a crowded field in which lawyers from surrounding states are now part of their competition, so they might not end up here anyway, or might not end up in the field they hoped (although that's always been common).  Maybe we're even at the point where it might not really be a good idea to give students false hopes by having an entire college dedicated to a field of study that's rapidly declining in terms of employbility due to market saturation and technological change.

Of course, none of this would be as fully true of Wyoming, which has unique law, had a unique bar exam, which would also serve to protect the interest of the state's citizens.

Seems like we had that at one time. . . . 

Well, it's often said that "you can't go home again". Well, you can.  You just have to want to.

  

The Cheyenne Leader for September 21, 1916. State Troops Expect Orders

During this week Wyoming would receive visits from both William Jennings Bryan and Charles Everett Hughes.  Included in the big news, however, was that the Wyoming National  Guard was expected to go to the border.

At some point, the motive is obvious.

This morning as I came up the stairs, The Today Show (which I don't watch) was on, and the topic was something about determining the motive of Ahmad Khan Rahami in his attempted terrorist bombings in New York a couple of days ago.

Okay, I understand its important to look at where he went and who he was in contact with, but at some point this becomes surreal.  His motive is pretty darned clear.

However, because we live in a society that is so pluralistic that its reduced tolerance to absolute acceptance, the endless pondering of "oh why would anyone do this" will, of course, go on.

The Wyoming Tribune for September 20, 1916: Villa in Chihuahua

World War One in the East took the big headline for Cheyenne's other newspaper, but Villa in Chihuahua showed up as well, a couple of days after the other Cheyenne newspaper reported on the raid. This report had a different character, however.

Oil also showed up on the front page, as did a population predication, not the largest from the state's early history, that shows that it was made during a booming economy.  A horse at the sold at auction was celebrated at the Natrona County Fair.

Monday at the Bar: Courthouses of the West: Frank E. Moss Federal Courthouse and United States Courthouse for the District of Utah

Courthouses of the West: Frank E. Moss Federal Courthouse and United States Courthouse for the District of Utah, Salt Lake City.

Built in 1931, the last year of the Hoover Administration, this classic courthouse is nestled in downtown Salt Lake City.   The current name is much more recent, coming from a long serving Utah Senator who retired in 1977.

Just behind this classic revival style courthouse is a large modern office building which is the current United States Courthouse for the District of Utah, which has the local nickname of the "Borg Cube" due to its modern architecture, and in obvious reference to the characters from Star Trek.  That also forms a fairly effective commentary on what the public thinks of modern style courthouses, so I don't need to add to that, and could hardly do so more effectively.

Detail from the Frank E. Moss Courthouse

While most of the court's functions have moved to the new courthouse, the old one continues to house the bankruptcy court.

Sunday Morning Scene: Churches of the West: Church of the Living God, Sheridan Wyoming

Churches of the West: Church of the Living God, Sheridan Wyoming:

I don't know anything about this church, but it's an older structure.

Poster Saturday: Tournee du Chat Noire

Theophile Steinlen's famous poster for Rodolphe Salis' cabaret show the Chat Noir.

Cheyenne State Leader for September 17, 1916. The Wyoming Guard to the border, and Villas raid on Chihuahua

The Wyoming National  Guard is ordered to the border.  On the same day, showing how initial news reports might not be fully accurate, the Villista raid on Chihuahua was reported as a defeat, when in reality, it was not.  A better question would have been how a force that had been down to 400 men just a few weeks prior now had many times that number.

9/11 Fifteen Years On, How Are We Doing?

As is well known, on September 11, 2001, the United States endured an attack by Al Qaeda, an organization that was dedicated to the Wannabe sect of Sunni Islam, and which dreamt of the restoration of an Islamic Caliphate, someday.

