Sometimes I wonder how many times I can restate essentially the same points about Iraq. I’ve been doing it for over four years now. I suppose I should derive some satisfaction from the fact that the majority of Americans are now against the war. Unfortunately, that’s like the majority of Americans being against the Big Bang—which they are. It’s way, way too late. All we can do now is try for a strategic withdrawal and hope the last helicopter out of Baghdad gets out safely.

Since I’ve started this Vietnam analogy, let’s keep going, shall we? And all the while, we must ask: does Bush really see the “War on Terror” as the new Cold War?

The Reverse Domino Effect

The second law of thermodynamics tell us that chaos spreads more easily than order. During the Cold War, we were afraid that relatively disordered states would reorganize under Communism because of influence by their neighbors, the so-called Domino theory.

We all know, however, that disorder and destabilization, or in other words, societal breakdowns, are easier to export than political reorganizations, or construction. Consider the problem of refugee camps—millions of people living in poverty, much of it somewhat abruptly imposed. Refugee camps are natural hotbeds of foment, be it criminal, political, or both.

Damascus now has an Iraqi quarter, and Iraqi refugees have also started taking up residence in the Palestinian refugee camps. Why is this important? Because in May, a harbinger event occurred in the Nahr al-Bared Palestinian refugee camp near Tripoli. A new terrorist group calling itself Fatah-al-Islam (variously spelled ‘Fateh-el-Islam”) or “Army of Islam,” got into a major firefight with Lebanese military forces, after police tried to apprehend a gang of bank robbers who turned out to be ‘terrorists’ retreated to the Palestinian refugee camps, where Lebanese armed forces are prohibited from entering.

Now, what’s significant about Fatah-al-Islam isn’t that they’ve turned to bank robbing; terrorist groups have been financing their activities by robbing banks for a very long time. What’s significant is that Fatah-al-Islam is robbing Lebanese banks in 2007. I predict that this is the beginning of a bold new age of free-for-all terrorism reminiscent of the 1970s, when you had what Wallerstein would call “anti-systemic” gangs—Baader-Meinhof, the Red Brigades, the Symbionese Liberation Army, the Palestine Liberation Organization. The days when someone like Carlos the Jackal might have had contacts with Euzkadi Ta Askatasuna and the Front de Libération du Québec and the Irish Republican Army. Back when people thought terrorism was sexy. (By the way, is anyone else upset those Matt Damon adaptations of Robert Ludlum’s Bourne series have nothing to do with Carlos or Vietnam?)

If you haven’t seen the amazing documentary The Weather Underground, you never got to hear actual former members explain why white middle-class kids turned to terrorism in the 1960s (the same way middle-class Arabs turned to terrorism in the last few years). Brian Flanagan, former Weatherman, said something like (I’m quoting from memory) “The only way I can explain it is that the Vietnam war made us crazy… When you feel you have right on your side, you can do some horrific things.”

What Bush II has done, as I have been warning since the invasion of Afghanistan, is to reboot the cycle of displacement, violence and frustration which transformed the Mekhtab-e-Khidamat (a support organization for mujahideen from around the world who wanted to fight in Afghanistan) into Al-Qaeda.

I’ve written before about the tragic stupidity of the ‘flypaper’ theory, where war-mongers informed us that the war in Iraq was actually making America safer by drawing the world’s jihadists to Iraq instead of the United States. I countered that we were running the world’s largest, most advanced terrorist training camp, the way the Soviets had ‘trained’ the ‘Afghan Arabs’ like Bin Laden and Al-Zawahiri who would eventually become the first generation of global jihadists.

Al-Qaeda started with the private contributions of middle- and upper-class Muslims, buttressed by what was essentially protection money from the Saudi royal family. But as all terrorist groups did, they migrated to more conventional crime (drug smuggling, kidnapping, and financial fraud).

But bank robbery just isn’t Al-Qaeda’s modus operandi; outright armed theft is a bit harder to reconcile with sharia than declaring it OK to sell intoxicants (like heroin) exclusively to infidels, which is how they managed the opium problem in Afghanistan. Bin Laden may be a lot of things, but he used to carry himself a bit differently.

The ranks of terrorist organizations are more likely full of ordinary street criminals than ideologues. At this point, though, there’s a more serious problem: Gangs of criminals are being given ideological ‘cover’ by the rising sentiment of ‘al-Qaedaism,’ or at least that incredible decrease in America’s standing across the globe.

And how lucky for these glorified thugs that the Bush administration is now tarring all opposition to our armed forces as ‘al-Qaeda,’ because now a whole new class of criminals have been given a political agenda, at least in public. Now there is a whole new generation of ‘Afghan Arabs,’ young men who feel like now is the time to take up arms in defense of Islam and/or to do some killing, looting, raping, what-have-you.

Lately I’ve been thinking about how the U.S. occupations in Iraq and Afghanistan are ‘force multipliers’ for terrorists in a literal, rather than figurative sense. The flypaper theory turned out to have caught more flies with vinegar than with honey—and they’re breeding.

So, who is behind this new wave of terrorism? Let’s look at the history of Fatah al-Islam. From a profile in a Turkish paper:

Fatah al-Islam announced its creation last November after breaking away from Fatah Al-Intifada, a splinter group of the mainstream Fatah movement. In its foundation statement, it introduced itself as an Islamic group seeking to liberate Palestine and restore Muslim sanctities captured by Israel. …Experts believe the group is ideologically but not operationally linked to Al-Qaeda and is played by Lebanese and Arab parties to achieve political gains.

Its leader Shaker Abssi, a Palestinian born in Areha in 1955, is a former colonel pilot.

Syrian authorities arrested Abssi in 2000 and sentenced him to three years in prison on charges of smuggling weapons, ammunition to Jordan and vice versa. No sooner had he been released than he went to Iraq following the US-led invasion. In Iraq, Abssi fought along with groups loyal to Al-Qaeda and made friends with a number of Al-Qaeda leaders there.

…Abssi went to Lebanon in 2005 with a group of youths he met in Iraq and stayed there around a year before getting into trouble with the Lebanese army in May 2006.

There is speculation that various governments (Lebanon, syria, Iran, Israel, the United States) are supporting or otherwise manipulating Fatah al-Islam because it represents a counter-balance to the now more mainstream groups like Hamas and Hezbollah. (Hamas itself was started with support from Golda Meir’s Israeli government who thought that its radical Islamism would be a good counterbalance to the secular PLO.)

Hamastan and Fatahstan

Divide and conquer—it’s the foundation of many a colonial empire. It isn’t even 20th-century thinking, it’s more like 19th-century thinking. The British were masters of this craft; consider Iraq, which is a fairly good (if late) example. By using the minority Sunnis the brokers between the two larger ethnic groups (Kurdish and Shiite) and forcing Iraq to accept the Hashemite (a Sunni) as its new King, they were able to ‘balance out’ factional movements.

I’ve been writing here that Americans really need to wise up about he fact that we’ve been trying to provoke a Sunni-Shia civil war in Iraq since the invasion of Kuwait, and that we really have to stop acting so surprised that it finally happened.

Well, not only have we achieved our goal, but our cup runneth over; the huge Iraqi refugee population and our strengthening of Iran have paid off in spades, recently in a set of violent incidents around the Middle East.

Now we have Hamastan and Fatahstan, Hamas taking over the Gaza strip and the successor to the PLO, Fatah, taking the West Bank. The civil wars we have been trying to provoke for decades are just getting started. Sunni vs. Shia, Religious vs. Secular, Old Guard vs. Young Turks.

Now, even for those who are s cynical as to belive that the inevitable deaths of civilians in the crossfire is a good thing, why don’t we rework the equation in our favor by depriving these groups of a common enemy to unite against? when Israel bombed Hezbollah-controlled southern Lebanon, they got even the Sunni and Christian Arabs, their traditional enemies, to start chanting ‘we are all Hezbollah” in the streets all over the world.

Again, what America needs is strategic withdrawal. we are way , way overcommitted here, and our obnoxious presence is just about the only bargaining chip we have left. (Elephant once said we’re just going to end up trading Israel for Taiwan as part of a global retreat over the next century.)

The Dark Side of the Net

I was looking through my stats today, and I noticed that someone had come here from the United Kingdom looking for the phrase “fuck the soldiers.” Now, I knew I’d never written those words in that sequence, so I was curious enough to do the same search myself. It turned out I had written “fuck with the soldiers” at some point, which got me in the top ten results.

The other results had to do mostly with the petition by MySpace users to have the group “Fuck the soldiers” removed from the social networking site.

But there was one item which caught my eye, entitled “SOLDIER IN IRAQ FINDS POT PLANT, GRACES COVER OF HIGH TIMES’ GROW AMERICA.

JUNE 2, 2004 – Specialist Carlos Arellano was on patrol in Baghdad’s Green Zone on April 23 when he discovered a pot plant growing innocently on the street. He asked one of his fellow soldiers to snap a photo of him kneeling next to the plant. The photo was forwarded to High Times’ Grow America by a friend of Arellano’s via email. … Bloom quickly learned that Arellano was not only a soldier, but he was also a rapper named “Singe,” who’s first CD, The Epidemic, was released on StashBox Records several months before Arellano, in the Army Reserves, was called up to active duty and sent to Iraq. “Coded in the photo was a message that we couldn’t ignore,” Bloom says. “While Carlos is a hero defending his country in Iraq, when he comes home and smokes a joint, he’ll be a criminal.”

Whenever I see a story about a soldier that’s more than a month old, I immediately check to see if that soldier had been killed in action.

Robert Arellano said Wednesday his brother Carlos may have known he wouldn’t return home from Iraq. Carlos Arellano, a Marine corporal, had survived two previous tours of duty in Iraq, although he was wounded on the second. But Carlos seemed different before he left his family’s Rosemead home for his third tour, his brother said. “I think Carlos knew he was going to die this time,” said Robert Arellano, 27, a Marine of nine years.

Cpl. Carlos Arellano died Friday when a suicide bomber in a car set off a blast in Haqlaniyah, Iraq, according to the U.S. Department of Defense. Also killed in the blast was Lance Cpl. Brandon Dewey, 20, of San Joaquin.

Sometimes it’s easy to forget that the people dying on both sides are my generation, and that people in the military aren’t politically or ideologically or culturally homogeneous. If you get a chance to see Soundtrack To War, the 2005 documentary about the music soldiers listen to in Iraq, you should. they run it on VH1 every once in a while.

Anyway, while I was searching for Carlos Arellano, I found his MySpace page. Someday, it will be in a museum, and I don’t mean that facetiously at all. It’s a perfectly preserved artifact, a life frozen in time.

www.myspace.com/singeofdankmobb

UPDATES:

A $282 million bank heist in Baghdad carried out by the bank’s guards:

Guards staged one of the largest bank robberies in Iraqi history, making off with a stunning $282 million dollars in cash from a private bank in central Baghdad, Aswat al-Iraq reports in Arabic. Speaking on condition of anonymity, an Interior Ministry source told Aswat al-Iraq that, “Three guards working for the Dar al-Salam Bank located on Sa’adoun Street in central Baghdad were able to attack the bank . . . stealing a sum of up to $282 million dollars, and fled in an unknown direction after implementing the operation.”

…The New York Times confirms that the stolen money was denomiated in US dollars, not Iraqi dinars.

…and speculated that the perpetrators of the robbery may have been linked to militias, citing the ease of the getaway in a city thick with checkpoints.

While the sum of $282 million is massive, especially by Iraqi standards, it would fund less than one day of US expenses for operations in Iraq.

And it looks like the fighting between the Lebanese military and Fatah al-Islam has just started up again:

Four Lebanese soldiers have been killed after the army resumed heavy shelling of a Palestinian refugee camp near Tripoli where fighters from the Fatah al-Islam group have been holed up for weeks. The bombardment on Thursday came a day after more than 150 people left the Nahr al-Bared camp amid fears that the army was preparing an assault.

“Today’s bombardment is a first step in the final battle against the terrorist group whose fighters have refused to surrender to the army,” an army officer told the AFP news agency.

But a military statement denied that the bombardment was part of a final assault on the camp.



Yesterday as I was watching Fox News, I heard a small but sharp explosion and the clatter of plastic shrapnel. The batteries in my VCR remote, which I last remember replacing sometime in college, decided that they’d had enough. A cursory examination of the debris showed the batteries were supposed to expire in 2012, with the Mayan calendar. But no, these AA’s wanted to suicide-bomb their way into battery heaven, where presumably they are recharged by seventy virgin AAA’s every night.

It brought home the point that terrorists (if we choose to define them as such) are everywhere, and they’re not just Arabs, to the chagrin of racists everywhere. Part of the problem here is that we’re supposedly waging, in the words of Terry Jones, “a war on an abstract noun,” i.e., “terror.” Well, if that’s what we’re doing, it can’t just be a war on one particular group of loosely-knit terrorists, but on terrorism and intimidation-by-violence everywhere, no?

Let us turn, briefly, to that racist for all seasons, Debbie Schlussel:

An unnamed 23-year-old man from Canton, Michigan—a Detroit suburb near Dearbornistan with a large Muslim population composed primarily of Pakis, er . . . Pakistanis—should be among this year’s candidates for the Darwin awards. He and his friends created homemade bombs using gunpowder and tennis and ping-pong balls. The unnamed man almost lost one of his hands from an explosion from one of the bombs, Sunday. He and his friends were throwing the bombs onto the road from the side of a truck.

