Bush regimes bows to ICC

The Bush regime has apparently decided that its hatred of the idea of a transnational legal order shouldn't hold up refering Darfur crimes to the International Criminal Court in the Hague.

Several readers have complained that I never acknowledge the Bushies for doing anything good. Well, here's an exception: this was a good move, I hope it won't appear as gloating if I observe that late is certainly better than never.

Schiavo Symbolism

Don't miss Dana Milbank's take on the longer-term political implications of the Schiavo ordeal.

And the beat goes on in Iraq

While there definitely seems to be improvement in Iraq, there have still been 44 U.S. casualties this month, more than in eight of the first eleven months since Bush declared "Mission Accomplished." And while U.S. deaths appear to be scaling back for the moment, the war itself continues to be as deadly as ever for the Iraqis themselves, with 2 more suicide car bombers this morning in Samarra and near Kirkuk. In the meanwhile, the much-vaunted freely elected Iraqi parliament has been unable to form a government and instead has been reduced to a shouting forum.

No doubt pro-war folks will respond to the above by, more or less, dittoing Paul Wolfowitz: "I have to infer from that (statement) that you would be happier if Saddam Hussein were still in power." To which a great post over on Night Light seems to me to say it all:

Let's deal with this question once and for all, OK? It's the classic retort given by neocons and other war supporters whenever anyone questions the wisdom of the Iraq War. In this case, it was Wolfowitz's response to a student who had just said the following: "We are tired, Secretary Wolfowitz, of being feared and hated by the world. We are tired of watching Americans and Iraqis die, and international institutions cry out in anger against us."

Let's say I get disturbed by a spider crawling up the garage wall. I slam the car into it at 50 miles an hour, destroying the car and causing a few thousand dollars in damage to the garage. When my wife objects, I say: "I have to infer from that statement that you would be happier if that spider were still crawling up the wall."

No, schmuck, she says, I'd be happier if we still had a car and didn't have to fork out ten thousand dollars to fix the garage.

And can anyone credibly claim that a non-WMD-armed Saddam was really anything other than a loathesome spider?

SOTU as bullshit

As everyone knows, the neocon right was overcome by paroxyms of rapture at Bush's celebration of democratization in his State of the Union address last month. He went on and on with purple passages of this sort:

The only force powerful enough to stop the rise of tyranny and terror, and replace hatred with hope, is the force of human freedom.... We've declared our own intention: America will stand with the allies of freedom to support democratic movements in the Middle East and beyond, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world... We are witnessing landmark events in the history of liberty. And in the coming years, we will add to that story.

Now consider this trenchant passage from Harry Frankfurt's "On Bullshit" (which, incidentally, is available in complete form on line here):

Consider a Fourth of July orator, who goes on bombastically about "our great and blessed country, whose Founding-Fathers under divine guidance created a new beginning for mankind."

The orator is not lying. He would be lying only if it were his intention to bring about in his audience beliefs which he himself regards as false, concerning such matters as whether our country is great, whether it is blessed, whether the Founders had divine guidance, and whether what they did was in fact to create a new beginning for mankind. But the orator does not really care what his audience thinks about the Founding Fathers, or about the role of the deity in our country's history, or the like. At least, it is not an interest in what anyone thinks about these matters that motivates his speech. It is clear that what makes Fourth of July oration humbug is not fundamentally that the speaker regards his statements as false.

Rather... the orator intends these statements to convey a certain impression of himself. He is not trying to deceive anyone concerning American history. What he cares about is what people think of him. He wants them to think of him as a patriot, as someone who has deep thoughts and feelings about the origins and the mission of our country, who appreciates the importance of religion, who is sensitive to the greatness of our history, whose pride in that history is combined with humility before God, and so on.

I think this is just right as an account of humbug and bullshit, and it bears directly on the similarly pretentious (excuse me, "visionary"!) rhetoric of democracy that Bush proffered the nation last month.

It's not that Bush or his speechwriters don't believe in the words they are saying and writing about democracy, progress and the world-historical mission of the United States. But that's not what is motivating them to say or write these things. Rather, what the SOTU speechwriters and Bush are aiming for is to convey a certain impression of who Bush is: that he is a glorious, strong leader whose values and instincts are sound and whom therefore you, the passive listener-citizen, should uncritically trust to make decisions on your behalf--especially on topics such as eviscerating Social Security and extending tax cuts for the rich. The goal is not as extreme as to create a totalitarian cult of personality, but it does share with such efforts a desire to neutralize critical political reasoning.