Since that date, the United States has been continually at war, to some degree. Sometimes more, sometimes less, but never not.  Iraq was invaded by the US in what may perhaps be regarded as an undeclared war, even though there was no clear connection, and indeed no connection, between the Wannabe jihadist and the secular Baathist Iraqi state that we defeated.  U.S. forces entered government-less Afghanistan and drove out the Taliban, the Islamic Punjabi Sunni movement allied to Al Qaeda, which is and was principally Arabic.  The war in Afghanistan continues on with the Taliban struggling to remain and return, fighting against an Afghan government we support.  In Iraq, the defeat of Saddam Hussein's Baathist dictatorship resulted in a civil war between Al Qaeda allies who evolved into ISIL or ISIS, depending upon which term you prefer.  Initially defeated that group regrouped and came back in such force that it occupied large sections of Iraq and neighboring Syria and changed Al Qaeda's goal of an eventually restoration of a Sunni Caliphate to an immediate restoration of one, one which indeed it declared to be in present existence.

War is never predictable, and it was not a war that we wanted or started. But a war none the less. So the question remains?  How have we done, and how are we doing?

Prologue:  How did we even get here?

Before we look at the question, at some point it's worth asking how we got here in the first place.

I'd note, on that, that often during war it's not healthy, nor necessary, to really ask that question. Was it necessary on December 7, 1941, to ask how it was that the Japanese Imperial Navy had launched an air raid on Pearl Harbor?  I think not.  The moral imperative at that time was to address Japanese aggression, not debate  the  history of the Japanese since Admiral Perry.  This question, however, might be necessary to answer now, given that he war has lasted so long, and it's been unique in some ways.

 

Indeed, this was the moral imperative at the time.  Folks wanting to debate and discuss the history of Japan since the US opened it up would have been well off the mark at hte time.

And I use the term "the war" advisably.  Others might not, and some of them advisable as well.  And that gets, I suppose, to part of the point here. We're in a war with a certain world outlook, and we were before September 11, 2001.  We had been at war with it probably since some point in the 1990s perhaps, or at least for a year with the attack on the USS Cole in October 1990. Be that as it may, perhaps we were not incorrect in not realizing that, and indeed for those who would argue that viewing this as other as a war is a better option are not without their point.

To really look at the roots of this we need to go way back, and indeed we should do that if we are to understand the nature of the enemy that attacked us.

Americans in particular, and Westerners in general, have a hard time with conceptualizing the war we are in, and its probable length (Europeans less so) as our world outlook is so different from other cultures, which is to say that the European and European American outlook is distinctly Christian. Even non Christian's in the West have a Christian outlook on the world, and it's fair to say that their outlook is both Catholic and catholic in a larger sense.  That's due to our history and the remaining impact of it, even though we dimly perceive that.

As a result of that our culture emphasizes the concept of all men being equal in nature, free will, and indeed as an aspect of that, free choice. Additionally, the Hellenic nature of early Christianity (most, maybe all, of the early Gospels were written in Greek, contrary to what some commonly believe,  and the version of the Jewish writings commonly cited by the New Testament, which we call the "Old Testament", was the Septuagint, a Greek translation of those texts.) caused much of the Hellenic world view to be incorporated into Christianity.  At least some Christian theorists have maintained that this was far from accidental, but rather Providential, in that Christ's appearance in the Middle East came at the point at which Greek thought and the Greek language was common in the region.

Other cultures and non Christian religions, however, do not have this wort of world outlook and Islam does not.  This reflects its early history.  Indeed, early in its post Muhammad history there was a struggle between a Hellenized branch of Islam and the rest of it, with the Hellenized branch loosing.  When people cite to early Muslim theologians who take a world outlook similar to our own they often fail to note that those who held that view fell more than a little out of favor, and aren't looked upon by Muslims today as influential.

Now, the early history that I'll give here is certainly not one that a Muslim is likely to give, but it's the one that's most likely correct, and it is the source of the problems that Islam has in its relationship to the modern world today.

Much of the really early history if Islam is poorly known.  Unlike Christianity, which spread enormously rapidly and which had foundational writings nearly immediately after Christ's Crucifixion, Islamic texts, including the version of the Koran now used, seem to have had about a three century or so gap before their appearance following Muhammad's death. For that reason, there's a lot we don't know about Muhammad or early Islam, unlike Christianity which has an early history that's extremely well documented (although many Christians are wholly ignorant of it).  Even Muhammad's real name is a mystery, as the world "Muhammad" is almost certainly a title, not a name.  The first depiction of him, coming on a coin, shows a figure with a miter and a cross, and that provides quite a clue as to who he likely really was.

