The asymmetry between the risk to our military and its lethality serves to delegitimize any military undertaking on our part in the eyes of the rest of the world, and to legitimize terrorist activity against us. Every time we destroy another country's military with little risk to our soldiers, we underscore to everyone in the world that terrorism is the only viable oppositional tactic. We didn't lose many soldiers in WWII compared with Germany, Russia, or Japan, but clearly it was a conventional war for all sides in addition to a terror war against civilians.
Wednesday, August 10, 2005
The moral challenge of overwhelming force
Phil makes an excellent point:
Technology and moral progress
Walter Benjamin famously observed in the late 1930s that one of the horrors of technological advance is that it was not accompanied by a similar advance in morals. This disjuncture meant that the physical capacity for executing evil was advancing without parallel growth in humanity's countervailing moral capabilities, thus setting the stage for unimaginable, unprecedent horrors. As with so much else Benjamin wrote, this thesis was thought-provoking -- and also dead wrong.
Matt Yglesias today provides a quite brilliant capsule discussion of how, in fact, the massive advance in the destructive capacity of the military has been paralleled by an advance in moral sensibilities about the application of these capacities -- to the fury, of course, of the Barbarous Right. I quote at length:
Thus it happens that these so-called conservatives arrive, irony of ironies, at the old Rousseavian paradox about "forcing men to be free." And we know where that sort of reasoning leads: to the guillotine, to the gulag, and now to Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo. And just as the argument that there were many perfidious aristocrats in ancien regime France doesn't justify the Terror, so the argument that there are many terrorists in the Middle East or Iraq will not justify Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo in the eyes of history.
Matt Yglesias today provides a quite brilliant capsule discussion of how, in fact, the massive advance in the destructive capacity of the military has been paralleled by an advance in moral sensibilities about the application of these capacities -- to the fury, of course, of the Barbarous Right. I quote at length:
As Henry Farrell points out, there's a deeply nasty disconnect between neo-cons' purported aims and methods -- it's a position with a venerable pedigree that was perhaps most famously expressed by the Vietnam captain who claimed he had to destroy a village in order to save it. Yglesias is right that the willingness (perhaps even the desire) to apply barbarous force underpins the thinking of the "retreat forward" (or "Tehran, ho!") crowd. They respond to the rejection of our campaign to allegedly liberate the Middle East from its own oppressive forces by arguing that we need to apply more and more force.It's very hard to see what moral principle could condemn the means by which Hiroshima and Nagasaki were destroyed that wouldn't also condemn earlier actions (Dresden, Tokyo) that had the same object -- wholesale devastation of civilian populations -- albeit accomplished by cruder methods. Ultimately, the question of whether we should condemn the strategic bombing writ large or not strikes me as an issue that's almost too momentous to resolve. Truman, FDR, and Churchill lived in what was, despite Grand Theft Auto, an almost unimaginably more brutal era than our own. A time when the "good" side in a war could be composed of a global empire and a apartheid quasi-democracy working in alliance with Joseph Stalin. And they really were the good side, because the enemy was just that bad. And not just almost absolutely malign, but (unlike, say, your latter-day sub-Saharan genocidaires) genuinely threatening and capable. So what to say about it all?
The important thing, I think, is to be clear-eyed about the nature of the allied victory and just how at odds the means by which it was achieved sit with our contemporary moral standards in order to avoid drawing facile lessons. Before the current war, the alleged feasibility of reconstructing Iraq along liberal, democratic, pro-American lines was often bolstered with reference to the post-war occupations of Germany and, especially, Japan. In days, months, and years to come the school of thought which holds that our failures in Iraq are primarily failures of technique rather than failures of the concept will doubtless make recourse to similar analogies. The differences, of course, are and always were extremely large. Strategic bombing, however, seems especially salient. Not only did this entail massive destruction, but it implicitly threatened worse. The point was not merely that cities had been destroyed but that we would keep on destroying them unless and until a surrender was on the table. Combined with blockade, strategic bombing constituted a threat of near-total annihilation of the Japanese population -- that's the sort of thing that makes an impression on people.