"And that's a good thing!": Habermas, Bobbio and Rawls as apologists for American empire

Perry Anderson makes a case that John Rawls, Noberto Bobbio and Jurgen Habermas--three of the leading intellectual lights of the postwar North Atlantic left-liberal intelligentsia--have at best been played for fools by the course of American foreign policy, and at worst given license to "American empire as a placeholder for human progress." Anderson provides a detailed account of how each of these intellectuals in his own way came to support American military interventions in the post-Cold War period, thus acting as de facto apologists for American imperialism.

Anderson is hardest on Habermas. Until the most recent intervention in Iraq, Habermas chose consistently to side with Washington in its use of force. Although Habermas (and the others) sometimes expressed dismay at the way the U.S. actually executed its military function, Anderson argues that these intellectuals spun the American use of force in Iraq in 1991 and in the Balkans as a positive step forward in the construction of a viable enforcement mechanism for a transnational legal order that Habermas has long advocated.

It was only with the American unilateralist intervention in Iraq in 2003 that Habermas declared that he was shocked, shocked!, to discover that the United States actually had no interest in building a transnational cosmoplitan legal order. For Anderson, Habermas's change of heart represents a sad mix of credulousness and bad faith:

Since, in Habermas's own words, there can be no greater good than liberating a people from a brutal tyranny, why should prevention of ethnic cleansing or provision of aid—presumably lesser objectives—supply General Clark with philosophical credentials denied to General Franks? It is plain that the crucial distinguo lies elsewhere: in European responses to American initiatives. So long as both sides of the Atlantic concur, the 'international community' remains whole, and the UN can be ignored. But if Europe demurs, the UN is sacrosanct. So naively self-serving an assumption invites, in one sense, only a smile.

What it points to, however, is the disintegration of a larger one. The West upheld in Habermas's credo was always an ideological figure, an unexamined topos of the Cold War, whose assumption was that America and Europe could for all practical purposes be treated as a single democratic ecumene, under benevolent US leadership. The unwillingness of Berlin and Paris to rally behind Washington in the attack on Iraq undid that long-held construction, rendering an unconditional orientation to the West meaningless.

In this emergency, Habermas fell back on European values, now distinct from somewhat less commendable American ones, as a substitute lode-star in international affairs. But, setting aside the work of lustration required to yield an uplifting common ethos out of Europe's bloody past, or even its self-satisfied present, the new construct is as incoherent as the old. Not only does Europe, as currently understood by Habermas, have to exclude Britain, for undue similarity of outlook to the United States, but it cannot even encompass the continental states of the EU itself, a majority of whose members supported rather than opposed the liberties taken by the us with the UN Charter. So in a further geopolitical contraction, Habermas has been driven to advocate a Franco-German 'core' as the final refuge out of which a future and better EU, more conscious of its social and international responsibilities, may one day emerge, harbinger of a wider cosmopolitan order.

As a supporter of the project of building a transnational cosmopolitan legal order, I sympathize with Anderson's evisceration of Habermas. I too felt that Habermas betrayed his own ideals in supporting the U.S. intervention in the Balkans in the 1990s. More recently, I also regarded Habermas's expressed feelings of betrayal in the pages of The Nation as an unforgiveably belated realization that the United States is an imperial power.

But if it is fair to blame Habermas for excessive optimism regarding the U.S. military excursions of the 1990s, Anderson goes too far in suggesting that there exists an unbroken, homogenous continuity of American imperial ambition. The neocons who ran the Bush regime's foreign policy between 9-11 and the 2004 elections (and are possibly still doing so now) represent something radically new.

One way to understand the significance of the neocons is to consider at how they have vindicated the (generally leftist) "revisionist" school of diplomatic history, which since the 1950s has been claiming that American foreign policy is best understood as a long story of imperial expansionism. For a long time people on the right and in the center regarded the revisionist take on American diplomatic history as a calumny and a slander on our great nation. But the neocons now admit forthrightly what formerly only leftists dared to say: that America is an empire without apology.