More from the Canton Eagle:

A night of hurling improvised cherry bombs from a pickup truck ended poorly for one Canton resident on Sunday night. According to Canton Police, a 23-year-old man sought treatment at Oakwood Healthcare Center on Canton Center Road after a Ping-Pong ball filled with a chemical compound exploded in his hand.

Sgt. Rick Pomorski said the man and two friends learned how to make the devices, which were also made using tennis balls, on the Internet.

“Playing with explosives is a very risky behavior,” he said. “It only takes one mistake and you could lose life or limb.”

The injury to the man’s right hand was extensive, said Pomorski, who has encountered this type of incident before.

… Since Muslim terrorists are generally more clandestine—and occasionally more clever—than that, looking for the best way to hurt the most infidels and not get caught, the man and his buddies might not be Muslims. But who knows? We know how the media generally tries to shield the “Religion of Peace,” from any and all crimes—like the Trolley Square terrorist in Utah, the UNC jeep jihadist in Raleigh, NC, the Seattle Jewish Community Center terrorist, etc., etc., etc., ad nauseam.

Maybe calling Debbie a racist is a little extreme. Is it really “racist” to hear about a crime in the news and immediately assume that it was committed by a particular minority? Oh… right, it is. Anyway, I submit to Ms. Schlussel: are you prepared to accept that this incident is significant no matter which way the matter of the perp’s ethnicity turns out? Because if he turns out to be a redneck Baptist, I’m going to officially stop calling Christianity the Religion of Peace. Same deal if he’s a Jain or Buddhist. Clearly, Debbie is betting that her powers of prognostication will bear out and this guy will be Muslim, but what has she bet against, exactly?

I’m prepared to accept that this incident is significant in the war on terror, by the way, no matter if he’s from Lahore or Laramie. This person clearly has problems, no matter his background. Being effective in any sort of war on terror, if we’re to take this phrase seriously, means preventing terrorist or pseudo-terrorist attacks on civilians regardless of the political affiliation of the assailants.

It’s strange to think that only a decade ago, it was the Democrats who had the Republicans over a barrel on this issue. After the Oklahoma City bombing, Clinton cracked down on domestic terrorism from right-wing militias and many GOP members were raising concerns about civil liberties and profiling and so forth. You couldn’t buy fertilizer in sufficient quantities for a family farm without getting a visit from the FBI in those days.

If we’re REALLY going to start profiling, we could talk about the history of domestic terrorism, which is not great for white people, from the Ku Klux Klan, the militias, Operation Rescue and the anti-abortion killers, organized crime and so forth.

And then there’s the elephant in the room, the spree killing. Traditionally, terrorism is defined as having a political component, to distinguish it from aimless psychopathy. But that isn’t really a practical distinction when it comes to securing a campus or a workplace—no matter what their manifestos say, the goals of a random psychopath and a politically motivated psychopath are practically the same.

I’ve been wanting to write about the Virginia Tech shootings for a while. I wanted to wait for an appropriate amount of time Many people have pointed out that Iraq, for example, experiences the equivalent of a VT shooting every day.

That’s why I want to talk about VT’s associate vice president for university relations, Larry Hincker. Did anyone else catch the press conference he gave a few days after the shootings? His remarks were basically to the effect of, “get off my lands, you media vultures!” It was a terrible, yet beautiful moment.

I just spell-checked Hincker’s name on Google and it brought me to a blog post at Uncommon Sense and, coincidentally, my next point. This is some of what Uncommon Sense has to say about Hincker:

Well, it seems like the moron himself feels qualified to write on these matters. The only real difference between his screed and the thousands of imbecilic screeds like it is that he bet against the odds of being proved stupid, and lost. Guns don’t belong in classrooms. They never will. Virginia Tech has a very sound policy preventing same. Well, mutherfucker, your “sound policy” and $3.50 will get you a latte at Starbucks, you brainless and dangerous shithead.

I suppose if you take the pro-firearm argument to a logical extreme, restricting the Second Amendment rights of the mentally ill is unconstitutional and unconscionable. After all, the more paranoid you are, the greater your self-defense needs, right?

Gun advocates say we’d be safer if everyone was armed. Fair enough—why don’t we test that assertion before we go off half cocked there, buddy? It’s a fairly simple social experiment, which I will offer to any sociology student as long as I get credited for the idea.

All you need to do is set up a classroom or workplace-themed first-person shooter game. Then invite college students (or high school kids, if you’re a real gun nut) to play for a few hours, arming them with as many virtual weapons as they can carry. The students will be told there may be a spree killer and/or suicide bomber on the loose somewhere on campus. Not every character will be controlled by a player or be armed.

In test A, there will be one player at random will be assigned to play the serial killer. In test B, one student will play a suicide bomber. Test C will function as the control scenario, where no player will be assigned a malicious role.

So, how many people will ultimately end up getting shot? This blogger already wants to launch another Wilmington Insurrection because a “bill that would have given college students and employees the right to carry handguns on campus” didn’t pass the Virginia legislature over the objections of police officers and school officials:

I can think of about 64 parents, 108 grandparents, and who knows how many siblings, cousins, aunts, and uncles that ought to be righteously securing many pounds of flesh among the pond scum, douche bags, and ass wipes peopling the Virginia “House Committee on Militia, Police and Public Safety.”

Yeah, nice job of helping your fellow gun owners prove you’re uniformly well-adjusted.* How long before someone gets bored or annoyed or misfires their weapon (in real life)?

Unlike Schlussel and her ilk, I’m prepared to accept any outcome, even though I hypothesize a bad one. As I’ve said previously, you’re not going to get rid of guns in America. But you can at least educate people about them. Because if you’re going to argue that arming everyone is more effective than metal detectors, you’ve got to prove it to me.

the solution to the war in Iraq may be political, but it’s on the home front that conservatives are more right than they think. When it comes to domestic terrorism, there will always be some people who ‘hate America’ no matter what we do, in the sense that there are always some maladjusted citizens who want to go out and kill a bunch of Americans and terrorize the populace.

What’s effective against terrorists is an evolving defensive strategy, not the prosecution of illegal wars abroad. There was all this talk about there being a danger Al-Qaeda would get ideas from the VT shooter. How about the reverse? How about the home-grown terrorist groups of the future (or even the present)?

Just wanted to thank everyone who’s been coming to this humble little blog lately. My traffic has doubled, due in no small part to my fellow Koufax nominees linking to my recent post about the whole British-to-Emirate ports deal. Then there are all the people looking up either David Sanborn or Muhammad Sharaf, sometimes in conjunction with Bin Laden, or Michael Moore. Search terms tell you a lot about how people think.

Oh The E-Rye-E Was A Rising, And The Gin Was A Getting Low

Speaking of which, I got into a bit of an argument (by accident, I swear!) with the estimable BattlePanda, who had posted on Ezra Klein’s blog, and I quote,

[I]f we let a British company run those ports for all these years, there is simply no reason not to let a UAE company run it now.

And that’s really what I’ve been trying to say. Also, for the record, there is definitely a segment of the outcry that is racist, and almost all of it is overblown. But as long-time readers here know, I put the ‘b’ back in subtle arguments.

In case you were wondering, I don’t see this as being a major issue either way when it comes right down to it. My objection is the same as John Nichols’ at the Nation: P & O is a corporation, and that’s really the issue. The reason only 5% of our cargo gets inspected is because more thorough inspection hurts the bottom line. And the reason I advocated nationalizing the port operations is because I’m a crazed pinko socialist baby-eating atheist.* It’s pretty simple, really.

Good points are being made on all sides here. There wasn’t a hell of a lot of legally required due diligence on the part of the government in approving the deal, which may or may not have anything to do with the appointment of David Sanborn as Maritime Administrator and John Snow being the head of CSX when they sold their port operations to DP World. Nixing the deal will prove to the Arab world that both parties are pandering to Arabophobes, and that no matter how nice Muslims play, they’re unlikely to get a fair shake in this country. Bush is not to be trusted. Neither are multinational corporations. Dubai is a vital port for our Navy, and for the passing of illicit nuclear and contraband materiel.

To tell you the truth, I’m tired of this story, even though it’s a windfall for Democrats and highly amusing to watch the GOP scramble to chastize Bush about it. As BattlePanda said, pass the popcorn.

Crunchy Red Staters

You know what I like to do when I’m bored or intoxicated? That’s right–watch the 700 Club. Pat Robertson may be a lunatic bordering on self-parody, but he sure is entertaining to watch. Yesterday, CBN featured a piece about “Crunchy Cons,” which are conservatives (usually religious home-schooler types) who are into organic food and environmentalism. At the end of the segment, Pat asks his co=host if she’s ever tasted organic chicken, and then goes on to talk about how it has flavors–flavors you couldn’t even imagine! Wonderful flavors! And the acid ain’t bad, either.

This kind of dovetails with an article I read in the Nation the other day about the Green Party in Germany. Even though they’re out of government, their programs and influence live on under the current centrist coalition. In particular,

Embracing a green jobs program the Greens had long championed, [CDU Chancellor] Merkel decreed that from now on 5 percent of all pre-1978 German housing would be made energy efficient every year. Toward that end, the government will spend 1.5 billion euros a year subsidizing the installation of more efficient insulation, heating and electricity systems in houses and apartment buildings across the nation. That is a major outlay of money, especially considering widespread calls to trim Germany’s budget deficit, but the program is seen as a win-win-win. The 1.5 billion euros will be recouped through lower energy bills. Lower energy use will mean less air pollution and lower greenhouse gas emissions. And, most important of all for a nation fighting double-digit rates of unemployment, the efficiency upgrades will create thousands of jobs that cannot be outsourced overseas.

And everybody’s been talking about evangelicals getting in on environmentalism, too (I guess they figured out there should be some kind of Plan B in case Jesus doesn’t show up next week).

In a world where the kulturkampf is overheating, it’s always nice to see issues moving out of the controversial zone of ‘progressive politics’ into the mainstream. Particularly environmentalism, becuase if everybody doesn’t get hip to it soon, we’ll all be doomed (whoops! too late. But at least some of us are trying). And as I’ve said here in the past, all that needs to happen is show that the choice between evironmentalism and employment is a false dichotomy.

Let’s get back to Crunchy Cons for a second. This is the kind of movement I appreciate, because it really embodies a live-and-let-live spirit. Even if they embrace other values I find highly disturbing, conservatives going back to the land aren’t hurting anybody; they’re living lives of private virtue and contributing to the community while they do it. And while I’m not a big organic food consumer, I would gladly sit down at a farm table for a calm, rational discussion with people like that.

Anyway, what I really wanted to talk about here is not organic food. It’s NASCAR.

Imagine the impact it would have on America if just one of the “stock cars” running endlessly around the track were running on clean fuel? By the way, I am not talking about Ethanol until the Green Revolution is over and a gallon of corn-based alcohol doesn’t take more than a gallon of gas to produce. It wouldn’t even need a top-five finish, just be able to keep up with the rest of the pack. Trust me, it would sell a million clean vehicles in a week. I’m writing letters to some auto companies, who’s with me?

Gentlemen, Start Your War Engines!

While America was shitting themselves over port operations, Iraq proved once and for all that they are, in fact, in the midst of a civil war.

Sunnis destroy dome of an historic Shiite mosque, and 60 other Shiite mosques were attacked across Iraq.

Also, Sunnis are boycotting the Shiite-dominated government.

Don’t worry–just keep saying “we are bringing democracy and peace to the Middle East by invading Iraq,” and it’ll magically become true. Because our presence brings stability; and if things don’t stabilize, we’ll shoot you.

–
*You all thought I was kidding, didn’t you. Don’t worry, I only eat organic, free-range babies.

If you didn’t think the White House was bereft of shame or even a sense of irony before, all you need to do is witness the latest salvo in its attempts to whitewash its failures. Today, in the midst of the investigations of Bush’s illegal NSA spying program (Bush supporters might prefer “extralegal” or “supralegal”) and the revelations that Libby was authorized to leak by his “White House superiors,” the President goes on television and details the thwarting of a four-year old terrorist plot against a skyscraper he can’t properly identify.

As soon as I heard the “10 terrorist plot” meme in White House communiques, I knew that they were going to save details of each undisclosed one for tough PR situations like the one they find themselves in today. But if you look closely at the speech the president gave, you’ll notice something:

Since September the 11th, the United States and our coalition partners have disrupted a number of serious al Qaeda terrorist plots — including plots to attack targets inside the United States. Let me give you an example. In the weeks after September the 11th, while Americans were still recovering from an unprecedented strike on our homeland, al Qaeda was already busy planning its next attack. We now know that in October 2001, Khalid Shaykh Muhammad — the mastermind of the September the 11th attacks — had already set in motion a plan to have terrorist operatives hijack an airplane using shoe bombs to breach the cockpit door, and fly the plane into the tallest building on the West Coast. We believe the intended target was Liberty [sic] Tower in Los Angeles, California.* Rather than use Arab hijackers as he had on September the 11th, Khalid Shaykh Muhammad sought out young men from Southeast Asia — whom he believed would not arouse as much suspicion. To help carry out this plan, he tapped a terrorist named Hambali, one of the leaders of an al Qaeda affiliated group in Southeast Asia called “J-I.” JI terrorists were responsible for a series of deadly attacks in Southeast Asia, and members of the group had trained with al Qaeda. Hambali recruited several key operatives who had been training in Afghanistan. Once the operatives were recruited, they met with Osama bin Laden, and then began preparations for the West Coast attack.