Needless to say, thanks to technological improvement it would only be easier nowadays for the United States military to defeat adversaries through such tactics. But technological improvements have also made it much easier to accomplish the reverse. Today's bombs (and, for that matter, artillery) are by no means incapable of going astray and killing some civilians. But compared to those of the 1940s they are vastly more precise and targetable. It now is possible to do enormous damage to military targets while mostly sparing civilian ones, and for that reason it seems incumbent upon us to try and do it. And while we don't always do it as well as one might like, we do do things very differently from how Curtis LeMay and Bomber Harris did them.
We could vaporize Falluja, Ramadi, and all the rest tomorrow if we wanted to without any real difficulty. But we don't. Because we don't want to. Because it would be wrong.
And good for us. But people need to seriously consider the possibility that such moral constraints place real limits on what can -- and should -- be accomplished through force of arms. The methods morally available to us are very good at destroying an enemy's weaponry, but not so good at utterly wrecking his country, his worldview, his spirit. Max Boot thinking along similar lines last week went horribly awry:
Does this make us more enlightened than the "greatest generation"? Perhaps. We certainly have the luxury of being more discriminating in the application of violence. But even today, there is cause to doubt whether more precision is always better. During the initial invasion of Iraq in 2003, the U.S. was so sparing in its use of force that many Baathists never understood they were beaten. The butcher's bill we dodged early on is now being paid with compound interest.This sort of thing needs to be called what it is -- barbarism of the most repugnant sort. The mask here has slipped, and not for the first time, from the allegedly humanitarian nature of the mission in Iraq. What was arguably justifiable in pursuit of a war of self-defense at a time when existing technology did not offer many alternatives is most certainly not justifiable as a war of choice undertaken in the name of idealism at a time when the techniques of war provide us with options.
But here we face the central paradox of humanitarian warfare. Our new, more humane techniques are perfectly adequate to meeting purely military objectives. Destroy a tank. Destroy an airbase. Destroy a missile silo. A weapons lab. A communications center. They are not, however, nearly so good at achieving what one might call the humanitarian fringe benefits that accrued following the Allied victory. But to use mass slaughter of civilians as a technique of humanitarian warfare is absurd, repulsive, and unacceptable. [Boldface added.]
Thus it happens that these so-called conservatives arrive, irony of ironies, at the old Rousseavian paradox about "forcing men to be free." And we know where that sort of reasoning leads: to the guillotine, to the gulag, and now to Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo. And just as the argument that there were many perfidious aristocrats in ancien regime France doesn't justify the Terror, so the argument that there are many terrorists in the Middle East or Iraq will not justify Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo in the eyes of history.
Katherine Harris video
Check out this truly frightening video of Katherine Harris talking about her plan to run for the Senate in Florida. Harris is a bit of an easy mark, it's true, but whereas in 2000 whe came off as merely stupid and partisan, this performance shows something completely new and far more disturbing.
I don't know exactly how to describe it, but her bodily affect is just massively weird. It's something like what you'd expect from a homely college girl, three drinks brave and coming onto the captain of the football team in a bar. She's kinda moving back and forth, standing at an angle so you can get a good sense of the rack, speaking in nonsequitors that are aimed at conveying confidence but actually communicate the opposite. "Unprofessional" doesn't begint to capture the deep weirdness of the thing -- it's even weirder than the Novak incident last week.
I don't know exactly how to describe it, but her bodily affect is just massively weird. It's something like what you'd expect from a homely college girl, three drinks brave and coming onto the captain of the football team in a bar. She's kinda moving back and forth, standing at an angle so you can get a good sense of the rack, speaking in nonsequitors that are aimed at conveying confidence but actually communicate the opposite. "Unprofessional" doesn't begint to capture the deep weirdness of the thing -- it's even weirder than the Novak incident last week.
Monday, August 08, 2005
Abbie Hoffman was wrong
I was sitting in a cafe in the Haight the other night and I noticed a poster on the wall that had a long quote from Abbie Hoffman's commencement address to Vanderbilt University in 1989. He said,
As has been quoted to death, this White House believes very much that "it matters who sits in the Oval Office." They believe that the notion of responding to the will of the people -- or any other inconvenient factoid -- is "not the way the world really works anymore. We're an empire now, and when we act we create our own reality." Well, Scooter, we'll see, we'll see.
Moreover, don't forget that this regime is interested in "creating its own reality" not just (in fact, not even mainly) in Iraq, but also (mainly) in reversing all the other historic "realities" created by the cultural advances of the 1960s that Hoffman was so smug about a decade and a half ago.