Indeed, it sometimes seems that the only thing that distinguishes the work of neocon historians like Niall Ferguson or Max Boot from that of the revisionists is that the latter append the phrase "And that's a good thing!" to the end of each of paragraph. In terms of how they consturct their narratives about of American foreign policy, the neocons and the revisionists have almost nothing to argue about. It is only in their moral judgments that the two schools part ways.

It goes without saying, however, that this moral judgment is of no small moment. The neocons' unvarnished embrace of imperialism is something sinisterly new under the American diplomatic sun. There are some on the left--and I suspect Anderson may be one of them--who may regard the neocons' candor regarding their imperial ambitions as a breath of fresh air after two centuries of American diplomatic and historical mendacity. But to me, this is a blood-thirstily naive position. Diplomatic niceties make a difference, and in this respect the neocons's imperial candor represents something radical and unprecedented. Lowering the bar of imperialist shame makes a big difference for the kind of outrage Washington can contemplate.

Pictures from Indonesia

Truly appalling.

Stuck between Unilateralism and Transformation

The Berkeley Electronic Press has just published my most recent piece, on Bush Doctrine's failure to reconcile its Transformationist military ambitions with its neoimperialist political ideals.

The bullshit presidency

I finally got my oversubscribed copy of Harry G. Frankfurt's delightful 1986 essay "On Bullshit." Although clearly he was inspired by a different era of bullshit (yes, that would the Reagan era of bullshit), one cannot help but be struck as one reads it by the prescience with which he captures the essence of the current Bush presidency.

The difference between bullshit and a mere lie, Frankfurt explains, is that the liar cares about truth; that is, he cares about the relationship between his statement and the reality to which his statement refers. Bullshitters, by contrast, don't care about the relationship between their statements and reality. Indeed, Frankfurt suggests that bullshitters are heirs to the radical epistemic skepticism generated by postmodern antifoundationalism. The motive for their discourse is thus not to describe reality (a task they consider largely irrelevant) but rather to present a picture of who they are. Here's Frankfurt:

One response to this loss of confidence has been a retreat from the discipline required by dedication to the ideal of correctness to a quite different sort of discipline, which is imposed by pursuit of an alternative ideal of sincerity. Rather than seeking primarily to arrive at accurate representations of a common world, the individual turns toward trying to provide honest representations of himself. Convinced that reality has no inherent nature, which he might hope to identify as the truth about things, he devotes himself to being true to his own nature. It is as though he decides that since it makes no sense to try to be true to the facts, he must therefore try instead to be true to himself.

Reading this can't help but make you reconsider the implications of Bush's eternal refrain, whenever anyone questions his grasp on facts, that, "You know where I stand." (Indeed, the whole anti-scientific attitude of the Republican Party is intimately related to their skepticism that such a thing as "facts" exist.) Thus Karl Rove explains why Bush makes the perfect Bullshit President:

I think a great deal of it is his personal characteristics. He is a person who is “"centered." This is a person who, as you know, went to Sam Houston Junior High – who grew up in Midland, Texas. He knows who he is and is comfortable with who he is. He doesn’t need validation from the editorial pages of the Washington Post or the New York Times.

We'll have more on Frankfurt and Bush later....

Another contradiction within rightwing coalition

Peter Drucker is always readable, and not even being radically wrong in the past can instilled in him any fear of making bold predictions. (For example, one wonders how he would reassess the prediction he made in 1977 that union pension funds would get together to enforce pro-union policies on the companies they invest in. Oops.) He's certainly been more right than wrong over the years, and I say that despite the fact that he's a staunch conservative and firmly pro-Bush man. In light of those facts, it's especially interest to read his take on the coming global economic crisis:

The next major economic crisis will most probably be a crisis of the U.S. dollar in the world economy. It will put to a severe test the oligopoly of the central banks of the developed countries that now rules over the world financial economy....

The persistent U.S. deficit creates a persistent deficit in the U.S. balance of payments, which make both the U.S. economy and the government increasingly dependent on massive injections of short-term and panic-prone money from abroad. The U.S. savings rate is barely high enough to finance the minimum capital needs of industry. It could, in all likelihood, be raised considerably by raising interest rates. But that is not only politically almost impossible; it would also require that a larger share of incomes go into savings rather than into consumption, with an inevitable collapse of an economy based on consumer spending and low interest rates, as for instance, the U.S. housing market.