Their plot was derailed in early 2002 when a Southeast Asian nation arrested a key al Qaeda operative. Subsequent debriefings and other intelligence operations made clear the intended target, and how al Qaeda hoped to execute it. This critical intelligence helped other allies capture the ringleaders and other known operatives who had been recruited for this plot. The West Coast plot had been thwarted. Our efforts did not end there. In the summer of 2003, our partners in Southeast Asia conducted another successful manhunt that led to the capture of the terrorist Hambali.

Whom does the President credit with stopping the plot? Surprisingly, it isn’t the U.S. incursion in Iraq, but police in unnamed Southeast Asian countries. Why, if you look at the White House’s list of the Ten Plots, you’ll see that 70% of the time, it’s the “U.S. and allies” who stop terrorists; it seems awfully disingenuous to claim credit for something other countries did. And yet, to quote the White House just four months ago:

The West Coast Airliner Plot: In mid-2002 the U.S. disrupted a plot to attack targets on the West Coast of the United States using hijacked airplanes. The plotters included at least one major operational planner involved in planning the events of 9/11.

There’s something else about the top ten list; the other two examples the U.S. claims sole credit for disrupting are the Jose Padilla and Iyman Faris plots, each of dubious viability.

Iyman Faris’ terrorist activities, for example, involved calling off a plot to bring down the Brooklyn Bridge with blowtorches after realizing it was unfeasible, and then working for the FBI as a double agent (not that this saved him any jail time). Faris had already thwarted the Bridge plan by himself before the FBI caught him, but in PR terms, the only thing that matters is that we caught us a terrist!

As for Jose Padilla, there is considerable dispute about his case, which I won’t really delve into here, but suffice it to say that the government held him for three years without charges, then charged him with none of the crimes they arrested him for in the first place.

So, by its own admission, the United States is nowhere near as effective in apprehending terrorists as “partner nations” with whom it claims multilateral cooperation. But what’s even more striking about the Ten Plots meme is that it underscores the effectiveness of what wingnuts decry as a wimpy, liberal approach–treating terrorism as a police matter.

However, when we do ‘strike at Al-Qaeda,” let’s say in Damadola, Pakistan, for example,

An AP reporter who visited Damadola about 12 hours after the attack saw three destroyed houses, hundreds of yards apart. Villagers had buried at least 15 people, including women and children, and were digging for more bodies in the rubble. Villagers denied hosting al-Zawahri or any other member of al-Qaida or Afghanistan’s ousted Taliban regime, and said all the dead were local people.

More than 8,000 tribesmen staged a peaceful protest in a nearby town Saturday to condemn the air strike, which one speaker described as “open terrorism.” Police dispersed a smaller protest in another town using tear gas. A mob burned the office of a US-backed aid agency near Damadola, but nobody was injured, residents said.

NBC News reported that US and Pakistani officials said Predator drones had fired as many as 10 missiles at Damadola in the Bajur tribal region. ABC quoted anonymous Pakistani military sources as saying al-Zawahri could have been among five top al-Qaida officials believed killed.

…

Doctors told AP that at least 17 people died in the attack, but residents of Damadola, a Pashtun tribal hamlet on a hillside about four miles from the Afghan border, said more than 30 died. They recounted hearing aircraft fly overhead before explosions in the village that were felt miles away.

Speaking as he dug through the rubble of his home, Zaman said he heard planes at around 2:40 a.m. and then eight huge explosions. He said planes had been flying over the village for three or four days.

At another destroyed house, Sami Ullah, a 17-year-old student, said 24 of his family members were killed and vowed he would “seek justice from God.”

No, we’d rather recycle news of a four year old plot than focus on how our military strikes have created terrorists and terrorist sympathizers faster than the U.S. army can kill them. The logic of terrorism fails for both sides; the terrorists think they can get Western countries to bow before them in supplication because they kill a few thousand people out of millions; we think that we can kill enough Islamists to get the Arab world to submit to Western civilization. As the example of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict shows, targeted assassinations, house demolitions and suicide bombings are peripheral to the actual issues at hand for the two camps–violence just begets more violence. But if you want to actually stop terrorists in an operational sense, you have to turn to the international police community. Killing brown people may be emotionally satisfying for a segment of the American public, but it only makes things worse.

Since I seem to be contenting myself with rehashing old themes lately, let’s go with the only one that people consistently seem to enjoy, i.e., actual casual asides.

The Bush-NSA Spying Scandal

Let us consider, for a moment, the depths of what has been revealed here. To begin with, I entered the words “warrant courts wiretap” in to the search engine at whitehouse.org, and you’ll notice a certain tone to the stuff the Bush Administration had been putting out before December 2005.

April 19, 2004

The USA PATRIOT Act uses proven law enforcement methods in new ways to reflect new technologies and new threats. The Act brought the law up-to-date with the new technologies actually used by terrorists, so America no longer has to fight a digital-age battle with outdated legal authorities.

• Roving wiretaps – in which a wiretap authorization attaches to a particular suspect, rather than a particular communication device – have been used by law enforcement for years to investigate ordinary crimes including drug offenses and racketeering. The USA PATRIOT Act authorized the same techniques in national-security investigations. This provision has enhanced the government’s authority to monitor sophisticated international terrorists and intelligence officers, who are trained to thwart surveillance, such as by rapidly changing cell phones, just before important meetings or communications.
• Before September 11, law enforcement could more easily obtain the business and financial records of white-collar criminals than of suspected terrorists.

[ed. note—does anyone else here detect a certain shrill bitterness here on the part of the Administration? Oh, the injustice of making it easy to get the "business and financial records" of business and financial criminals. And really, it begs the question—should we be wiretapping Ken Lay's cell phone in the name of national security?]

…

• The USA PATRIOT Act gives investigators the tools, such as roving wiretaps and delayed-notification search warrants, which are needed to stop terrorists before they strike, fulfilling America’s duty to win the War on Terror and never forget the lessons of September 11, 2001. The USA PATRIOT Act has not diminished our liberty – it has defended our liberty and made America more secure. Congress must renew the USA PATRIOT Act and take further steps to improve our ability to fight terror within the United States.

By the way, it has always bothered me that the guy who just got an failing report card from the actual government task force assigned to strategizing and reshaping our “War on Terror,” i.e., the 9/11 Commission, said, on Decmeber 19th,

And as the 9/11 Commission pointed out, to prevent this from happening again, we need to connect the dots before the enemy attacks, not after. And we need to recognize that dealing with al Qaeda is not simply a matter of law enforcement; it requires defending the country against an enemy that declared war against the United States of America. As President and Commander-in-Chief, I have the constitutional responsibility and the constitutional authority to protect our country. Article II of the Constitution gives me that responsibility and the authority necessary to fulfill it. And after September the 11th, the United States Congress also granted me additional authority to use military force against al Qaeda.

and then turned around in the same speech and said,

My personal opinion is it was a shameful act for someone to disclose this very important program in a time of war. The fact that we’re discussing this program is helping the enemy,

all within the context of asking Congress to renew a law he just admits he broke and doesn’t deem necessary or sufficient for national security. His own government has held his administration responsible (or irresponsible, as the case may be) for making the country less safe than before 9/11, but disclosing an illegal seizure of power by the President is the most destructive act. And by the way, nice tie in to the Commission, I’m sure they appreciate a patronizing aside much more than steps towards making the country ‘safer,’ legally.

By the way, the reason I’m hapring on the 9/11 Commission recomendations is that they institue systemic upgrades to security rather than target a particular religious group, which is the key to stopping terrorism, not just “Al Qaeda,” whatever that may be. The part that Bush would rather seize on, because it provides a venue for the expansion of executive power (Nixon-style) is the wiretap stuff:

June 9th, 2005

Roving Wiretaps Are Essential In Investigating International Terrorists. The Patriot Act extended the use of roving wiretaps, which were already permitted against drug kingpins and mob bosses, to international terrorism investigations. They must be approved by a judge. …

Many Safeguards Exist To Ensure The Patriot Act Is Applied Responsibly.

• Judicial Oversight Protects The Privacy Of Americans. Wiretaps and search warrants require a high level of proof and permission from a judge. The tools in the Patriot Act are fully consistent with the U.S. Constitution. As Senator Diane Feinstein said, “I have no reported abuses.”
• Congress Also Has Oversight Responsibilities. Congress created a Civil Liberties Board to ensure the Patriot Act and other laws uphold civil liberties. The Patriot Act protects America and defends American liberties.

And, of course, there’s still the July 14th, 2004 “Q and A” session, which include such gems as,

Let me answer some questions, and then we’re going to get back on the bus and take it up the highway. Who has got a question? Yes, sir. Yell it — oh, there’s a mike. Q The Patriot Act —

THE PRESIDENT: Patriot Act.

Q The Patriot Act is due to expire —

THE PRESIDENT: Yes.

Q — coming next year. And I find that an important tool for protecting America. And in Wisconsin here, we have Senator Russ Feingold, as you’re aware, the only Senator to vote against the Patriot Act. Wondering if you can tell us all here the importance of the Patriot Act and what we can do to help get that renewed.

THE PRESIDENT: Let me — that’s a great question. A couple of things that are very important for you to understand about the Patriot Act. First of all, any action that takes place by law enforcement requires a court order. In other words, the government can’t move on wiretaps or roving wiretaps without getting a court order.

and again in the infamous speech on April 20th, 2004 in Buffalo:

Incredibly enough, because of — which Larry and others will discuss — see, I’m not a lawyer, so it’s kind of hard for me to kind of get bogged down in the law.

Don’t you mean bogged down with the law?

(Applause.) I’m not going to play like one, either. (Laughter.)

Oh, that’s real fuckin’ funny.

…So the first thing I want you to think about is, when you hear Patriot Act, is that we changed the law and the bureaucratic mind-set to allow for the sharing of information. It’s vital. And others will describe what that means. Secondly, there are such things as roving wiretaps. Now, by the way, any time you hear the United States government talking about wiretap, it requires — a wiretap requires a court order. Nothing has changed, by the way. When we’re talking about chasing down terrorists, we’re talking about getting a court order before we do so.

When asked about this recently, Bush was a bit flummoxed, according to the New York Times:

As Mr. Bush continued to defend the program in San Antonio, he was asked about a remark he made in Buffalo in 2004 at an appearance in support of the antiterrorism law known as the USA Patriot Act, where he discussed government wiretaps. “Any time you hear the United States government talking about wiretap,” Mr. Bush said in Buffalo, “a wiretap requires a court order.”

He added: “Nothing has changed, by the way. When we’re talking about chasing down terrorists, we’re talking about getting a court order before we do so.”

Democrats have seized on the remark, made more than two years after Mr. Bush authorized the N.S.A. to conduct wiretaps without warrants, in charging that the president had misled the public.

Asked about that charge on Sunday, Mr. Bush said: “I was talking about roving wiretaps, I believe, involved in the Patriot Act. This is different from the N.S.A. program.

“The N.S.A. program is a necessary program. I was elected to protect the American people from harm. And on Sept. 11, 2001, our nation was attacked. And after that day, I vowed to use all the resources at my disposal, within the law, to protect the American people, which is what I have been doing and will continue to do.”

The guy doesn’t even run out of resources at his disposal within the law before the goes for a secret program, but don’t let that bother you. After being caught in a lie, he assures us that the program was “limited in scope.” I’m not usually one to say “falsus in unum, falsus in omnes,” but to hear him tell it, the disclosure of any facts about the program basically amounts to treason. So we’ll understand if he lies to us again.

Most people have figured out that there are several possibilities:

1. The Bush adminstration believes that FISA has been compromised by bin Laden and is not secure for submitting requests for otherwise legal wiretaps of the utmost secrecy.
2. The targets of this program met with the requirements of FISA, which the Administration does consult from time to time. Why, according to ever faithful Atty. General Gonzalez,
   

   Another very important point to remember is that we have to have a reasonable basis to conclude that one party to the communication is a member of al Qaeda, affiliated with al Qaeda, or a member of an organization affiliated with al Qaeda, or working in support of al Qaeda. We view these authorities as authorities to confront the enemy in which the United States is at war with — and that is al Qaeda and those who are supporting or affiliated with al Qaeda.

   The Bush administration did not seek approval in violation of the law for absolutely no reason except they felt entitled by the authorization of force in 2001;

3. The targets of this program did not meet the requirements of FISA because they were illegally identified through domestic spying such as Echelon or some other unauthorized search(es);
4. The targets of this program were rejected by FISA for wiretaps and the executive decided to overrule them in clear violation of statute;
5. The targets of this program did not meet FISA requirements because they are not connected with Al Qaeda. We know that Bush’s political enemies list has been shared with the FBI, how about with the NSA? What about all that Pentagon secrect spy group, CIFA, who target anti-war protestors? Is that what we’re talking about? Are our tax dollars going toward secretly wiretapping Kos or Michael Moore? By the way, I’m drafting a letter to be signed and passed around asking for the release of the enemies list via FOIA request.