Young Muhammad encountering a Christian monk in his youth.  In Islamic tradition the monk predicted his mission as a prophet, but what's more likely is that this demonstrates an exposure by the illiterate Muhammad to Christian theology very early on.  Christianity itself took no note of Islam until well after Muhammad's death at which time it was noted simply as another Middle Easter heresy, which it no doubt was.

At the time of its first appearance Islam was treated as a Christian heresy, as that's almost certainly what it actually was.  Muhammad, who was illiterate, was married to a Christian woman before he started his proselytiziation.  She had an uncle who was a Gnostic priest.  Chances are very high that Muhammad was a Gnostic through these influences.

Depiction of Khadīja bint Khuwaylid, Muhammad's first wife, who died in 619.  Twelve more wives would follow.  She was a  Christian and in Islamic tradition converted to her husband's new faith. But what was that faith?  Chances are high that an infant Islam was more Christian than the religion that exists today, but probably in a Gnostic from.  Indeed, its easy to see how the illiterate Muhammad could have taken the basic Gnostic message and added a few elements to come out with a heretical evolution of Gnostism, which itself was a heresy.

Indeed, he may have never ceased being one, as we know little about what he actually did from direct contemporary sources. But assuming that this is not the case, what he seems to have been is an example of a Christian preacher who was poorly educated and who began to reinterpret his religion heavily, or began to excuse personal vices as allowed behavior. This is not an atypical story.  In Muhammad's case, moreover, the gap between his actions and the writings concerning them is sufficiently long so that his teachings, whatever they were, may have evolved in the meantime, perhaps considerably.  We could think of him, in this sense, of being somewhat like Rasputin, whom people often imagine to have been a Russian Orthodox monk, but who in fact was not ordained and was simply a layman with a self declared religious mission.

Muhammad, veiled, advances on Mecca.  The residents of Mecca, a town with was home to a wide variety of religions, were not keen on Muhammad when they first encountered him.

This combined would explain why some aspects of Islam closely mirror Christian teachings, including some that closely mirror Gnostic beliefs in circulation at the time, while some radically depart from them.  It would also explain why so much of Islam it self seems self contradictory in some aspects.  Islam both praises peace and advocates war, but in the context of Muhammad's own experiences this makes sense.  Proselytizing, at first unsuccessfully, in the Arabian Peninsula and suffering as a result, when he returns with followers they were armed and charged was a holy mission. Finding themselves far from home and their wives, he found that the taking of female slaves was just fine.  Finding himself personally attracted to multiple women, rather than carry the cross of the attraction, he found it sanctioned.  Finding women in general problematic, he placed most of them in Hell in the afterlife.  Finding lust a personal cross in his lifetime, he found that it would be perpetually satisfied in the afterlife.  Had he not encountered difficulties of the type he did, and had he not gone into the Arabian peninsula, probably originally simply as a Gnostic lay minister, he probably would have simply been a nameless forgotten Gnostic, and to some extent he actually may be.  The beliefs now attributed to him may, in fact, not have been so fully, and some would say not at all.

At any rate, that early history does indeed charge Islam with license to act violently in its name, and to dominate over everything where it exists.  It expanded by the sword.

But it hasn't always acted fully in that way, and it doesn't act fully in that way everywhere now.

It did early on, as it spread.  Distinctly different from Christianity, it spread by the sword and nearly exclusively by that means.  Where it came to conquer it frequently didn't succeed in converting for centuries.  Christian communities in remote North Africa held out for nearly a millennia after it came to politically dominate t here.  It spread by violent means all the way until the armed progress of Islam was arrested at Vienna in 1529, by which time the Protestant Reformation had already commenced.  Had the Ottoman's not been turned at Vienna, Europe would now be Islamic without question.  Further to the West, however, Islam had already been turned back, starting much earlier with the Battle of Tours and, in 1492, by the final reconquest of the last remaining Islamic principality in Spain.

It's worth recalling, which is rarely done now, that by and large Islamic occupation of Christian lands was never pleasant for Christians. While its frequently noted that Muhammad called these people the "People of the Book", in apparently reference to the Old Testament, they were definitely not equals, merely tolerated. Subject to punitive taxation and less than third class citizens, they endured for centuries, but never in pleasant circumstances.  In a few locations, notably Iraq, Turkey Syria, Iran, Lebanon, Palestine and Egypt, they endured into current times, sometimes doing well, and other times not so much.

