To much commentary on Anthropology for me not to jump in

Nor is Clausewitz responsible for the smothering political correctness that makes it virtually impossible even to discuss things like the strategic history of Islam. Personally, I am still recovering from the high-pitched institutional whining that ensued when I made remarks on that subject virtually identical to Corn's a few weeks ago at one of the nation's premier institutions for strategic education. And almost every PME effort to discuss the "anthropology" of Islam that I have experienced has immediately degenerated into an utterly irrelevant analysis of the finer points of Koranic theology.
No question in my mind that Clausewitz isn't responsible for the current PC attitudes, and I can certainly understand the "institutional whining" reaction - I see that frequently enough <wry grin>. Without being there, I honestly couldn't say whether the analysis of Koranic theology was irrelevant or not (probably, but there's always a chance it might not have been).

What is to clear to me is that Bassford got trapped in a debate where theologians (broadly construed to include both deistic and non-deistic theologies) set the rules of discourse. I'll admit to engaging in theological debates myself, usually over Port and/or Brandy. They can be a lot of fun, but the true enjoyment in them comes from one fairly simple fact - they have no immediate relevance to the material world. As such, they really should be exlcuded from discussions dealing with immediate, real world activities unless their relevance can be demonstrated.

Corn makes some (seemingly) favorable allusions to the potential value to strategists of understanding modern evolutionary theory (i.e., to Richard Dawkins and his memes). Great stuff! But mention evolutionary theory to a US-government audience and you'll spend the next hour debating the Book of Genesis with folks on the right side of the room; a week later you'll be reading articles by lefties in the Washington Post accusing you of advocating new eugenics laws banning reproduction by racial minorities.
Too true! I remember applying for a position in one US university and being asked if I would give Intelligent Design theory the same weight as Evolutionary Theory. Being 99% sure I wouldn't get the job, and being pretty sickened by the rampant PC attitude of the interviewer, I told her that I would be more than happy to teach a course that included ID theory - along with every other creation myth I was aware of: an "Anthropology of Origin Myths". You can imagine the reaction...

Bassford is also quite right in his comments about Dawkins meme theory - it has a direct relevance to the GWOT. Part of the problem, however, is that he (and the rest of us who use any neo-evolutionary theory) is up against is an institutional reaction within Sociology and, to a lesser extent, Anthropology against anything to do with studying biology in addition to the Genesis crowd. This reaction comes out of a general, post-WWII reaction against the Nazis and their state-sponsored "racial science". The unfortunate problem is that it has, de facto, destroyed a very profitable line of research.

If Bassford really wants to get lambasted in the press by "lefties", he should try integrating Dawkins work with that of Jerome Barkow, Leda Cosmides and John Tooby and, just for fun, toss in the works of Charles Laughlin. Of course, he would also end up with a theoretical model that actually models mediaspace warefare and how it ties in to insurgency warfare. Obviously, this would be too useful to actually get published in any academic setting...

The errors Corn describes originate in American cultural attitudes that certainly do not derive from Clausewitz. Iindeed, it is those cultural attitudes that drive the frequently ludicrous manner in which Clausewitz's ideas are used and taught. Those attitudes will not magically disappear once every copy of On War has been safely burned. If anthropology becomes the new strategic rage, then educators who may be "men of one book" (or even "men of one set of Cliffs notes") will be subjecting students to equally misleading doctrinal discourses on Margaret Mead. (I'm not joking here: Read John Keegan's anthropological absurdities in his A History of Warfare, which are every bit as asinine as his comments on Clausewitz.)
Well, I suspect that the doctrinal discourses would be on Clifford Geertz and Clifford and Marcus, with hermeneutic strategies derived from Foucault, but I can't disagree. Too much of Anthropology teaching has moved towards a non-deistic theology - probably an inevitable consequence of institutional vectors following WWII. On this line, I posted an article that appeared in the Times Higher Education Supplement that is relevant in another thread.

Marc