At any rate, the real question is this: why would the Bush administration recklessly endanger the convictions of suspected terrorists by gathering evidence illegally?

More on this later. As well as a more in-depth analysis of Republican Fascism-lite^TM.

The War on Christmas

Now that the War on Christmas is over (and Christmas won, of course), let’s take a minute to examine what was really being argued on the part of Christian soldiers such as Bill O’Reilly and John Gibson (lovefest excerpted verbatim)

O’REILLY: With us now, Fox News anchor John Gibson, the author of the book The War on Christmas: Why It’s Worse Than You Thought. This is so incredibly stupid I can’t believe it. All you need to do is use all the phrases: “Merry Christmas,” “Happy Holidays,” “Happy Hanukah.” Plenty of advertising space, plenty of room for banners in your store. Why do you think they’re this dumb in excluding “Merry Christmas”? GIBSON: In the book, I talk about this going on in schools and libraries and public parks all over the country. And the only thing I can think about these retailers is they tend to worry about 100 percent of the customers. And if 85 percent of the country is Christian and 90 some percent celebrate Christmas, there’s that little extra percentage that may not.

O’REILLY: Yeah, but surely they understand, because they do understand. We called Toys “R” Us. They knew right away —

GIBSON: Right.

O’REILLY: — OK, that they’re in waters they don’t want to be in. So surely, they understand the anger that’s going to be engendered by millions of Americans who believe that their cherished holiday is being denigrated, disrespected.

GIBSON: Yes, it indicates hostility and —

O’REILLY: By not using the word.

GIBSON: — by refusing to say the word “Christmas.” And what I’ve noticed is the way this appears in schools, for instance, is we now don’t call it the Christmas break. It’s the winter break, as if people worship winter. And there wouldn’t be a winter break if there wasn’t Christmas at that time of year. So once you call it — change the name. You won’t use the word “Christmas,” then you go to “winter,” you can sort of push the Christmas thing out of public view.

O’REILLY: See, I think it’s all part of the secular progressive agenda —

GIBSON: Absolutely.

O’REILLY: — to get Christianity and spirituality and Judaism out of the public square. Because if you look at what happened in Western Europe and Canada, if you can get religion out, then you can pass secular progressive programs like legalization of narcotics, euthanasia, abortion at will, gay marriage, because the objection to those things is religious- based, usually.

GIBSON: You have France or you have — or you have Holland, you have legalized prostitution, you have drugs. All those things come in which religious organizations tend to oppose. Once you start taking out even the secular symbols of religious holidays — Christmas trees, Santas, so forth — refuse to use the word “Christmas,” you can shove this religious stuff indoors, out of sight.

O’REILLY: Yeah, because no kid is going to come home and ask Mom what winter break is.

GIBSON: No.

O’REILLY: But a kid might come home and say, “Hey, what’s this Christmas thing all about? Who is this baby Jesus guy?” You know?

GIBSON: Right.

Now, let’s look at the numbers here. America is actually 75% white and Christian, repsectively, as I have pointed out before. When it comes right down to it, the argument here is that America is, at heart, a Christian nation. It’s the refrain you hear from fundamentalist politicians and think tanks all the time, and it’s based on numerical superiority.

But if you think about it, America would be much more aptly described as being founded as a white country. Not all of the Founding Fathers were Christian—many were Deist—but all of them were white landowning males. See the Treaty of Tripoli for details about our so-called Christian origins. Certainly our legal history bears out this idea. I figure there’s a reason Fox News isn’t more openly pushing the idea of a white America, but for the life of me I can’t figure out why (based on the census and our rich national history, of course).

Now, if you believe that America’s mission statement expanded beyond just providing for white people at some point in the last hundred years, you might be able to recognize the ideas behind civil rights for minorities, the relentless commercialization of a formerly pagan holiday and Emily Post-style common courtesy might lead to a more open and diverse America.

Anyway, what’s so hilarious about the “War on Christmas” is that they keep insisting that Christians have a special right to be offended by inclusive phrases whereas non-Christians have no right to protest exclusive phrases. We can all hope Santa brought Gibson and O’Reilly some moral clarity, but it doesn’t seem likely.

And that’s because Gibson and O’Reilly have it right in one respect: Americans will do whatever retailers tell them to do. If Radio Shack tells you to have a Merry Christmas, you’e going to have a jolly fucking Yuletide, even if you’re goddamn sun-worshipper. And if they tell you to have some “Happy Holidays,” you’re going to put your crucifixes down and drink toasts of babies’ blood to Satan while sodomizing your same-sex secular progressive spouse—and no one will ever know of Christmas or Santa Claus or Irving Berlin ever again.

A New Idea in Campaign Finance Reform

McCain’s curtailments of lobbyists goes in the wrong direction; instead of proposing restrictions on Congress they have no incentive to approve (if you weren’t involved with Abramoff), why not have all lobbyists contribute instead to a slush fund to be equally distributed to all of Congress? You could sell it to lobbyists as a way to increase their lobbying power (while actually diluting/diminishing their ability to lobby particular votes), and then we’d have a record of all contributions. While Vasco v. US remains on the books, bribery is still legal, but by making the money go to a general fund, it would become functionally impossible (and monetarily impractical) to do the kind of influence-peddling deals like Abramoff did. Everybody would be able to see where the money came from and how much there was. If, say, the pharmaceutical industry wants to bribe Congress into favorable legislation, they’re going to have to give each Congressperson the same amount of bribes to do so—maybe a just a bottle of pills apiece. Seems fairer, no?

Dear Dr. Krauthammer,

I came across your article in the Weekly Standard which argued for two hypothetical exceptions from a blanket ban on torturing prisoners by the U.S. government. I must tell you how strongly I disagree with your conclusions merely on practical grounds (to say nothing of the morality of torturing detainees, a complicated issue you did address admirably).

Your first example was laid out as follows:

block|
Let's take the textbook case. Ethics 101: A terrorist has planted a nuclear bomb in New York City. It will go off in one hour. A million people will die. You capture the terrorist. He knows where it is. He's not talking.
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Now, we both took political science degrees at McGill and I can safely say that my freshman year seminar on ethics provided no such justification for torture (of course, we took these classes almost thirty years apart).

But let's look at this particular example carefully, if it can truly be claimed to be a case which justifies torture, as you say:

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Question: If you have the slightest belief that hanging this man by his thumbs will get you the information to save a million people, are you permitted to do it?
|block

I think this justification sidesteps the most important issue here, and that is the veracity of information obtained under torture. If you were a terrorist who knew they could only be torutred for one hour, there would be practically no incentive to give up the true location of the device, because you know they can only torture you for a maximum of one hour before you all die. Likewise, if you give false information, the authorities have one hour to verify your claim, which would almost certainly not be enough time to stop the explosion, but it would save you up to an hour of suitably horrifying pain.

The very urgency of the situation makes it less likely the information you extract (regardless of whether or not you torture) is verifiable. The closer you are to the event horizon the less incentive the prisoner has to give up that information. While the aformentioned nuclear bomb scenario might make for riveting television, it doesn't ring true outside of Fox television on Tuesday nights.

It's true that sometimes torture yields useful information, but there is nothing to suggest that it does so with greater effectiveness than interrogation methods which are prohibited under the 'Body of Principles for the Protection of All Persons under Any Form of Detention or Imprisonment' a UN resolution the US signed in 1988. The waterboarding of Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi yielded the false assertion that Saddam Hussein had conspired with Al-Qaeda, something which we now know to be false, even though this information was presented as fact to the American public by no less than the President and the Vice-President.

The example of al-Libi is instructive because it reveals the point of torturous interrogations. The relationship established between the torturer and the tortured is simple: give me the information I want and I'll stop the pain. It applies as easily to the victims of the Inquisition as to modern-day political prisoners.

It's in light of this 'textbook' example that I wonder what you mean by 'the slightest belief.' Your article indicated that you recognize the danger of the sliding scale in these situations, so the question is really at which point we can safely balance the hypothetical interests of the many against the one.

The second example you gave, of the "slower-fuse high-level terrorist," carries its own interesting implications as well; why limit these practices to terrorists? If the utilitarian calculus of torture outweighs our adherence to international law, then we would have a moral duty to use measures across the board where "the level of inhumanity of the measures used … would be proportional to the need and value of the information." If the actions of a suspect could be construed as harmful to a large enough number of people, why should we not, then, torture white collar criminals whose crimes impact the economy on a large scale? Or heads of state whose decisions lead to the deaths of thousands of soldiers and civilians? Would we be remiss in not torturing eco-terrorists whose targets are industries and not humans? Pharmaceutical executives who manufacture medicines with potentially fatal side effects?

Most importantly, would any country be justified in torturing anyone they capture who holds the kind of information they might find useful in preventing a military attack on their soil? Take the example of John McCain–there is no question that his mission in Vietnam was to kill Viet Cong. Were the North Vietnamese then justified in torturing him into revealing the names of his fellow soldiers, who were posing an immediate risk to the lives of North Vietnamese? And how was it possible for McCain to divulge only the names of the Green Bay Packers offensive line instead of the information his torturers were seeking?

If we are only to rely on anecdotal evidence in determining the effectiveness (and consequently, the morality) of torture, we have no basis in declaring torture to be morally necessitated. Of course, there's more than just the effectiveness of interrogation at stake here, as you noted yourself.

Sincerely,
<br>D. J. Waletzky

Bush’s October 6th speech at the National Endowment for Democracy was so close to self-parody that for once, Bush’s smirks were actually humorous. It was like a Friar’s Club Speech, if the friars were experts on Middle East affairs.

The theme of this speech is the comparison (more precisely, the equation) of Islamist terrorism to Communism. Way to set up your upcoming ‘we will stay the course in Iraq and Afghanistan’ speech where you ask for more money for the war effort. Hey, if you think about it, every billion in mysteriously ‘lost’ funds to contractors like Halliburton is a billion the taxpayers don’t have to spend on education! Everybody wins!

A small aside to those intrepid “Porkbusters” who want to cut various services in lieu of reversing tax cuts for the wealthy to pay for Katrina aid: How about the 9 billion Bremer lost in Iraq’s oil funds which could have helped the reconstruction effort in a time of dire need? Or at least helped to foot the burgeoning war bill? Can we go after government contractors who are constatly misapproriating funds, like Halliburton? I mean, it’s only a billion dollars here and there, but maybe that could pay some of the reconstruction costs. Just a shot in the dark there, especially considering how KBR just got a bunch of contracts to protect New Orlans militia-style. The future of warfare is truly the mercenary army; if they weren’t so damn expensive everyone would have them. Sometimes I wonder; if every GI were being paid as much as the government-contractor private security armies in Iraq, would we have been so quick to rush to war? Could the market pressure of occupation be a force for peace? Not likely, as we keep paying assloads of money to be in Iraq all the time, but it does kind of make you wonder about ‘business conservatives’ who might apply a cost/benefit analysis to the Iraq war.

Anyway, here’s the first half of the speech–I’ve been really busy lately and working on this piece since the 7th. The rest will have to come later, sorry. I swear I’m not consciously invoking Festinger’s theory of Cognitive Dissonance. However, while we’re at it, I would like people to think that when, say, I don’t post for a week, that in the words of Kibo’s brilliant FAQ:

KIBO HASN’T POSTED ANYTHING FOR TWO DAYS. IS HE DEAD? No, he’s just busy writing a carefully-crafted one-line posting which says “DOIDY. DOIDY. DOIDY. DOIDY.” only a million times better ’cause it’s taking him days to write it.

Back to our the terrorism speech. There’s a theme Bush develops in his speech, although he doesn’t do it consciously. What he’s really decrying are the beliefs, the ideology of radical Islamists. But as for their goals… well, you’ll see. At any rate, it shows you something about how the neocon moral system works: it’s wrong if they do it, but not if we do it. But more importantly, might makes right. We have the means to pursue global hegemony, and by God, we’re going to do it. Even if it means costly military engagements, or war crimes, or anything else we have to do

.Seriously, if you want to have a serious discussion about ideology with the Arab world, don’t send the great theologian George Bush. Send someone ‘sensitive,’ like a chick. Maybe send PR queen Karen Hughes, they love that shit over there. And the worst thing you can do is to quote the other guy’s brutality as evidence of their evil aims–you don’t even mention our brutalities. Didn’t you want to make the argument that their war crimes justifies ours, like you do in US courts? It just makes the choice for Iraqis and Arabs around the world more muddled; our hypocrisy doesn’t help us in the slightest. The news media around the world aren’t under Bush’s thumbs they way they are here.

So, the speech. Our illustrious presdient–who has previously said, mind you, that he gets his news from the most objective people he knows (his staff), said (emphases mine, of course):

All these separate images of destruction and suffering that we see on the news can seem like random and isolated acts of madness; innocent men and women and children have died simply because they boarded the wrong train, or worked in the wrong building, or checked into the wrong hotel. Yet while the killers choose their victims indiscriminately, their attacks serve a clear and focused ideology, a set of beliefs and goals that are evil, but not insane.
…
When 25 Iraqi children are killed in a bombing, or Iraqi teachers are executed at their school, or hospital workers are killed caring for the wounded, this is murder, pure and simple — the total rejection of justice and honor and morality and religion.