But Islam quit expanding in 1529.  And Europeans started expanding their world in the 1600s.  And a much different sort of situation took place.

From the 1600s through the mid 20th Century Europeans came to dominate an increasingly large expanse of the globe, including many Muslim nations.  Europeans never reconquered (which is what it would have been) Turkey the seat of the Ottoman Empire, but they came to essentially occupy or influence much of the rest of the Islamic world save for the Arabian Peninsula itself, which they did not attempt to take in any fashion.  And in Turkey, the forces of secularism itself came to displace Islam up until very recently.

This provides an interesting counter story.  From the 1600s Islam was in retreat, but not in the face of Christian expansion, but in the face of European economic expansion. European colonialism was not religiously motivated, but motivated by financial interests.  While Christian missionaries typically followed in the wake of European colonialism, they were never the motivation for it, and indeed in the case of the French, they actually reflected a bit of a counter culture to the dominant secularism of the French republics.  This is hugely significant to our story as while Christian missionaries were enormously successful in most places that Europeans conquered, in North Africa and the Middle East they met with little success, which is further interesting when its recalled that in much of this region a a remnant of Catholic or Orthodox Christianity remained, as well as a remnant of Oriental Judaism.  Indeed, that may be why it did not succeed, as it was not the case that anything new was really being introduced and lines had hardened long ago.

Beyond that, however, while the opposite is commonly assumed by snotty moderns, by and large in the 19th and 20th Centuries European colonial powers not only did not sponsor missionary activity they didn't accord any advantage to those who converted, and that also likely played a role in what occurred, as we will see.  In the case of hte English, moreover, that was always true.  The United Kingdom itself was distinctly anti Catholic in its early colonial period, but at least as of point at which it acquired Quebec it never acted on that.  Indeed, it was remarkably tolerant of every Faith in the regions in which it ruled.  18th Century France and Spain did combine a missionary aim with their colonial enterprises but they'd stopped doing that by the 19th Century and, after the French Revolution, French missionaries, while they were taking advantage of the French presence, were often out of sync with their own governments.  Everywhere the Europeans ruled missionaries had the ability to go, and the advantage of legal protection, but by and large they had very little, if any, state assistance.  And converts were not given an advantage in local administration.

European missionaries were often spectacularly successful in this era in many places, but what's notable about that is that the conversions were highly genuine, which likely explains why in many places today the Christian churches are highly vibrant.  Unlike conversions under the Caliphates to Islam, there wasn't an advantage to be gained by converting, however, during the period of high European colonialism of the 19th and 20th Centuries.  In the Middle East, the British and the French had the policy of being tolerant towards all the native religions and protecting them, and affording all of them roughly equal opportunities in colonial administration, keeping in mind that in many instances these roles were definitely inferior to those afforded to Europeans. Given that, the opportunities and the prejudices were pretty much equally doled out on an ethnic, but not a religious, line.  So in a place like the Middle East, which had a very long existing Christian and Jewish minority, there wasn't a big reason for Muslims to convert other than religious ones. That's to the European's credit, but it forms part of the background to the complicated story.

What did take root, however, was European political thought, but oddly, that part that took was the highly radicalized variation.  As the local populations developed politically and began to have nationalist yearnings they tended to gravitate towards European political extremes, which welcomed them.  That this occurred is highly understandable as the European mainstream was large tolerant of, or supportive of, colonialism.  So, in looking to break the chains with their colonial masters, they tended to integrate with the extreme forces at work.  Communism, socialism and fascism all found their expressions in Middle Eastern nationalist movements.  Very significantly for us today, all of these forces were very secular and in fact many of them were quite hostile to Islam, which they saw as a force that would hold their populations back from reaching the political state they sought. So, when revolutionary movements broke out in the Middle East in the 30s through the 60s, they were not Islamist as a rule.

Which doesn't mean traditional Islam went away.  Rather, when oppressed by authoritarian forces, it went underground.  Always part of the culture, it did not go away so much as it became a subversive force.  It did so in Egypt, Iran, Algeria and Syria.  While westernized, which is to say secular but authoritarian governments, sought to  create new, Europeanized, Middle Eastern countries, they suppressed and repressed any other force, including the hard edge of Islam.