The government deficit is therefore being financed almost in its entirety by foreign investments in the United States, mostly in government securities like short-term treasury notes and medium-term bonds. The Japanese are converting most, if not all, of their trade surplus with the United States into dollar-denominated U.S. government securities and have thus become the largest U.S. creditor.

It is often argued, especially in Washington, that the deficit is mostly an accounting mirage. Defense spending—the main cause of the deficit—enables other free countries to keep their own defense spending low, which then generates the surpluses these countries invest in U.S. government securities. But this is a political argument. The economic fact is that the United States increasingly borrows short term (U.S. securities can be sold overnight) to invest long term and with very limited liquidity. This, needless to say, is an unstable and volatile system. It would collapse if the foreign holders of U.S. government securities (above all, the Japanese) were for whatever reason (such as a crash in their own economy) to dump their holdings of U.S. government securities. It certainly cannot be extended indefinitely, which, among other serious drawbacks, calls into question the long-term viability of the Bush Doctrine's goal of defending and extending the "zone of freedom" around the world.

Running an empire requires fiscal prudence. The neocons know this. Does Bush?

Policy versus politics

The New York Times has a nifty graphic depicting the political and policy levers Karl Rove uses to wield influence. But the graphic is also fundamentally deceptive on a key point: it implies that Rove distinguishes between the policy side and the political side.

Do as I say, not as I...

Turns out that when his dad was horribly injured as a result of a faulty product, Tom Delay not only pulled the plug on his own dad, but also filed a tort case against the manufacturer of the defective product.

The limits of the democratization project

I was positively shocked to find the Wall Street Journal op-ed page publishing this piece decrying the international inaction in Sudan, and not just fairly apportioning blame for that inaction, but also pointing out how the Darfur case gives the lie to the Bush's regime's claim that the ultimate end of its foreign policy is to promote democracy: "The truth is that combating crimes against humanity is simply not considered a national security issue."

Apparently, the main sticking point in sanctioning a multilateral intervention in the Sudan is that France wants to insist that whatever crimes have been committed there get tried in the International Criminal Court, whereas the U.S. refuses to do anything that would provide that court with legitimacy. (The Bush regime would prefer to have no international institutions, and instead provide ad hoc international tribunals for particular cases of crimes against humanity.) Both the French and the the U.S. are holding the people of Sudan hostage to the diplomatic dispute. (The U.S. also claims that the Russians and Chinese would veto any use resolution to use force in Sudan, but this is unproven, at best.)

This is classic 1990s-style Great Power "consensual minimalism": i.e., do nothing until there is complete Great Power consensus. It certainly shows the Bush Doctrine -- which states that the U.S. should have the sole and exclusive right to dictate when and how force can be used in international relations -- has not been universalized. Meanwhile, the Sudanese people suffer.

The ghosting in the machine

While the nation turns its lonely eyes to Terry Schiavo, we learn on page A15 of the Washington Post that the Army and the CIA have been "disappearing" inmates in Abu Ghraib.

They really have that "culture of life" thing down in Abu Ghraib, huh?

Another nomination for Kasparov's best game

A couple people wrote to me disputing that the 1985 game with Karpov was Kasparov's greatest, instead offering this one from 1999 against Veselin Topalov. The Topalov game features one of the most stunning attacking combinations ever executed at this level of play. Just looking at the dates for these two games emphasizes what is most amazing about Kasparov, namely that he remained at the top of the game for 15+ years.

The great conservative crack-up

Don't miss Andrew Sullivan's piece on how absolute power is exposing the fissures in the Republican coalition.

Idiots

Hard to believe, but I find myself unable to disagree with Qaddaffi on this one:

"The Israelis are idiots and the Palestinians as well," Kadhafi said in the speech at the closing session of the two-day summit in Algiers which is usually reserved for a reading of the final resolutions.

"The Jews are dying by the dozen because they are in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. If these regions are so important to them, why didn't they occupy them before" seizing other Arab land, Kadhafi said.