Way to set ourselves on the moral high ground! I think he just called our troops murderers. Because I can think of a few examples (check this page for a complete accounting of internationally reported deaths).

Coalition forces have killed the following civilians (and these are only a few examples excluding those killed in crossfire with insurgents): a family in car driving too close to US convoy (Karbala, Sep 2005); 56 people in ‘suspected safe-houses’ (Husayba, Karbala, Qaim area, Aug 2005); 9-15 people, including 3 or 4 children outside a mosque (August 2005); 12 bricklayers from Abu Ghraib, who suffocated in a police van (July 2005); TV producer Ahmad Wail Bakri, Maha Ibrahim, a local television news editor, and an unnamed Iraqi news reporter (Baghdad, June 2005); a family of six, including 4 children (Hit, 6 May 2005), 14 people killed by laser-guided bomb targeting the wrong house (8 January 2005); A family of 4 in a taxi near Abu Ghraib (23 Dec 2004); 20 people–demolishing four houses by air raid, 1 child playing soccer–and eight of his friends (al-Fakhirya and Abu Ghraib, September 2004); countless civilians in the destruction of Fallujah: “Americans did not have interpreters with them, so they entered houses and killed people because they didn’t speak English! They entered the house where I was with 26 people, and shot people because they didn’t obey their orders, even just because the people couldn’t understand a word of English. Ninety-five percent of the people killed in the houses that I saw were killed because they couldn’t speak English” (November, 2004); another family of 6 with four children in an air strike (Fallujah, October 2004); at least 30 people in air raids on (Fallujah September 2004); up to 84 people in air strikes (Al-Sharkia, Kut, August 2004); 15 people in an air strike on a suspected safe-house (Shuhada, Fallujah July 2004); 29 people during air-strikes of suspected Zarqawi hideouts (Fallujah, June 2004); 9 people in air strikes (Karbala, May 2004); 42 people at a wedding party by air strike (Makr-al-Deeb, May 2004); 9-15 people by gunfire, including ABC cameraman and 3 children (Fallujah, March 2004); 2 people in a station wagon including a 10-year old (Baghdad, January, 2004); 4 people in a taxi by heavy-calibre machine gun fire (near Tikrit, January 2004); 4 policemen, 5 demonstrators, 1 vegetable seller, and one “70-year-old man ‘died of fright, apparently a heart attack’ when U.S. troops put a bag over his head in preparation to detain him’” (Mosul, Samarra, Baghdad, Sleiman Beg, December 2003); 3 people at a market by “gunfire from passing armoured vehicles,” possibly testing recently purchased guns (Sadr City, Nov 2003); 6 people by gunfire at an “unnanounced U.S. checkpoint” (north of Basra, August 2003); 7 people by gunfire during the hunt for Saddam Hussein and family, including 14-year old son of Qusay (Baghdad, July 2003); 1 child run over by U.S. convoy (Basra highway, June 2003); 1 child run over by U.S. convoy (Ramadi, May 2003); 85 people in air strikes (Rashidiya, April 2003); 78 people in coalition bombings (Hillah and surroundings, March 2003); 1,473-2,000 people who ended up in 19 Baghdad hospitals (20 March-09 April 2003); 2 people in aerial bombardment of a children’s hospital (Rutbah, March 2003); 201 people in the aerial bombing of Baghdad’s General Hospital “incl. consequent loss of electricity” (March 2003); 226 in air raids over Nassiriya (March 2003); 22 in air attacks and cluster bombs (Manaria, Talkana and Zambrania villages, Mohammedia district, March 2003); 2 people in the Palestine Hotel by tank fire (Baghdad, April 2003); 5 people in a Red Crescent Maternity Hospital (Baghdad, March 2003); 22 people in the vicintiy of Khurmal by air strikes and bombardment (March 2003); 5 people in a Syrian passenger bus by air-to-surface missile (Al-Rutbah, March 2003).

The list literally goes on and on, but you have to remember, these people are less dead than those killed by insurgents. Therefore they have less power to sway Iraqis to the Dark Side, q.e.d.

Many militants are part of global, borderless terrorist organizations like al Qaeda, which spreads propaganda, and provides financing and technical assistance to local extremists, and conducts dramatic and brutal operations like September the 11th.

If only they would incorporate in Delaware (or Bermuda), they’d be under the aegis of a multinational corporation–then they could act with impunity! Al-Qaeda’s real problem is they haven’t fully realized the benefits of Westernization–they get the Internet and cell phones but haven’t quite figured out corporate structuring. Wait until they discover outsourcing.

The militant network wants to use the vacuum created by an American retreat to gain control of a country, a base from which to launch attacks and conduct their war against non-radical Muslim governments.

Why bother using a vacuum created by an American retreat when the one caused by the American presence is working so well for them? Iraqis are embracing radical Islam because the U.S. is fighting so hard against it–the enemy of my enemy is my friend-type thinking. It doesn’t help that our hypocrisy and deceit are so bold-faced. And the fact that the whole world is watching means that insurgents and Al-Qaedaists are coming from “bases” all around the world, including terrorist strongholds like Britain and Jamaica.

Over the past few decades, radicals have specifically targeted Egypt, and Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan, and Jordan for potential takeover. They achieved their goal, for a time, in Afghanistan. Now they’ve set their sights on Iraq. Bin Laden has stated: “The whole world is watching this war and the two adversaries. It’s either victory and glory, or misery and humiliation.” The terrorists regard Iraq as the central front in their war against humanity. And we must recognize Iraq as the central front in our war on terror.

Does Bush even realize the bin Laden quote he uses disproves his (much earlier) point about Saddam being in league with the terrorists? It is precisely the chaos caused by America’s invasion which makes Iraq such a tempting target for Islamofascism. Having rebooted Afghanistan’s cycle of violence, we decided to bring a new terrorist training ground online in the most visible failure of our understanding of global political realities to date.

Third, the militants believe that controlling one country will rally the Muslim masses, enabling them to overthrow all moderate governments in the region,

Cold war references complete with domino theory! Of course, the neoconservatives who launched this war have been advocating “democratic domino theory” so that presumably we can rally the Muslim masses to overthrow their ‘moderate’ governments…

and establish a radical Islamic empire that spans from Spain to Indonesia. With greater economic and military and political power, the terrorists would be able to advance their stated agenda: to develop weapons of mass destruction, to destroy Israel, to intimidate Europe, to assault the American people, and to blackmail our government into isolation.

Good thing we delivered all those weapons and fresh recruits to the terrorists, because otherwise they might actually have to shop around for a state to support them. You know, besides Iran.

As Zarqawi has vowed, “We will either achieve victory over the human race or we will pass to the eternal life.” And the civilized world knows very well that other fanatics in history, from Hitler to Stalin to Pol Pot, consumed whole nations in war and genocide before leaving the stage of history. Evil men, obsessed with ambition and unburdened by conscience, must be taken very seriously — and we must stop them before their crimes can multiply.

You know, for a second there I thought he was quoting Zarqawi as an inspiration. Bush, are you burdened by conscience?

Defeating the militant network is difficult, because it thrives, like a parasite, on the suffering and frustration of others.

On the other hand, the job of America seems to be provide, or at least exacerbate, this nourishing suffering and frustration, so that we can continue to fight the terrorists abroad and not at home.

The radicals exploit local conflicts to build a culture of victimization, in which someone else is always to blame and violence is always the solution. They exploit resentful and disillusioned young men and women, recruiting them through radical mosques as the pawns of terror. And they exploit modern technology to multiply their destructive power.

Except for the radical mosques, this is a farily accurate description of our military recruiters’ job. In fact, it’s a pretty accurate description of our military. I mean, I can’t even tell the difference between them any more…

Instead of attending faraway training camps, recruits can now access online training libraries to learn how to build a roadside bomb, or fire a rocket-propelled grenade — and this further spreads the threat of violence, even within peaceful democratic societies.

…oh, right, al-Qaeda has a more cost-effective basic training program.

Some have also argued that extremism has been strengthened by the actions of our coalition in Iraq, claiming that our presence in that country has somehow caused or triggered the rage of radicals.

Some of these so called “experts” have even infiltrated the CIA.

I would remind them that we were not in Iraq on September the 11th, 2001 — and al Qaeda attacked us anyway.
…
The hatred of the radicals existed before Iraq was an issue, and it will exist after Iraq is no longer an excuse.

Master of logic! Behold, an excerpt from bin Laden’s 1998 fatwa establishing The Jihad Against Jews and Crusaders where he lists those unaddressable grievances:

First, for over seven years the United States has been occupying the lands of Islam in the holiest of places, the Arabian Peninsula, plundering its riches, dictating to its rulers, humiliating its people, terrorizing its neighbors, and turning its bases in the Peninsula into a spearhead through which to fight the neighboring Muslim peoples. If some people have in the past argued about the fact of the occupation, all the people of the Peninsula have now acknowledged it. The best proof of this is the Americans’ continuing aggression against the Iraqi people using the Peninsula as a staging post, even though all its rulers are against their territories being used to that end, but they are helpless. Second, despite the great devastation inflicted on the Iraqi people by the crusader-Zionist alliance, and despite the huge number of those killed, which has exceeded 1 million… despite all this, the Americans are once against trying to repeat the horrific massacres, as though they are not content with the protracted blockade imposed after the ferocious war or the fragmentation and devastation. So here they come to annihilate what is left of this people and to humiliate their Muslim neighbors.

Third, if the Americans’ aims behind these wars are religious and economic, the aim is also to serve the Jews’ petty state and divert attention from its occupation of Jerusalem and murder of Muslims there. The best proof of this is their eagerness to destroy Iraq, the strongest neighboring Arab state, and their endeavor to fragment all the states of the region such as Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Sudan into paper statelets and through their disunion and weakness to guarantee Israel’s survival and the continuation of the brutal crusade occupation of the Peninsula.

So, not only are their grievances mostly about America’s foreign policy before the Iraqi war, it’s also about the embargo of Iraq which, all will agree, killed at least a million civilians. Call it a “conspicuous abscence” from Iraq, then.

The government of Russia did not support Operation Iraqi Freedom, and yet the militants killed more than 180 Russian schoolchildren in Beslan.

It’s called Chechnya, numbnuts. You have to be banking on a pretty ignorant public to hope this line resonates. Talk about bald-faced bullshit.

Over the years these extremists have used a litany of excuses for violence — the Israeli presence on the West Bank, or the U.S. military presence in Saudi Arabia, or the defeat of the Taliban, or the Crusades of a thousand years ago. In fact, we’re not facing a set of grievances that can be soothed and addressed. We’re facing a radical ideology with inalterable objectives: to enslave whole nations and intimidate the world. No act of ours invited the rage of the killers — and no concession, bribe, or act of appeasement would change or limit their plans for murder.

Good thing all we want to do is impoverish whole nations and intimidate the world (“you’re either with us or against us”). Also, we are totally blameless, because all this is is a bunch of wackos in some cave somewhere with weird stories about “the Muslim world’s unhappy collision with the modern West. Triumphant for a thousand years, Muslims have now witnessed three-hundred years of unrelenting defeat… the Arab Middle East easily takes solace in a ruthless despot who can intimidate America.

“Ooops, that wasn’t bin Laden, it was Reuel Marc Gerecht in The Weekly Standard (May 14, 2001). My mistake.

On the contrary: They target nations whose behavior they believe they can change through violence.

And that’s just wrong. Unless we do it, because we’re on a mission from God.

Our enemy is utterly committed.
…
Against such an enemy, there is only one effective response: We will never back down, never give in, and never accept anything less than complete victory. (Applause.)

He better hope there aren’t any impressionable young Muslims listening.

The murderous ideology of the Islamic radicals is the great challenge of our new century. Yet, in many ways, this fight resembles the struggle against communism in the last century. Like the ideology of communism, Islamic radicalism is elitist, led by a self-appointed vanguard that presumes to speak for the Muslim masses. Bin Laden says his own role is to tell Muslims, quote, “what is good for them and what is not.” And what this man who grew up in wealth and privilege considers good for poor Muslims is that they become killers and suicide bombers. He assures them that his — that this is the road to paradise — though he never offers to go along for the ride.

The strain of comparisons to Communism aside, bin Laden has always vowed he will never be captured alive. But then again, even money says he’s already dead.

Like the ideology of communism, our new enemy teaches that innocent individuals can be sacrificed to serve a political vision. And this explains their cold-blooded contempt for human life.

Remember Secretary Albright’s response when she was asked about the million Iraqis killed by the embargo? She said, “It’s worth it.” And we’re not even talking about casualties from air strikes.

These militants are not just the enemies of America, or the enemies of Iraq, they are the enemies of Islam and the enemies of humanity. (Applause.)

I’m going to take a small break from humorously skewering our sneering dunce of a President to agree with the above statement. Anyone who kills civilians is the enemy of humanity, whether those civilians are American or Iraqi. The insurgents, terrified and frustrated with the U.S. occupation, have chosen the worst possible response to their predicament, to kill innocents and destabilize their country in the name of god-knows-what. But the alternative isn’t all that appetizing, either:

We have seen this kind of shameless cruelty before, in the heartless zealotry that led to the gulags,

Hey, look, he worked in a Guantanamo reference. Very classy.