During the Cold War this did not perhaps matter much.  With the entire world seemingly at play, secular forces in the Middle East benefited from Superpower sponsorship that allowed them to seem both permanent and dominant.  The alignments themselves were more than a bit bizarre, however, as Middle Eastern politically totalitarian regimes tended to receive Soviet support, while traditional authoritarian, and what few democratic regimes there were, received Western support.  So, governments such as Nasser's in Egypt or the Baath regime in Syria tended to be backed by the Soviets, even though their ideology could not be described as communistic.  Regimes like that of the Saudis (which the British actually plotted to depose in the 1950s) received Western support even though they were no more democratic than that of the Baathist. 

Gamal Abdel Nasser Hussein, leader of Egpyt in the 1950s and 1960s.  Personally an observant Muslim, his government wasn't a theocracy

This continued through the 1960s but by the 1970s it began to break down as alignments began to change. At the same time, suppressed Islamic forces began to emerge demonstrating the age old situation that minority movements tend to gain support where suppressed, but in a malignant form.  In the 1970s they became strong enough to topple the Western backed government in Iran and they began to challenge the military dictatorship in Egypt and the Baath regime in Syria.  The success of the Iranian revolution, in and of itself, greatly boosted Islamist movements everywhere in the Middle East.

 Leaders of Algeria's FLN, the movement that successfully expelled the French from Algeria. Every one was no doubt at least nominally a Muslim, but it wasn't that which motivated them but rather Algerian nationalism.

By the 1980s there were very serious, and seriously radical, Islamist movements throughout the Middle East all of which looked towards a highly traditional interpretation of the religion.  By that time they'd taken a run at the government in Syria, assassinated Anwar Sadat in Egypt, and threatened the governments in Algeria and Tunisia.  And they'd made the sectarian strife in Lebanon an added nightmare. All of this was regarded as serious in nature, but as a regional problem.  They were regarded more, for example, as a threat to Israel and oil exportation than as an outright threat to the United States itself.  Elsewhere, the civil war in Afghanistan that had broken out over the communist government's alignment with the USSR, which in turn had resulted in a Soviet invasion that would fail, left that country with a provisional government ruled as a radical Islamic theocracy.  That development destabilized democracy in neighboring Pakistan, which had showed promise in that direction up until then.

Then came the First Gulf War.

The First Gulf War and the changing of the game.

An odd feature of wars is that looking back they appear inevitable, but really only because they actually occurred.  Looking at them in context, it's frankly amazing that some of them actually happened.  The Vietnam War, for example, strikes me particularly that way.  An American war in a region of the globe we had no traditional interest in.  Pretty unlikely.  But it happened none the less.

So too with the First Gulf War.

 U.S. armor during the First Gulf War.

That war was about oil, that's easy to say, but not in the greedy sense we so often like to imagine. The dynamics of it were simple.  Saddam Hussein lead his country into an invasion of neighboring Kuwait.  It wasn't the first time Iraq had tried that.  It was a pure territorial land grab.  It's clear that the Western powers couldn't allow that to occur.  Iraq was a fascistic state and unstable.  Kuwait was a stable monarchy aligned with  the West.  Iraq would be pushed out, and it was.

The problem rapidly became what to do with Iraq, and the George Bush I administration decided to basically leave it in place, but restrained.  I have been critical of this in the past, but that was probably the correct call.  It was fascistic, but it was not Islamist, and it was a buffer state for the Middle East against Islamist Iran, which detested it, and which it detested.  Liberal revolutionary movements attempted to overthrow the Baath government as it started to loose the war, but we did not support them.  In retrospect, that was likely the correct course.

In order to take Kuwait back it was necessary to stage our forces, and those of the other western allies, in Saudi Arabia.  Even though the Saudis were threatened they understood the difficulties that this placed them in.  Much less stable than they would appear, the Saudi monarchy is one of the most repressive regimes on earth.   A Wannabe monarchy, in effect, like Franco's Spain it has not been afraid to suppress even the forces that support it and which brought it to power, on its own soil. Repression of real political movements and other religions other than the Sunni branch of Islam (and there are other religions that are there, and have long been) is extreme.  The Saudis feared what having Western soldiers on their soil would mean.