"The Palestinians, too, are idiots because they lost these territories in 1967. So we must admit that both are idiots," he added.

My sentiment about Israel/Palestine has for a long time been, more or less, "A pox on both their houses." The U.S. should stop funding either side of that dogfight.

Pro-life, but not if we have to raise taxes to pay for it

An article in the Washington Post points out that while the Republicans pass laws intended to mandate that poor Terry Schiavo must be kept alive if anyone in her family wants it, they at the same time cut the Medicaid funding required for poor (or even middle class) families to be able to exercise their right to "choose life."

The Schiavo case is more and more looking like a political disaster for the Republicans, mainly because it is exposing the faultlines in the coalition. It was a Republican, Rep. Steve King of Iowa, who first brought up the issue of Schiavo's Medicaid support. True, King brought it up mainly as a way of decrying Medicaid fraud, but then there's this:

The cost of care in cases such as Schiavo's has vexed governments for years. In 1999, then-Texas Gov. George W. Bush signed a law establishing procedures for hospitals and physicians to withhold life-sustaining care from patients with conditions deemed hopeless, even over relatives' protests. The legislation affords a family 10 days' notice to find another facility. Last week, Texas Children's Hospital in Houston invoked the law to remove a 6-month-old boy from his breathing tube against his mother's wishes.

I wonder if King would agree with the charge made by one of Tom DeLay's henchmen yesterday, who claimed that "tying a life issue to the budget process shows just how disconnected Democrats are to reality." I guess the DeLay logic is that while the government should apply a moral standard to many issues, it should never do so about anything concerning money. Certainly maintaining a Chinese Wall between money issues and moral issues is crucial to maintaining the governing coalition.

With all that said, the thing that seems most weird to me about the Schiavo case is this: why hasn't Michael just gotten a divorce from Terry and washed his hands of the whole matter? Here's a guy who (about seven years after his wife went into a coma) started a relationship and eventually a family with another woman.

As my mother pointed out to me last night, one cannot help but suspect that the real fight between Michael and the parents is over the $750,000 Michael received on behalf of Terry in a medical malpractice judgment in 1993. If he divorces her, he probably has to forfeit that money, which would then go to her parents. The article cites Michael's lawyers claiming that there is only $40-50K left from the malpractice, but presumably Terry's parents might also try to claim half of Michael's assets were he to divorce Terry.

In other words, what both the political and right and left have politicized as a battle between competing moral values--namely the right of parents to keep their daughter alive versus the right of a husband to enforce what (he claims) were his wife's wishes--may in fact be little more than a sordid battle over money.

Which only makes Terry's plight sadder, even as it makes the political circus that much more disgusting and disingenuous.

Poverty: a moral issue?

John Edwards apparently thinks it is. Money quote:

"We have millions of Americans who work full time and still live in poverty, and that is absolutely wrong," said Edwards, a Democrat....

In an interview Wednesday on NBC's "Today," Edwards called poverty "one of the great moral issues in America today." He said more people live in poverty now in the United States than 30 years ago.

Good political move for Edwards; good political move for the Democrats.

Hat tip: RWM

Iraq: still not worth it

I recently had a pro-war friend write me the following email:

I just got through reading a Charles Krauthammer article that has been making the rounds on the right side of the blowhardsphere. It's a good example of triumphal about current goings on in the ME. To those on the right, occurrences in Lebanon, Afghanistan, Egypt, Israel, Syria, etc etc. are all positive and are all a direct result of Iraq. Ridiculous. To those on the left, these occurrences are all meaningless and have absolutely nothing to do with Iraq even if they were important. Just as ridiculous.

There is only one intellectually honest position: The importance of current movements in the ME is currently unknown. More importantly, causation by the invasion of Iraq is unknown. Period.If you want to be only slightly intellectually dishonest, you can go out on a limb and say that Iraq had some salutary causative effect, but just how much is unknown. I think this is reasonable. It's hard to imagine the protests in Lebanon being quite so big as they were without the elections in Iraq, for instance, but there are also currents and undercurrents there that are totally separate. There is a continuum between full causation and no causation, and the only thing you can say is that the answer is somewhere in the grey area, in a range that we cannot know...