Now that domestic support for the war has headed into Vietnam-like numbers, we're about to find out if Hoffman was right in claiming you can't send a million soldiers to the other side of the globe to fight an unpopular war. As I've said repeatedly, the Iraq War is nothing like Vietnam in terms of the political rights and wrongs of the local or global dispute -- but it's very much like the Vietnam War in terms of its domestic American political significance.In the nineteen-sixties, apartheid was driven our of America. Legal segregation -- Jim Crow -- ended. We didn't end racism, but we ended legal segeration. We ended the idea that you can send a million soldiers ten thousand miles away to fight in a war the people do not support. We ended the idea that women are second-class citizens.
Now, it doesn't matter who sits in the Oval Office. The big battles that were won that period of civil war and strife you cannot reverse. We were young, we were reckless, arrogant, silly, headstrong -- and we were right.
I regret nothing.
As has been quoted to death, this White House believes very much that "it matters who sits in the Oval Office." They believe that the notion of responding to the will of the people -- or any other inconvenient factoid -- is "not the way the world really works anymore. We're an empire now, and when we act we create our own reality." Well, Scooter, we'll see, we'll see.
Moreover, don't forget that this regime is interested in "creating its own reality" not just (in fact, not even mainly) in Iraq, but also (mainly) in reversing all the other historic "realities" created by the cultural advances of the 1960s that Hoffman was so smug about a decade and a half ago.
DLC at it again
The DLC types are at it again, arguing that only by giving up social liberalism can the Democrats regain majority party status. Michael Totten disagrees, and I am with him on this one: "Social liberalism is the best thing the Democratic Party has going for it. They should keep that and drop the pacifism and isolationism instead. They’ll get a lot more votes next time around if they do. Plenty of socially liberal people voted for George W. Bush on national security grounds."
Just to be clear: giving up on isolationism and pacificism should not mean that one has to say the war in Iraq was a good idea.
Just to be clear: giving up on isolationism and pacificism should not mean that one has to say the war in Iraq was a good idea.
Winning in Iraq
This calendar of US military dead during the current Iraq War shows that in every month except one, there were more U.S. deaths in the second year than in the first year of the war, and that so far there's been more deaths every month except one of the third year of the war, as compared with the second.
What's particularly striking is if you compare the months of May-June-July for all three years -- a time when there were no major battles:
As things get worse and worse, the pro-war establishment is naturally enough preparing to declare victory and go home.
What's particularly striking is if you compare the months of May-June-July for all three years -- a time when there were no major battles:
August is shaping up to fit well within this trend.U.S. Deaths May 2003-2004-2005: 31, 80, 88
U.S. Deaths June 2003-2004-2005: 34, 52, 89
U.S. Deaths July 2003-2004-2005: 42, 60, 65
As things get worse and worse, the pro-war establishment is naturally enough preparing to declare victory and go home.
Sunday, August 07, 2005
How Bush "thinks"
It's been said many times before, but Jonathan Chait says it well: Bush rejects reason and facts in favor of gut judgments of character. Everyone does this to some extent, of course, but what makes Bush special is that once he's made a judgment call, it seems that absolutely no amount of contrary evidence can ever get him to change his judgment.
I suppose the hacks will call that confidence, will and leadership.
I suppose the hacks will call that confidence, will and leadership.
Friday, August 05, 2005
Bush's declining popularity
When you look at this graphic, which aggregates all polls on Bush's popularity since he took office, several things become obvious. The first obvious point is that the direction is clear, and that barring some other discontinuous event, Bush will be trending into an approval rating in the 30s by the time of the '06 midterm elections -- which means that many Republican Congressmen will be forced to run against him. (Conspiracy theorists will also mutter darkly about how this situation incentivizes the Republican Party to seek, or at least not to prevent, such a "discontinuous event.") Second, it make it clear how unforgivable Kerry's loss was. Bush's highest poll ratings in the last year and a half -- and the only time they've exceeded 50% -- was the week of the election last Fall.
No Exit
This article from the Nation is a month old, but it's still worth reading erstwhile liberal hawk David Rieff's review of Larry Diamond's Squandered Victory and David L. Phillips's Losing Iraq.