But they had to allow it, and it occurred.

It might be noted here that there should be a real question as to whether the American lead effort in the Gulf War, which I think was necessary, was legal.  Iraq's invasion of Kuwait was an act of war.  Our participation in the retaking of Kuwait was also a war.  No Declaration of War was made.  As this was more than a local police action, and this wasn't in the nature of our supporting an established government, such as the Vietnam War, so a Declaration of War appears, at least to me, to have been legally necessary.

Be that as it may, we quickly won that war but some US forces remained in Saudi Arabia.  And in that country, amongst hard core Islamic adherents, in a land where Wannabeism had long been sponsored, it sparked outrage.  Women in uniform, even restrained Western behavior, Christians on Saudi soil, it was all more than they could tolerate.

This gave rise to the Al Qaeda war on the United States.

Caliphatist war on the West

Al Qaeda arose in the Arabian Peninsula as a movement that really did not vary greatly from Wannabeism.  It was an extreme form of Sunnism, and indeed it likely would have been regarded as heretical had Saudi Arabia not long sponsored Wannabeism.  The difference, perhaps, between the officially extreme version of Sunni Islam and Islam as viewed by Al Qaeda is that Al Qaeda looked to the reestablishment of the Caliphate and the utlimate creation of a global Sunni monarchy.  Not immediately, as even it, as illusionary as its goal clearly is, recognized that it could not bring that about overnight.

 The black flag of the Wahhabi combatants that brought the House of Saud to power.  The Islamic State has its own black flag.

 

 The green flag of Saudi Arabia.

As an extremist movement at war with the West, it could have no home in Saudi Arabia, and soon it became repressed there, but not before it had already struck at the U.S. Navy in the form of the attack on the USS Cole.  From then on it, and closely aligned movements, would strike at the US whenever they could. The September 11, 2001 attack on the United States was when we really took notice of it, however.

 Damage from the October 12, 2000 attack on the USS Cole.  It's interesting to note that we widely remember September 11, 2001, for obvious reasons, but the opening shot had been fired on October 12 of the prior year.

By that time it had entrenched itself in Afghanistan for the simple reason that it was welcome there.  That was already well known to us, and therefore the war in Afghanistan would become an inevitability after the September 11, 2001 attacks.  It had to be.  Afghanistan was effectively a country without a government that harbored a vile terrorist organization.

The second war against Iraq, however, didn't have to be.  Indeed, again in retrospect, it didn't make sense and it was a mistake.  Highly secular Baathist Iraq had no love for Al Qaeda and Al Qaeda despised it, claiming that the Baathist were "Communist". 

Again, as an aside, the second war against Iraq was clearly an illegal war given that it was an invasion of that country and it required a Declaration of War that was never asked for.  The war in Afghanistan, however, was different.  Lacking a legal government of any kind, the lawless nation could not really be regarded as at war, so much as in anarchy, and our role there, while certainly a war in terms of what it entailed, was not legally one.

So where are we at?

Following September 11 we were a united country. So much so that the country supported an invasion of Iraq in spite of there being no real reason at the time to do it.  In our minds, the war there blended with the one in Afghanistan.  It was all one effort.

We removed the Taliban from control of Afghanistan and crushed Al Qaeda there.  But we must admit that the country remains very unstable and the Taliban has managed to somewhat regroup and remains a threat.  So, after fifteen years, we really haven't completed that job and we speak fairly routinely about simply leaving the country.  Typical American short attention span has kicked in, apparently. Forgetting what Afghanistan can be, we choose to pretend the country is ungovernable, rather than press for the end of the job.  That the country can be stabilized should not be doubted, as it has been a stable country in periods of its past.  The question is whether we choose to complete the job or not.  Right now, in spite of commemorating fifteen years past, its doubtful that we will.