I am not interested in assigning "credit". I am interested in delineating the boundaries of truth. None of it is my credit nor my fault, so I have no stake in the outcome.... I guess you can say that the burden of proof is on the right to claim a causality on the Iraq war. But then again, so much more has happened in the politics of the ME since that war than in the long period of time before it that ascribing it all to chance is just as ridiculous. This, then is your epistemological position: "Sure all these things happened immediately after the Iraq war, but that's just a coincidence!" You must see that this, as well, is hardly convincing. All I am advocating is reserving judgment in view of a dearth of facts.

Even if my friend poses as being interested merely in establishing "truth" rather than assigning political credit, it is either naive or disingenuous not to realize that the question of causality and the question of political credit/blame are inextricably bound up with each other.

Consider first what has become the Right's Exhibit A in trying to show that the Bush Doctrine is achieving its alleged goal of spreading liberty and freedom: Lebanon. I'll happily concede that the way things are unfolding in Lebanon has been shaped by the elections in Iraq. People on the streets of Beirut say that the Iraqi elections were an inspiration, so presumably that's so -- even if everyone also agrees that those elections were but one variable among many informing the political mood in Beirut. In fact, most Lebanese seem to consider the Ukrainian example a more inspiring case than the Iraqi one. (And please, don't make me laugh by claiming that Iraq War II is responsible for what has happened in Ukraine.)

Second, even if one gives Iraq War II and subsequent Iraqi elections total and exclusive causal credit for what's happening in Lebanon (which, last I checked, was a horrific political murder, a bunch of street demonstrations, and Syrian withdrawal into the Bekaa highlands -- good news, to be sure, but let's not get overexcited), the political progress in Lebanon alone scarcely makes Iraq War II worth it. Yet it is precisely this that the partisan right is suggesting.

Third, I am unconvinced that the positive things couldn't have been achieved in ways that would have been far less costly to the U.S. and the Iraqis in terms of blood, treasure, and prestige. For example, since the late 1970s the U.S. has been giving the Egyptians billions in aid annually. Don't you think that (the threat of) withholding that aid might have convinced old Hosni to make the same (very minor, it must again be emphasized) movement toward holding real elections? (Such an approach might actually have saved the U.S. money, instead of costing us $250b and counting.) Might have been worthing giving a shot, no? Hell, it might still be worth giving a shot.

Fourth, whatever causal role Iraq War II may have had in whatever good news is emanating from the Middle East today, it's hard to argue that the sum of the political motion is unambiguously positive. Libya? No move toward democratization there, just a corrupt oil deal. Iran? By all reports the hardliners are in firmer control than before the Iraq War II, and sporting a more defiant military stance. Saudi? Give me a break. And how about Algeria, Yemen, UAE, Kuwait, Oman, Dubai, or Pakistan? In sum, it's not clear that we have much to celebrate: as you go down the list of countries in the region as a whole, instead of cherry-picking the good news stories du jour, the direction of movement is hardly clear.

Finally, what's happening in all these countries seems to me almost entirely beside the moral point. The first and overwhelming case on which you have to judge the morality of Iraq War II is on how things are going in Iraq itself. No one can reasonably dispute that. Though things in Iraq seem to be going a bit better of late, if you read Juan Cole's blog, which summarizes the daily reports on the mayhem still reigning there, it's difficult to make the case that things are better for the average Iraqi than they were under late-Saddam, and it's certainly impossible to say that the situation is actually good for the Iraqi people.

(Just to focus on the American experience in Iraq, do you realize that US Embassy employees are forbidden to travel by land the ten miles to Baghdad airport because it is so dangerous, and have to be helicoptered in and out of the capital? Mission Accomplished!)

In fact, as everyone knows, the ongoing security disaster in Iraq is the overwhelming story of Iraq War II aftermath. Which is precisely why the defenders of the war are trying to change the subject by focusing on what's happening elsewhere, outside Iraq. This is a somewhat desperate move, in my view, but it is being abetted by the fact that media are suffering from Iraq fatigue. Just how many times can you lead with a story about a police station in Baghdad getting blown up? By the fiftieth time this happens, it's not "news" any more.

It's just the daily reality we have wrought in Iraq.

Ennui

Yet another product of modernization: boredom.