What strikes me about this article, like so many others from pro-interventionists that I respect, is the almost desperate tone in which it is suggested that if only the immediate postwar in Iraq had been handled differently, then it could have all worked out so much better. I am radically skeptical of this view. Rieff sidles up to this point when he observes that "It is empire that is the ghost at the banquet in Diamond's approach, and it is the problem of imperialism that, although he treats it glancingly, he never quite confronts." A good point... except that Rieff doesn't ever quite confront the point, either.
While some (many) things in postwar Iraq could clearly have been handled better, it's self-serving of pro-interventionist intellectual prejudices (whether of the left or right) to believe that everything has turned out as an unpredictably awful disaster as a result of Bremer and gang's poor decisions. It's self-serving, because it puts the entire blame for the situation on the tactical execution rather than the strategic vision, allowing the strategic vision to remain unquestioned. It also is fundamentally delusional in that it assumes that the people in control, the only people whose decisions mattered, were the Americans in charge. If only we had behaved differently, it could all have been better. That's poppycock. Battle plans never survive contact with the enemy; neither do reconstruction plans.
In fact, what almost no one wants to say out loud, is that we've seen so far in Iraq is actually close to being the best case outcome. Remember: there weren't tens of thousands of deaths at the time of the invasion because of Saddam launching chemical weapons attacks on invading troops or on Israel; a wider regional war hasn't broken out (yet); the incipient civil war remains (just) over the horizon; the Iraqi Kurds haven't (yet) spun up kindred irrendentism across the border in Turkey or Iran by declaring independence; and one could go on.
In an unintentionally ironic sense, therefore, the Bushies and the op-ed page of the WSJ is not wrong when they say that the people who look at Iraq pessimistically are simply defeatists: the situation in Iraq is what 21st century imperial victory looks like. If you don't like what Iraq looks like, it means that you just don't have the stomach for neo-imperialism. Hot kitchens and all that.
The sick thing, of course, is that the Bushies fundamentally lied either to themselves or to the American people (or to both) when they didn't come clean on this point. They were either laughably deluded or Great Liars when they claimed that we would be greeted as liberators in Iraq -- and the liberal interventionists were just as bad. The belief that the situation in Iraq would be anything much better than what we're seeing today was always a farcical claim, as anyone with even a fleeting knowledge of Arab nationalism and post-1950s Global North occupationist strategies could have (and did) tell anyone who wanted to listen.
What strikes me about this article, like so many others from pro-interventionists that I respect, is the almost desperate tone in which it is suggested that if only the immediate postwar in Iraq had been handled differently, then it could have all worked out so much better. I am radically skeptical of this view. Rieff sidles up to this point when he observes that "It is empire that is the ghost at the banquet in Diamond's approach, and it is the problem of imperialism that, although he treats it glancingly, he never quite confronts." A good point... except that Rieff doesn't ever quite confront the point, either.
While some (many) things in postwar Iraq could clearly have been handled better, it's self-serving of pro-interventionist intellectual prejudices (whether of the left or right) to believe that everything has turned out as an unpredictably awful disaster as a result of Bremer and gang's poor decisions. It's self-serving, because it puts the entire blame for the situation on the tactical execution rather than the strategic vision, allowing the strategic vision to remain unquestioned. It also is fundamentally delusional in that it assumes that the people in control, the only people whose decisions mattered, were the Americans in charge. If only we had behaved differently, it could all have been better. That's poppycock. Battle plans never survive contact with the enemy; neither do reconstruction plans.
In fact, what almost no one wants to say out loud, is that we've seen so far in Iraq is actually close to being the best case outcome. Remember: there weren't tens of thousands of deaths at the time of the invasion because of Saddam launching chemical weapons attacks on invading troops or on Israel; a wider regional war hasn't broken out (yet); the incipient civil war remains (just) over the horizon; the Iraqi Kurds haven't (yet) spun up kindred irrendentism across the border in Turkey or Iran by declaring independence; and one could go on.
In an unintentionally ironic sense, therefore, the Bushies and the op-ed page of the WSJ is not wrong when they say that the people who look at Iraq pessimistically are simply defeatists: the situation in Iraq is what 21st century imperial victory looks like. If you don't like what Iraq looks like, it means that you just don't have the stomach for neo-imperialism. Hot kitchens and all that.