I’m going to stop here and pick this up again, but I leave you with one more tibdit:

Its leaders pretend to be an aggrieved party, representing the powerless against imperial enemies. In truth they have endless ambitions of imperial domination, and they wish to make everyone powerless except themselves. Under their rule, they have banned books, and desecrated historical monuments, and brutalized women. They seek to end dissent in every form, and to control every aspect of life, and to rule the soul, itself. While promising a future of justice and holiness, the terrorists are preparing for a future of oppression and misery.

As the pro-war contingent of American politics becomes increasingly desperate–oh, who am I kidding, it’s actually just standard operating procedure on both sides of the aisle–we have progressed to ad hominem attacks on prominent anti-war media figures. As with the Dixie Chicks, Michael Moore, Tim Robbins, and so forth, we now have hawks trying to tear down Cindy Sheehan of Crawford vigil fame.

Now, I usually don’t care about things like this–I don’t particularly care about Cindy Sheehan as an individual, either–I care about ultimate political consequences. Cindy Sheehan (and/or her media handlers) definitely have the knack for getting media coverage, and that’s a good thing–not a good thing in and of itself, mind you, but because it’s the only antidote to Karl Rove’s extreme media savvy (more about this in a moment).

With this in mind, I came across Eric‘s post entitled “Emotion or Reason?” which reads, in part,

So, we talked about Cindy Sheehan, the opposition to the war, and so forth. As we did, we discussed the arguments being made against the war by the Left, and what became clear is that their arguments are, for the most part, based on emotions not reason. There are some reasons to oppose the war that are not based on emotion, but the anti-war crowd knows that those are weak and won’t sway the public to their side, so their only hope is to attack the war proponents using emotion.

A small technical point; recent polls suggest the majority of the country has, in fact, already been swayed; Cindy’s approve/disapprove numbers are 53/42 (almost exactly the same ratio as respondents who say we shouldn’t have gone into Iraq in the first place) compared to a 37/58 rating for Bush’s handling of the war.

But the effectiveness of Sheehan’s appeal is basically unquantifiable. The question here is whether the reasons for and against war are basically rational or emotional.

Now, as James would say, the question is how you define ‘emotional appeal.’ As I wrote previously, every political position is based on base fears, those bits of axiomatic emotional logic which take precedence over other such bits. If I had to take a stab at laying down some guideline for “emotional” versus “rational” appeals, I’d have to say that emotional appeals involve an individual or small group of individual concerns, while rational appeals talk about statistics and larger numbers of people. (My utilitarianism is showing, I know.)

Let’s get back to Cindy and Casey Sheehan. Now, what I’m about to say is likely going to be controversial, but honestly, I couldn’t give two shits about military losses. These people signed up for mortal danger (yes, even the National Guard folks) and they knew what they were getting into in terms of coming home in a bodybag (Gulf War Syndrome and their chidrens’ birth defects are a different matter, however). Let me be clear: in order to be willing to kill another, you have to be willing to be die by another’s hand. For a pacifist and consientious objector like myself, anyone who is willing to kill is as good as dead in my eyes. So Ms. Sheehan’s appeal doesn’t carry that much weight for me, personally. Soldiers killing other soldiers doesn’t retain much shock value; it’s just a wargame with live ammo and limbs being ripped off and all that other ‘glorious’ stuff you see in war movies.

What I care about almost exclusively when it comes to war are civilian casualties. This, apparently, puts me at a distinct political disadvantage when arguing about Iraq, principally because Americans have a pervasive disregard for foreigners and for the most part do not care how many of them are killed by U. S. troops. Before you call me a “blame America firster” or something equally stupid, bear in mind that Americans are in no way unique in this respect.

Sometimes I wonder if an Iraqi Cindy Sheehan-type (that is, a mother of a civilian casualty) would get as much coverage by the American press or have as much influence on the way people think about the war. I don’t think she would–any thoughts, readers? Because there are way, way more war widows and simililarly bereaved parents in Iraq and Afghanistan than here. And as I said, it’s about large numbers: one cindy Sheehan is a media circus, but 100,000 Cindy Sheehans is a bonafide political movement.

Let’s get back to Eric (and as a veteran, I’m sure he has something to say about my point about soldiers). In the comments for his post, he wrote (in response to something I said about “moral superiority”),

Do I take into consideration the arguments anyone makes? Yes, I do. Do I think that they should have moral authority and be able to pre-empt the debate with an appeal to my emotions? No. But that is precisely what the anti-war Left is trying to do with Cindy Sheehan (and numerous other examples).

In terms of Sheehan’s emotional appeals, the most poignant one is her sense of betrayal by the president in terms of how the war was sold. I know it’s all ancient history, but back in August 2003 (when Casey re-enlisted), the war was enjoying a 63/35 worth it/not worth it split in the polls and we were still looking for weapons of mass destruction. I suppose this has less impact on me because I never believed in the war in the first place, so I don’t feel betrayed.

But since we’re talking about the invalidity of emotional appeals, what needs to be discussed is how the whole war itself was based on emotional as opposed to rational appeals. There were very few Middle East scholars who thoguht Iraq posed a threat to the U.S. or that the war was a good idea in the first place. The reasons for war themselves had little to no rational appeal.

Now, instead of making such a charge and letting it sit out in the sun to rot (as Eric often does), let’s take a look at some of the reasons Bush gave for going to war:

• Saddam was a growing/gathering/grave clear and present danger
• Saddam had WMDs (or WMD programs)
• Saddam was actively seeking nuclear weapons
• Saddam’s regime materially supported terrorists
• Destroying the Ba’ath state would make us safer

If you didn’t know these points were all bullshit, the effect of these pronouncements would be fear, which is exactly the emotion these lies were intended to provoke. None of these claims were substantive–it was more of a fear-mongering exercise than a fact-based rationale for war. and the Republican party, make no mistake, is the party of fear.

But then, these are just lies, not exactly “emotional arguments.” If you want some raw, unreasonable, irrational emotion, you should take a look at a key statement by Karl Rove (in a text prepared by the White House) which he delivered on June 23rd, 2005:

Conservatives saw the savagery of 9/11 and the attacks and prepared for war. Liberals saw the savagery of the 9/11 attacks and wanted to prepare indictments and offer therapy and understanding for our attackers.”

Let me hip you to something, dear readers. The proper response to Islamist terrorism is not to send troops to Muslim countries to kill people. Even if you think everyone who gets shot is a terrorist of some kind, you have to realize that these people don’t mind blowing themselves up. Killing them is playing right into their fucking hands. All you do is create martyrs (if they were, in fact, terrorists) and/or more terrorist recruits if the people you killed were civilians (not to mention that it is, in fact, murder

).But what’s even more striking than the knee-jerk militarist bullshit Rove spewed was that he laughed at the idea of “indictments.” Sometimes I wonder why people like myself (who wanted to approach 9/11 as a police matter as opposed to a police state matter) weren’t more vocal about the fact that it was Pakistani police who caught Khalid Sheik Mohammed, who, if we are to believe what we are told, was the architect of the 9/11 attacks. Killing suicidal people is doing them a favor, and basically anything the terrorists do is good PR for them, except getting caught.

The invasion of Iraq has, as I have long predicted, just bred more terrorists, and is breeding them faster than we can supposedly kill them or they can kill themselves. Compare that fact to the following picture, which appeared all around the world on the event of Mohammed’s capture, in terms of effectiveness in fighting “the War on Terror,” shall we?

The worst thing that can happen to an al-Qaeda suicide bomber is not getting killed. It’s getting caught, and possibly turned. Nothing is worse for their PR than being ignominously paraded in front of the world, handcuffed in their pyjamas.

Of course, if Rove and his band of conservative morons had a shred of rational thought in them, they’d be listening to all of the intelligence officials, all the state employees, all the academics, all the experts on the region, who told them that invading Iraq was not the appropriate response. But no, those who “saw savagery” and “prepared for war” must be appeased!

Who are these people, who blindly stumble out into the Arab world with a machine gun and a hankering for brown-people blood? Here’s that excerpt from a Guardian piece about U.S. soldiers killing civilians indiscriminately, (again):

[D]espite there being no link between Iraq and the September 11 attacks Richardson admitted that it gave him his motivation to fight Iraqis. “There’s a picture of the World Trade Centre hanging up by my bed and I keep one in my flak jacket. Every time I feel sorry for these people I look at that. I think, ‘They hit us at home and, now, it’s our turn.’ I don’t want to say payback but, you know, it’s pretty much payback.”

But as I said before, individual examples are the basis of “emotional appeals.” What we really need to do is play the numbers game. Now, this is a very dangerous game for Americans to play. Why? The real problem with rational appeals (for the pro-war side) is that without the benefit of American chauvinism, the numbers are pretty awful:

Civilians killed (averages represent middle ranges for disputed figures):

By the U.N. embargo: 1,500,000
(in effect for 10 years; average ~150,000/year)

By coalition forces and lack of adequate medical care since invasion: 25,000-150,000
(since March 2003; average ~35,000/year)

Bringing it all back home, the reason Cindy Sheehan’s emotional appeal (and let’s be honest, she’s no expert and therefore I don’t have a substantive interest in her opinions on foreign policy) is the most effective counter to the bullshit, anti-rational appeal of the hawks–for people who are swayed by emotional appeals rather than rational ones. Leo Strauss would be proud.

P. S. About the “Sheehan is an anti-Semite” meme floating around the hawkosphere: the only reason people are bringing up white nationalist oppositon to the war now (it’s been going on since the beginning) is that because the majority of Americans are opposed to the war, hawks need to try and marginalize the anti-war movement, tarring it with the guilt-by-association brush. Talk about opening up the floodgates! If that’s the way you want to play it, conservatives, we’re going to get armpit deep in “Nazi-by-association” name-calling (I’m starting with German kindergarten teachers).

My friend Elephant sometimes says that he’s a pro-market liberal. But he often makes the excellent point that markets are always created by the state. It’s not just regulation which shapes and produces markets; there are the limits of enforcement as well as the means for chartering corporations.

Now, I had been harboring some vestigial anarcho-capitalist ideas about how “capitalism is a global default,” as some people say. Then, I read Wallerstein’s The Decline of American Power, which contains the following passages:

The free (or competetive) market is the great shibboleth of the capitalist world-economy, yet is its supposedly defining characteristic. Yet every working capitalist knows that if a market is truly free as Adam Smith defined such freedom–a multitude of sellers, a multitude of buyers, and total transparence of operations, including full knowledge by all buyers and sellers of the true state of the market–it would be absolutely impossible for anyone to make a profit whatsoever. For the buyers would always force the sellers down to a price barely above the cost of production, if not below it (at least for a certain time). What is necessary in order to make profit is some kind of at least partial restriction of the market, some degree of monopolization. The greater the restriction or monopolization, the greater the potential profit available to sellers. To be sure, monopolies have their downsides, which are regularly pointed out to us.

…Having the state on one’s side is the royal road to lare-scale profit. And if the state is not on your side but someone else’s side, then one’s primary need as an entrepeneur is to change the politics of the state. Capitalists require states in order to make serious profits, but states that are on their side and not someone else’s side.”

And it got me thinking about how governments absolutely shape markets. Elephant, you were totally right and I was totally wrong (Happy Birthday). The Rule of Law to back up contracts; the civil court system to monetarize damages; the printing and control of currency; the police forces to quell workers’ riots–these examples cried out to me as proof that markets don’t exist without regimes (and vice versa?)

The role of the state, as I’ve said before re: property, the function of the state is to defend the indefensible (and here I’m speaking in purely functional, not necessarily moral terms). In order for capitalism to grow, it needs the state; ask any real anarchist. That’s what had been bothering me about the “global default” thesis–if capitalism is so natural, why did it take so long do develop?

I mention all this because people seem to lay their anti-guv’mint rap on the punitive regulatory powers of government with respect to business, but seldom do you hear the truth that without government, there wouldn’t be “business” anywhere near as we know it. (Maybe some day I’ll write a pirate novel about a ‘post-government’ society to better illustrate this point.) As I said to someone yesterday, it’s not that we necessarily need more government market regulation, we need better government market regulation (to say nothing of enforcement). Congress would rather bury businesses in paper in an attempt to ‘level the playing field’ than create fundamentally fairer structures of business.

Indeed, the legislative focus is often on punitive measures instead of structuring ones. The point of institutions (e.g., democratic elections, the army, or the World Cup) is to channel conflicts into socially acceptable venues. Regulation engenders attempts to subvert this regulation. Structural laws (like corporate charters) are harder to break because they form the plane of interaction. Of course, people try to break fundamental structural laws, too.

And so, I began to wonder about which has more impact, formative, structural laws about the market; or punitive measures designed to punish violations. For example–the problem of corporations “externalizing environmental costs” as economists say (the rest of us might say “shitting in the stream” or “fucking up the neighborhood”) seems to be prevented neither by the actions of the market nor the weak attempts at environmental regulation and enforcement. What if we were to use regulation in a way that directly ties better metrics of these externalized costs into their bottom line? Adjust property taxes based on the volume of toxic waste produced, or additional percentage points on corporate income tax by the curie? I don’t know.