Our war in Iraq massively destabilized Mesopotamia and our bungling of that has in turn brought about a disaster.  As the Baath regime collapsed Al Qaeda moved in and a new war commenced.  That religious war was successfully concluded by making alliances with Sunni chieftains, but not before Al Qaeda in Iraq had evolved into the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant, a new strain of the same movement which determined to bring about t he Caliphate right now, thereby taking the delusion into the presence.  Biding its time, it struck after we prematurely pulled out of an Iraq whose civil government fully aligned itself with the Shiia's of Iran and thereby made itself massively unpopular with the Sunnis.  Taking advantage of destabilization in Syria, and the isolation of that regime, it rose up with success there by taking advantage of an existing rebellion and then spread it self into Iraq, where it remains.  The tide does seem to be turning against it, but it has a lot of fight left in it yet.

The problem is, however, that ISIL, while declaring the Caliphate in existence right now, has changed Al Qaeda's "strike at the west" strategy to a new one, which basically amounts to strike everywhere, with everybody.  It has appealed ti Muslims in the Middle East, Central Asia, and the West with an amazing degree of success, and its organization is so loose that it can effectively take credit for barbarities that stretch from Iraq to Florida.  We are so stunned by this that we can hardly effectively recognize that its a fact, preferring to rationalize and excuse the attacks that come closest to us.

An Existential War

We're so accustomed to thinking of war in territorial terms, and ultimately all war is about territory, that we have not been able to really grasp that the current war is for all the territory, everywhere.  Indeed, in real terms this war shares that feature with the long struggle with Communism.  We face an enemy that conceives of itself having a global mission.  Unlike the Communist, however, it also conceives of that struggle in a sort of eternal terms that can withstand the loss of territory, which the Communist never did, fearing that territory lost was lost for ever.

To use the terms so often applied to the Vietnam War, this is somewhat of a war for "hearts and minds".  We and our enemy conceive of it in that fashion, but they further conceive of it as a war against Devine Good and evil. We may talk of good and evil in this war, but our leaders have a very immediate and sometimes washed out concept of that means.  Our enemies don't.  They are charged with a world outlook that's definiative and vast.  It appeals to people who look for meaning in their lives.  In order to defeat them, if we are to, we have to have a cogent world view as well.

But do we?

Earlier on this blog I've argued that we do not, and I'll argue it here again.

I'll also note that this was not always the case for us.

Here's one of the places I recently noted the nature of our struggle, although it is not the only one:

We're in a war, whether we like it or not, with a variant of Islam that retains a very, very primitive view of the world and men and women's role in it.  Hardly any of us would agree with the social aspects of our opponents movement, but in opposing it, we actually have to have a point.
We don't have much of one.
Which is why I will say, form time to time, that we could lose the war.
We could, truly, simply because we're fighting for. . . well what is it? The right to wear pants that are too tight? The right for men to self identify as gerbils? What was it?
Okay, I know what our core values are, and so do you, but how often does anyone actually think on those core values and where they come from?  Not very often.  But our opponents do.
Indeed, endowed with a strong sense of right, wrong, and the order of the world, even if we don't agree with it, our opponents have been remarkably successful in recruiting simply by using our libertine example as a recruiting too.  And, part of that it might be noted, has been a distressing success rate with Europeans, including European women.
When we think of Islamic extremist groups in Europe, or the US, we tend to think that they're all radicalized Syrians, basically. But that's very far from true.  Some of them are, but others are radicalized first generation Muslims in Europe, and more than a few have been Europeans with no Middle Eastern heritage. What's going on here?
Well, agree with it or not, Islam stands for something. That's much less true of the modern West.
Now, I'm sure people will react that we stand for democracy, and liberty. But do we?
I think we do, but in such an unthinking way that our examples are pretty hollow, as we've forgotten what democracy and liberty, in the modern context, were supposed to mean. They are not the same as social rationalization and libertine.
Indeed, democratic thought is deeply embedded on a concept of the natural rights of man. And the natural rights of man is a principal that stems from the concept of a natural law. Natural law holds that there are certain fundamentals, observable as "self evident", that all people have.  People, although not poorly educated modern lawyers, like that idea as it is self evident and it seems so very fair.
But what is seemingly forgotten in our modern world is that a natural law that recognizes natural rights will care not a wit about an individual's sense of what rights would be, were he creating them. That's something else entirely.  Indeed, that's so debased that its' basically sick.
Natural law credits nature, and if we're to understand what our entire concept of the world, government, liberty and the like is based on, we have to do the same.  We have free will, but we are not free to will what we will. We cannot, that is, create 6 billion individual realities, there is only one.  Everyone's window on that reality will be different, at least somewhat, but that doesn't mean that there's more than one reality, it means that we're too small to grasp the whole.
Anyhow, properly viewed, we believe in individual liberty as we believe that people are endowed with free will. But that means that people are at liberty to act in accordance with the nature and the natural law, but they can't change it.  Nature, and its law, is bigger than we are, and unchanging.
That may seem not to fit in here (and this post is stunningly rambling, I'll admit) but it very much does.  We have looked out at the rest of the world since 1776 and maintained that we are the champions of liberty and justice, as that's part of the natural law. We've sometimes done it badly, but we've done it well enough that we've been a major factor in bringing about a "liberal" sense of the world globally.  We've certainly had the assistance of the the political and philosophical cultures of other European powers in that, even though not all of us have quite the same sense of these things as a national culture.  I'd maintain, however, that down on the street level the overall concepts are not far removed from each other.  That is, the ethos of 1798 may have been the spark of 1917, but at the same time, the average Frenchman, up until mid 20th Century, held views more akin to an Irish tenant farmer than a member of the Parisian mob.
Since 1917, however, that being the returning and focusing of 1798, we've struggled with an opposing view that detests the concept of anything but an animalistic view of our species and which has been largely at war with nature.  In more recent years even though its political expressions have failed, it philosophical ones have not, and since the turmoil of the late 1960s most western political thought, both at home and abroad, has been devoid of any deep meaning.  Long habituated to our political culture, we have not noticed much until recently as it slipped its moorings and became fully devoid of a deep meaning, although many now do sense that, but others have noticed.
In the Islamic world some certainly have, and in a Europe that took in a lot of Muslim immigrants post World War Two, post Colonial retreat, and post Algerian defeat, many residing there, where assimilation is poor, undoubtedly have.  In the years following 1968 a Europe that had grasped that its political and cultural outlook was fully Christian in origin now doesn't know what it even is.  It's for "fairness" and "human rights", but it doesn't know what those concepts are grounded in.  We aren't doing all that much better, although we are doing better, which is frankly why our enemies view us somewhat differently.
For a people who retain a sense of a deep purpose, a larger culture that is grounded on nothing more than "if it feels good, do it", comes across as abhorrent, because it truly is abhorrent.  That it is abhorrent provides the basis for young Europeans, particularly European women, crossing over into the minority culture.  It's notable that more than a few of these women have been Scandinavian or British, as these areas are where the fall is amongst the most expressed.
This doesn't mean, of course, that they're right, and we're wrong, overall.  I'm not urging that we all become radical Muslims and salute the black flag.  Not hardly.  Rather, I'm urging that we take a deep look at the deep things.

And that would mean recognizing that "if we feel good, do it", not only is a moronic philosophy, it's contrary to nature, its contrary to nature's law, and its extremely destructive.  We need, apparently, to get back to where we started from and do some serious thinking.

Our enemy, to put it simply, has a world outlook that looks outside of the world, to an eternal something.  Right now, in the West, we pretty much stand for the proposition of absolute relativism.  The problem with that is not only is it not emotionally satisfying, it's demonstratively false.

There is, very obviously, a set of absolutes as nature exists.  No matter what a person's view is of nature, it doesn't care much about that view.  It is clearly outside of us, and it clearly has its own set of laws.  Early on, and indeed up to very recently, we clearly understood that ourselves.  Now we don't.  This is so much the case that five of the current Supreme Court justices actually believe that the law protects any sexual union as long as it makes individuals feel good.  That's stupid.

And it puts us at a disadvantage against an enemy that recognizes a natural law, even if its a debased version of it.

So, in a war like this, gaining territory will help, but it won't determine the war.  This is a war of ideas. They have some. We have. . . low, low prices and Justice Anthony Love! Kennedy.  We aren't going to win a war based on that.

So, in terms of how we're doing.  Well, we're loosing interest in winning in Afghanistan and Iraq is a mess. We will probably prevail in Iraq, but we have some serious thinking to do. What do we stand for? We need to think about that. We have the high side of the argument, if we don't simply wash it all away.