The sick thing, of course, is that the Bushies fundamentally lied either to themselves or to the American people (or to both) when they didn't come clean on this point. They were either laughably deluded or Great Liars when they claimed that we would be greeted as liberators in Iraq -- and the liberal interventionists were just as bad. The belief that the situation in Iraq would be anything much better than what we're seeing today was always a farcical claim, as anyone with even a fleeting knowledge of Arab nationalism and post-1950s Global North occupationist strategies could have (and did) tell anyone who wanted to listen.
Thursday, August 04, 2005
The backlash of military families begins
20 young men from a suburb of Ohio have been killed in Iraq this week. The reactions are unsurprising.
The LA Times:
The LA Times:
Associated Press:"How much more are we expected to give?" asked Nancy Chase, 47, a schoolteacher who came to place flowers and flags at the entrance of the battalion's headquarters. "We are patriotic people. We love our country. But how many lives are enough?"
Pat Wilsox, who manages a doughnut shop near the battalion's headquarters in Brook Park, a Cleveland suburb, threw her hand over her heart when she heard of the latest deaths. "Oh my God," she said softly. "I'm all for protection but this is getting a little bit ridiculous."WKYC:
The Columbus Dispatch:"It comes in waves," Paul Schroeder said. "I mean, I'm really calm right now. If I can stay busy, I'm calm. That's part of it. The other part is that this was not wholly unexpected. Schroeder's son, 23-year-old son, Lance Corporal Edward August Schroeder died Wednesday in Iraq....
"Americans have been silent too long," he said. "And I'm asking all Americans to really question where we are today."
As word of the deaths spread — names dribbled in slowly — Brook Park residents were left to wonder exactly who had been claimed. As they wait, their emotions boil, and they debate the sense of this war. "How can this not make you angry?" said Ed Haddad, the shop’s baker. "These were honest, hardworking people and now they’re gone," he said.
Bill O'Reilly's ass
PDFs of court documents in Andrea Mackris's civil sexual harrassment case against Bill O'Reilly. Money:
You can't make this shit up. Oh wait, maybe you can!Defendent BILL O'REILLY suggested he would perform oral sex upon Plaintiff ANDREA MACKRIS, and that she would start to perform fellatio upon his "big cock" but not complete the sex act: "you'd tease me, like you wouldn't really do it, you'd just like - 'cuz I know you... you're like a tease."
During the course of his perverted ravings, Defendent BILL O'REILLY told Plaintiff that they would then engage in sexual intercourse. When Plaintiff ANDREA MACKRIS again reminded Defendent O'REILLY that she did not want to participate reminding him that he was her boss, O'REILLY responded: "you just have to suspend that."
During the course of Defendent BILL O'REILLY's sexual rant, it became clear that he was using a vibrator upon himself, and that he ejaculated. Plaintiff was repulsed.
Immediately after climaxing, Defedent BILL O'REILLY, launched into a discussion concerning how good he was on a recent appearance of the "Tonight Show...."
Spying indictments
Two AIPAC officials were today indicted for spying against the U.S. The Israelis didn't solicit the information, but, "The fact that Rosen and Weissman, as American citizens, handed information to an official representative of a foreign power while knowing it was classified is incriminating under the 1917 Espionage Act, which defines as a crime receipt of classified information for the purpose of helping any foreign entity." It's absurd that AIPAC isn't forced to register as a representative of a foreign country.
In other news on the Israel front, the suicide attacks are now going the other direction.
In other news on the Israel front, the suicide attacks are now going the other direction.
So Roberts doesn't hate gays
Turns out that Roberts doesn't hate queers -- more proof that (a) this nominee is about as good as the Democrats could have hoped for; and (b) that the cultural warriors of the right really have been completely duped by the GOP establishment. I can't help enjoying the thought of how James Dobson must have felt reading this article....
Along those lines, this article also brings to mind that image Thomas Frank conjures in What's the Matter with Kansas? where he imagines an angry mob of pro-lifers, waving their pitchforks outside some gated community in Overland Park, frothing at the mouth at the liberal elites immured therein, yelling "we are here -- to cut your taxes!"
Along those lines, this article also brings to mind that image Thomas Frank conjures in What's the Matter with Kansas? where he imagines an angry mob of pro-lifers, waving their pitchforks outside some gated community in Overland Park, frothing at the mouth at the liberal elites immured therein, yelling "we are here -- to cut your taxes!"