I had been thinking about stuff like this back when Bush was complaining about “double taxation” on corporate earnings. Check out this bald-faced horseshit:

The double-taxation of dividends is not fair. And I ask Congress to get rid of the double-taxation of dividends. And let me explain some reasons why it makes sense to do that. First of all, there are 62,000 seniors in the state of Arkansas who pay taxes on dividend income. A lot of seniors rely upon their dividend income in order to live the out-years, the remaining years. It’s good public policy, it makes sense to let the seniors keep more of their own money by getting rid of the double-taxation of dividends. (Applause.)

Let’s ignore the fact that Bush is almost certainly talking about the wealthiest 16.2% of Arkansas senior citizens–there are 381,600 Arkansans over 65 as of last count. (I have a little breakdown of Bush’s math in this speech here; the way he sells this plan is amazingly dishonest–and a quick read).

What I want to talk about is Bush’s phrase, “double taxation.” How on earth is taxing dividend income double taxation? As those intrepid pederasts at the Foundation for Teaching Economics say, “[L]ike you and me, a corporate entity can earn an income. When it does, it pays taxes. That’s once… When corporations distribute profits to shareholders, they’re called dividends. For shareholders, those dividends are income. Personal income is taxed. That’s twice.”

By this logic, no one who makes any wages should be taxed at all. If I pay you to paint my house from my after tax income and then you get taxed on the income you made from painting houses, the only thing that prevents us from truly calling this “double taxation” is that money is infinitely taxed if you want to look at it that way. I’m surprised they didn’t cry “triple taxation” or “octuple taxation.” I mean, I know why they didn’t cry “dodecatuple taxation;” there’s no such word and it’s hard to say. (Here’s an excellent analysis of “double taxation”.)

The key words here are “like you and me.” The reason corporations pay separate taxes is that the state has accorded them the privileges of an “artificial person,” albeit one with a different set of rights and duties than actual people. If corporations really want to be like people, they could start acting like them. Not to mention all the cost incurred by the corporate system on the government–court time, reams of paperwork, regulatory agency budgets, etc. If you were found to have caused the deaths of hundreds of people purely for financial gain, you’d be in prison; but if you were the Ford Motor company, you would just have to seriously consider the cost of fixing your cars vs. the potential legal costs incurred by the inevitable lawsuits. Limited liability is only good for bad people.

So, I agree with Bush. I don’t think corporate taxes are fair, either–let’s get rid of this artificial person called the corporation and just have individuals interact with other individuals, right? Let’s not harsh our market high by letting the corporations in with their “double taxation,” man.

Speaking of getting high, this provides me with a perfect segue about what I think governments can’t do, now that I’ve talked about what it can. For example: stopping people from taking drugs by criminalizing drugs. I was going to post this whole thing about that, but Abu Gingy beat me to the punch with his post where he mentios how we need to legalize drugs to help fight the War on Terror. Prohibitions (and Prohibition is a wonderful example) create black markets and crime. The reason there’s so much violence surrounding illegal drugs is that the criminalization of a good (as in “goods and serivces”) makes it dangerously profitable. Governments are much better at regulating positively than regulating negatively.

This is not to say that the government making some things illegal isn’t a good idea. People will do drugs with or without the laws, but the obvious counterexample would be murder–people kill other people all the time, whether it’s illegal or not. The markets exist for providers of both services, in the black market. Actually, the government does regulate those monopolies, because the defining characteristic of a state is the monopoly over the use of violence. But as a civil libertarian, I say that your right to swing your fist ends at the tip of my nose, and that businesses necessarily involve intrapersonal relationships which are contractual as opposed to consensual. So in terms of how I would approach legalization, I’d regulate commerce but not criminalize ingestion or non-commercial production. I’ll grant possession qualifying for intent to distribute and drunk-and-disorderlies to drug-counseling courts (an idea endorsed by President Bush, by the way). I would certainly stop all of the Bill of Rights violating policies connected with the “War on Drugs,” but at this point they’ve all been superseded by the “War on Terror,” so no one would even notice.

Speaking of market regulations, I wrote all this as a preface to what I’m about to say regarding embargoes. I was thinking of the worst embargo in recent memory, the UN blockade of Iraq after Gulf War II, which killed 1.5 million people while enriching only the most corrupt bureaucrats on both sides of the Iraq-UN table. Our rhetoric said that we were punishing Saddam and not his people, but Saddam’s standard of living improved while everyone else’s worsened until the point of death in many cases. Plus, the embargo never stopped major U.S. defense contractors like Halliburton (then under CEO Dick Cheney) from trading with Iraq under a French subsidiary, anyway. The whole affair would have been a farce if only it hadn’t caused a small holocaust (on top of the 300,000 Saddam had already killed himself, not to mention the huge casualties from Gulf War I).

Some offer the example of South Africa as an effective embargo. I was thinking of the efficacy of the half-hearted embargoes on White-ruled South Africa (very effective at limiting De Beers’ 90% monopoly on the diamond market, you noticed). I think what had a better impact on the debate were the boycott/divestiture efforts on U.S. campuses–they kept the issue in the news and awareness of apartheid up until de Klerk finally relented. Of course, the incredible poverty in South Africa has helped make it one of the most dangerous places to live in the world. Two steps forward, one step back, I guess.

Recently, as I was going through some papers from university, I found an outline for a term paper I wrote about the standards for humanitarian intervention. According to my ouline, the strategic value of the intervention (and the influence of the Realist school of international relations in thinking about “security”–which was our code word for “war”) had much more to do with the standards for “humanitarian action” than the distant second motivating factor, which is paternalistic interest in the region because of guilt for causing conflicts in the first place.

Inevitably, when people talk about humanitarian intervention, someone will say, “we can’t be everywhere.” And this makes sense given our limited (and lately, thinly stretched) military resources.

But that’s just what political science calls “hard power,” the military strength of our nation. The Bush Administration doesn’t really seem to believe in what we call “soft power,” i.e., diplomatic, economic, cultural methods to influence every country. The problem with the “we can’t be everywhere” statement is that, in fact, we are everywhere. We trade with (or embargo) every country in the world. We support regimes all over the place with money and guns and strategic support. Our corporations are busy extracting resources from every last bit of the Earth’s surface possible. We are everywhere, let’s stop pretending.

Governments set the mode of interaction, not necessarily the actions themselves. Anarcho-libertarians like Eric and Brad seem to think that the government is socialist because it “controls the means of production through Sarbanes-Oxley,” et al–but there wouldn’t be corporations or limited liability or civil court or currency or any of the other laws which make our economy possible without the state. Now, the states are totally capable of stemming the tide of corporate malfeasance, but they won’t, so they can’t.

So, while I believe in soft power, it occurs to me that the embargo method doesn’t work. So what are our other options? There is the boycott, a tactic I embrace as a way of life, now that I think about it. A while ago, I commented on Abu Gingy’s blog, where he had a post about the threats of divestiture from Israel on the part of some Protestant Churches wasn’t going to be effective. The amount of shares they were talking about amounted to less than 4% of a day’s trading, etc. I replied,

…For example, I do not eat anything from, nor have I ever been inside a McDonald’s restaurant. Do I think that my boycott has the slightest impact on McDonald’s bottom line? That would be crazy. So why do I do it? Two reasons: a) It’s not about McDonald’s, it’s about me. If I don’t agree with McDonald’s corporate agenda or its union busting or the McLibel affair, then I cannot, in good conscience, give them any of my money. That way, when I criticize McDonald’s publicly, I don’t have their fries hanging out of my mouth or McNugget in my beard. If you want the world to change, you have to start changing it. You’ll never convince good people to follow your advice unless you follow it yourself. I’ll get back to this one in a second.

b) So now that I’ve sworn off McDonald’s, where do I put my money? I always, always try to patronize smaller restaurants. Don’t get me wrong, I love greasy burgers and fries and chicken nuggets and all those things they have at McDonald’s (that’s not my beef with them at all). But I know that my dollar goes further toward helping people when I visit the mom-and-pop diner instead. I choose to patronize businesses where the income differential between the top employee and the bottom employee is relatively low for this reason (it’s one of the rights I retain within the capitalist system).

Getting back to the churches, now the question becomes, what are they going to do with the money they make and how many churchmembers will follow their spiritual leaders’ example?

People look to join a boycott, but seek to subvert an embargo. (Of course, if we embargo China, let’s say, we just create a grey market smuggler economy into Thailand or somewhere like that, which enriches those countries at a slight cost to their national sovereignty.) You know, once I had a profile in the newspaper where I was described as an “anarcho-syndicalist,” which wasn’t true at the time (I had been making a metaphor about open-source software, not my own political beliefs). But since then, I became gradually more sympathetic towards some of the organizing ideas of anarcho-syndicalism, because it is democratic from the ground up. Of course, things get institutionalized over time as the become more efficient. You can’t really escape government by pretending not to have it, because then all you get is half-hearted, bad government. At any rate, a boycott is a good anarcho-syndicalist kind of thing; it’s a spontaneous, popular movement that doesn’t need leaders, just media attention.

It’s kind of like the ‘leaderless cell” technology. Invented by the Racial Holy War White Power organizations and now used to great effect by our enemies in the War on Terror, the leaderless cell movements are hydras instead of the traditional private armies. Removing leadership seems to be much more effectively carried out by police (plus we know we have them, instead of the lingering possibility of a non-fatal bombing); but it’s not ‘net effective’ in stopping further attacks. These guys are just out to start some shit, and any shit they start is ultimately served by anything they do besides getting caught, where they might possibly be turned and we can start putting moles into the (admittedly loose) organization.

Didn’t Rove say, “Conservatives saw the savagery of 9/11 in the attacks and prepared for war; liberals saw the savagery of the 9/11 attacks and wanted to prepare indictments and offer therapy and understanding for our attackers” right here in New York a while ago? Here’s what I have to say about it: thoughtless people prepared for war, thoughtful people wanted to prepare endictments and gain understanding of our attackers. Remember when the Quran was a bestseller right after the attacks? I was heartened, really I was.

But pointless military engagements, embargoes and boycotts aren’t the only options. If we were to impose heavy tariffs on countries with unfair labor practices (while favoring those who treat workers fairly), we would help eliminate their competetive advantage against American and other fair wage countries. I have a vision of listing our trading partners in order of working conditions and wages, and bestowing “Most Favored Nation” status at the precise cutoff we democratically establish.

Does this mean withdrawing from NAFTA/CAFTA/WTO/World Bank/MAI? Yes. It’s another excellent reason to do so. For years, India had a 100% duty on foreign computer equipment. You know what they got out of it? A tech sector which literally rivals our own. Why should we subsidize the oppression of civil and labor rights? It’s a loser for us and ultimately a loser for them. If corporations paid taxes, I might feel differently about it, because then the profits they’re making would go back into the economy here, but they money often sits in offshore accounts or imported cocaine sniffed off immigrant strippers who send home remittances. Tariffs are all-American, people, it’s in the damn constitution!

Often, people think that when I argue with them about the war on terror, or the war in Iraq, or the war in Afghanistan, that I am somehow traitorous or ‘morally indistinguishable’ from a fifth-columnist or Al-Qaeda terrorists. Especially when I note that many of their political complaints are founded (though as I’m sure you can tell, I think the religious ones are just crazy).

Call it ‘nuance’ if you will, but for me, the distinction between ends and means is very important for me. I don’t think that we must take any action in the cause of justice or freedom or whatever it is we’re pretending to be fighting for today; we should take the right action. Some like to throw resources (money, troops, lawyers) at problems and others demand we retreat to our caves and abandon all collective enterprise so the wolves can feast on it. Neither of these approaches really work.

The problem is, if we recognize the validity of the other sides’ grievances, some will inevitably feel that this is a capitulation, that America must seem strong at all times, at all costs. (Incidentally, these are likely some of the same people who think that perception abroad of weakness invites terrorist attacks, when in fact, it has no bearing on the frequency of attacks whatsoever.) This position is fine, if you have no problem with civilian deaths, both here at home and abroad. If you wish to do anything about the death rate, it’s not really defensible to throw so many people upon the the fire of our supposed ‘national pride.’

I’m getting off on a tangent; my principal task here is to show you how I mean by ‘the means-ends’ problem. So, here are some sample breakdowns:

Sometimes, when I talk about the foibles of our policies, people ask me, "well, what do you propose?" which is a good question. I prefer strategies which really look to the future, so here are some fun ways for us lefties to think two steps ahead:

1) Regardless of what Karl "The King of Plausible deniability" Rove did or didn't do, the entire affair will now be called "<b>Turdblossomgate</b>."

2) Propose <b>a real national security plan that respects civil liberties</b>. We need to shred the P.A.T.R.I.O.T. Act and find a real technocratic solution. (I just love spelling it out with the periods in between the letters to emphasize how ridiculous the Act is.) The best way to stop terrorists from striking is to stop them from striking, not create more of them by killing people Muslims think of as freedom fighters driving out occupying troops.

The thing is, security is going to change, things are going to get less free as a necessary consequence, and so if we don't take charge of this, the other guys will use the issue to push their agendas, and we'll only lose more liberties.

The majority of Americans now understand that the invasion of Iraq doesn't make them any safer–the Dems need to be the party of real anti-terrorist policy, not just advocate a pullout.