Wednesday, August 03, 2005
Being lied to
This is a must-read article about the U.S. torture of prisoners in Iraq. The whole article is sickening, but the real money comes in this paragraph, when the article describes the official army response to the death of an Iraqi general under interrogation:
Not that we should feel sorry for Mowhoush individually, but the home-front lesson couldn't be more obvious: don't believe a word the government tells you about what's happening in Iraq; it's all psy-ops, and the target is the homefront as much as Iraqis.Hours after [General] Mowhoush's death in U.S. custody on Nov. 26, 2003, military officials issued a news release stating that the prisoner had died of natural causes after complaining of feeling sick. Army psychological-operations officers quickly distributed leaflets designed to convince locals that the general had cooperated and outed key insurgents.
The U.S. military initially told reporters that Mowhoush had been captured during a raid. In reality, he had walked into the Forward Operating Base "Tiger" in Qaim on Nov. 10, 2003, hoping to speak with U.S. commanders to secure the release of his sons, who had been arrested in raids 11 days earlier.
The National Young Republican Convention (With Pictures)
This post from an covert operative who snuck into the Young Republican Convention in Las Vegas last month is both telling and hilarious. My favorite bit:
This was pretty good too:[We] were helped by an elderly security guard working for the Convention Center. After some friendly chatting, the guard thanked us for being Republicans. He served in World War Two, and was glad that at least some young people were still "thinking smart" and "supporting the troops." I guess supporting the troops has nothing to do with providing medical benefits and body armor, or even keeping them alive by not sending them to fight in poorly managed corrupt wars, and everything to do with magnetic yellow ribbons on SUVs.
The Democratic party really needs to improve its PR towards veterans groups.
The New York delegation then invited us to a party across town with an open bar, and we packed into a charter bus. I was sitting near the back and listened as some drunken jocks (including a delegate from Kentucky) had a heated discussion agreeing about how federalism was a great thing and slavery was a really good idea at the time and important part of America and anyone who thinks otherwise needs to check their history books....
My Republican friend went to great lengths to explain that this was definitely stereotypical Republican night, and they weren't really like this.
Tuesday, August 02, 2005
Why we shouldn't feel sorry for Judy Miller
This post explains in detail why we should spare scant sympathy.
for New York Times reporter Judy Miller, who is currently rotting in jail for refusing to comply with a Supreme Court ruling that she should testify about her role in the unmasking of covert CIA agent Valerie Plame.
It's becoming increasingly apparent that Miller is in jail not because of her stalwart, principled defense of the first amendment, but rather because she's made a careful legal calculation that it's better to serve an 18 month sentence for contempt of court than it is to tell the grand jury the truth -- which would force her to admit her own role in (at best) abetting the Bushies' efforts to make war on their domestic political enemies and (at worst) actually taking active part in the unveiling of Plame. If Miller indeed did go down the latter route, then eighteen months in jail probably looks like a walk in the park.
for New York Times reporter Judy Miller, who is currently rotting in jail for refusing to comply with a Supreme Court ruling that she should testify about her role in the unmasking of covert CIA agent Valerie Plame.
It's becoming increasingly apparent that Miller is in jail not because of her stalwart, principled defense of the first amendment, but rather because she's made a careful legal calculation that it's better to serve an 18 month sentence for contempt of court than it is to tell the grand jury the truth -- which would force her to admit her own role in (at best) abetting the Bushies' efforts to make war on their domestic political enemies and (at worst) actually taking active part in the unveiling of Plame. If Miller indeed did go down the latter route, then eighteen months in jail probably looks like a walk in the park.
Monday, August 01, 2005
The disinformation campaign
The military improves its credibility by essentially admitting that it makes up stuff for its press releases on the ongoing counterinsurgency campaign.
What this kind of thing shows is that real campaign for the Bush regime at this point is not for the hearts and minds of the Iraqis -- they're lost already -- but rather to hold onto the hearts and minds of the American people until the midterm elections.
What this kind of thing shows is that real campaign for the Bush regime at this point is not for the hearts and minds of the Iraqis -- they're lost already -- but rather to hold onto the hearts and minds of the American people until the midterm elections.
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