We need to make an issue out of the dismal Homeland Security megamerger. We need to formulate a plan that libertarians and civil libertarians can live with. Everybody knows the Democrats lack (among other things) <i>Vision</i>, and they need to counter the Republicans' percieved 'strength' with real strength on terrorism.

3) <b>Start demanding a posthumous war-crimes trial for Saddam Hussein now, before he 'mysteriously dies in prison.'</b> Saddam is like a mob witness–there's too much incriminating stuff he can say about the U.S. for him to really go to trial. But if we have the trial anyway, even after they kill him to avoid it, it'll totally confuse the shit out of our gorvernment.

While I was busying myself with other pursuits, Eric’s post about Iraq and Al-Qaeda seems to have prompted a really good discussion with Matt of Cerulean Blue and Mike of No Angst Zone (as always, I’ve arrived stylishly late to the party).

In the thick of all this, Mike comes up with an essentially flawed post about how the history of Afghanistan explains why we needed to invade Iraq. The problem is, his history is faulty in a way that tremendously undermines his argument.

I’ve been thinking a lot about what the following little mistake implies about his reasoning and our foreign policy in general:

In order to understand al-Qaeda fully, we must go to the start. And the start is Sudan, in 1990. It was here that Osama bin-Laden fled after he was kicked out of Saudi Arabia. And it was here that he first formed al-Qaeda, which translates to “The Base.”

Let’s forget, for a moment, that bin Laden wasn’t even in Sudan until the NIF took over the country in 1991. The organization we call “al-Qaeda” split from the Maktab Khidamat al-Mujihidin al-Arab (also known as the Afghan Services Bureau, or MAK) in 1988, around the time of the assassination of one Dr. Azzam, the bureau’s cofounder. The other founder? Osama bin Laden. And where did this happen? Peshawar, North-West Frontier Province, Pakistan.

After re-reading Mike’s post, it becomes clear that his false assertion about Sudan is crucial to his case that Al-Qaeda needs friendly governments to survive. Well, I already explained this two years ago, so I’ll just quote myself:

There were two main branches of the Afghan Communist Party in the 1970s – Khalq (the Masses), and Parcham (the Flag). When the Khalq faction wrested control of the country from a coalition government composed of the former royal family and Parchami military figures, the officially secular bent of the government offended the regional clerics, who started organizing armed resistance. Thus, in 1978, the “mujahideen” appear, Islamist guerillas who fought for the establishment of an Islamic state.

After two of his predecessors are graphically executed [i.e., hung from Kabul lampposts with their testicles stuffed in their mouths --ed. note], newly installed President Babrak Karmal called in the Soviet Army in December 1979 to help him deal with the insurgency, beginning twenty-five years of continuous combat.

During the 80′s, Afghanistan became the top jihadi-tourist locale in the world. One scholar described it as a kind of Woodstock for the Bin Laden generation; if there was one place you could actually fight the advances of the atheistic kaffir (infidel), it was Afghanistan–so many a young Muslim flew to Pakistan, picked up an automatic weapon on the Afghan border, and started firing on the Red Army. Al-Qaeda (“the list”) began when Bin Laden, who was hanging out in Pakistan far from the front, started collecting the contact information of every aspiring mujahid who came through his house in Peshawar.

Now, two years ago, I referred to al-Qaeda as “the list,” (which refers to the actual guestbook bin Laden kept in the Peshawar house) but the literal translation would be “the basis,” or “the foundation,” as in, “al-Qaida al-Sulbah,” the title of an essay by Azzam about the “solid basis” for Islamic revolution (by the way, here is an amazing article about Al-Qaeda and Asimov’s “The Foundation”).

So, returning to Mike’s post, by his own logic, because he doesn’t “go to the start,” he cannot “understand al-Qaeda fully.” Here’s what I mean:

Al-Qaeda is just one symptom of a larger problem plaguing the Middle East, a problem that is caused by people like Saddam Hussein. The problem is a combination of things: lack of political representation, often due to an oppressive government, compounded with a stagnant economy and booming birthrates has produced a generation with a lot of young Arab men who are unemployed, unheard, and angry about it. Because of their oppressive, non-representative government, they are often forced to turn to religion as an outlet. Too many of these young men are being converted to Wahhabi style Islamism. What is the solution? Obviously, getting rid of the oppressive government and, in time, the stagnant economy.

I wish to dispel, once and for all, this canard about secular oppressive governments inciting worldwide terrorism. It’s this kind of ‘liberal’ fallacy which underpins our whole flawed foreign policy.

Permit me to digress a little bit first. The reason suicide bombings are so effective is that it totally screws with our Western notions of justice. When they caught McVeigh, we were satisfied with his execution. Now, what is the appropriate punishment for mass murder? Mere execution balances one life ‘justly’ taken against many unjustly taken, but the math is fundamentally unsatisfying. How about spending the rest of their lives in jail? You could do that for dealing drugs or securities fraud (if you have a heart condition). The truth is that mass murder is a supremely unjust act because there is no punishment equal to or even approaching the crime. At least a public execution makes some people feel better, even if it can’t bring back their loved ones, or, in the view of some others, ends the guilty party’s torment prematurely.

When the guilty execute themselves, we are deprived not only of what we think of as “justice,” but also the “vengeance” of watching them being killed by the state. What do I mean by “vengeance,” you ask? Punishment is for the guilty’s wrongdoings. Vengeance is for the victim’s emotional needs. And so, the narrative of justice is that when wrongs occur, someone must be punished! But the fact that suicide bombers are so unafraid of punishment that they actually do it themselves is fundamentally unsatisfying to us. And so, it prompts Westerners into a perfectly innappropriate response, which is to kick some ass (and it doesn’t really matter whose). The invasion of Iraq is a perfect example, because it ultimately did more for al-Qaeda than 9/11.

But our Western thinking extends beyond just inappropriate responses to terrorism. In fact, our conception of terrorism and terrorist groups is also fundamentally flawed. I think a lot of people conceive of bin Laden as the head of COBRA (while we, of course, are G. I. Joes). Well, kids, knowing is half the battle. Al-Qaeda’s organization, if it can be called that, is the most loosely-organized ‘terrorist group’ in the world, more like an ideological cause than an army with personalized jumpsuits.

Our foreign policy is based on the idea that we can’t afford to respect national sovereignty, but the reality is that we can’t afford not to respect it. In fact, the former assertion is the basis of what international relations scholars call ‘liberalism,’ the idea which justifies invading other countries because democratic capitalism needs the lebensraum.

Now, let’s get back to suicide bombing. Oppressive governments and poverty are not the causes of international terrorism and/or suicide bombing. We all know this because the two conditions have been pervasive for a long, long time, longer than any government has been around. It’s a stupid argument, so obviously false it amazes me that people keep repeating it. Bin Laden grew up with 53 siblings in a billionaire’s mansion. The 9/11 hijackers were mostly middle-class guys with degrees.

Well, if it isn’t poverty and oppression, what does cause suicide bombings? A very smart man named Robert Pape has the answer. This is a guy who appears in the New York Times, The American Conservative and Intervention Magazine, explaining to people that the only known cause of suicide bombing is occupation by foreign troops. He figured this out by looking at every single suicide bombing since 1980. Did you know, for instance, that the Tamil Tigers carry out the majority of suicide bombings in the world, not “al-Qaeda?” And what does that name really refer to, anyway?

Before you protest that not every occupation reuslts in suicide bombing, I wish to state here and now that the relationship is more of a prerequisite than a causal one. That is to say, suicide bombing is always a response to (real or percieved) foreign occupation. It is not the only response. The reason the “oppressive leadership” theory gets so much play is that it dovetails so nicely with liberal foreign policy.

So, with regard to Muslims and our foreign policy, do we hate their freedoms more than they hate ours? I would have to say yes, because we couldn’t leave bad enough alone. We can’t help but fuck with other countries, because we don’t trust them to install sufficiently friendly leaders.

Two recent posts on blogs I read regularly have been bothering me: most disturbing is Time for the West to Close its Borders to Muslim Immigrants over at The Kvetcher, and the other one is DadaHead's post linking to Prof. Brian Leiter's "This is how we shall preach to the converted" manifesto.

I'll take on Leiter's first, because it lays the foundation for my response to the other post. Sayeth Leiter:
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It has, on occasion, been noted that gentleness is not the hallmark of my postings on this blog, at least on matters of a political nature … When it comes to politics … reasons and evidence appear to play almost no role in changing anyone's views.

… I am sometimes presented with the following criticism: "Your rhetorical style won't persuade anyone who doesn't already agree with you." That is no doubt true, but, as we've just remarked, it is quite rare to persuade anyone by a careful, reasoned argument …

I shall let the readers in on a secret (though I suspect it is obvious to my regular readers): I am not interested in persuading anyone. … my goal in posting on various political topics is simply to alert like-minded readers to ideas and evidence and arguments which help strengthen their convictions regarding the truths they've already understood or glimpsed, as well as to give some expression to our collective outrage and dismay. I really wish that the unlike-minded folks would simply "go away."
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Not that I can fault a particular personal web-page philosophy, but I think my regular readers know that this is pretty much the exact opposite of this blog's philosophy. I'll take on any argument which, in my private discourse, I might disdain because it's 'stupid' or 'evil.' And do you know why? Because John Stuart Mill told me to, that's why:
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There is the greatest difference between presuming an opinion to be true, because, with every opportunity for contesting it, it has not been refuted, and assuming its truth for the purpose of not permitting its refutation. Complete liberty of contradicting and disproving our opinion, is the very condition which justifies us in assuming its truth for purposes of action; and on no other terms can a being with human faculties have any rational assurance of being right…

<i>–J. S. Mill in On Liberty</i>
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No matter how wrong we may think a particular argument, we really should, at some point, address why this argument is wrong. Because to do otherwise merely mirrors the axiomatic belief system of your 'stupid' and 'evil' rhetorical opponents. If we dismiss a point, there ought to be a reason for it.

Clearly not everyone is interested in taking up the obvious case (Elephant has a great dismissive technique–he just declares things "not interesting," which means he doesn't feel like going through the motions of arguing them). But I've noticed two things about myself, which, I suppose, separate me from most people:

1) I don't really ever get tired of arguing, and 2) I come to political and philosophical conclusions by questioning my basic assumptions about an issue and arguing both sides in my head.

Naturally, this leads me to write really long blog posts where I lay out cases for claims my fellows on the left would consider obvious; e.g., why the War in Iraq, racial profiling, or Britney Spears are wrong. (Oops, that Britney Spears post isn't public yet. But someday, when I run out of other stuff, I'll put it up here.)

As Leiter says, "it is quite rare to persuade anyone by a careful, reasoned argument" — and that's true, except that the person I'm most interested in convincing of any particular argument <b>is myself</b>. Let your karma run over your dogma, in bumper-sticker parlance: your concept of truth is worthless if it remains untested. As worthless as your adversary's untested reasoning. Mill concieved of a capital-T-truth which is robust and does not shy away from proof.

Although Leiter is right that successful rational persuasion may be rare, it's not impossible (you need to argue harder, Brian! Just kidding). I convince people by rational argument all the time, although admittedly part of this is that I don't waste my time arguing with what I understand as <i>pervasively irrational people</i>. Absurd <b>people</b> may be rhetorically immovable, but absurd <b>arguments</b> are not only debatable but refutable. Now, is the most carefully reasoned argument going to sway those hypothetical conservative trodglodytes? Probably not. But if you exclusively preach to the converted, you'll never make any converts–and conversion happens all the time.

Call it a delusion of grandeur, but my hope for this blog and the arguments I make here is that <i>somewhere, someone</i> will walk into a bar armed with one of my arguments and use it to convince not some right-winger, but a moderate of weak convictions who overhears their debate.

As I was looking up a certain Latin phrase for the title to this post, I came across this great repository of Latin words and phrases. The alternative title (rejected on the basis on length) is, <i>sapiens nihil affirmat quod non probat</i> — "A wise man declares nothing true unless he can prove it." It's for this reason that I go trolling on right-wing sites for arguments to refute–the worst of thing for a democracy is an unchallenged assertion.

And again, the Golden Rule: if we wish civility to return to public discourse, we have to start. We can't wait for those <b>pieces of shit across the imaginary aisle</b> to start treating us nicely.

So, let me don my "Captain Obvious" cap and turn the death-ray of reason upon my friend Kelsey's assertion that it is " Time for the West to Close its Borders to Muslim Immigrants."

There are six basic reasons why this <operationally speaking</b> is a bad idea.

1. There are already 5-8 million Muslims in the US alone, with tens of millions more throughout the West (and the East, for that matter). As London proved, we are perfectly capable of breeding Islamist terrorists in our own country.

2. The effect of racist official policy is to radicalize moderate Muslims–yes, even those we formerly called our allies. Now, often I will hear people say that they will hate us no matter what we do because we're America and they hate our freedoms (it really, really steams me when liberals make this argument, by the way). This is the kind of thing that becomes increasingly easy to say the less actual Muslims you know. But, if you were to, I dunno, <b>ask them</b>, as detailed in this Washington Post article from 2004 (emphasis mine):
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"What we're seeing now is a disturbing sympathy with al Qaeda coupled with resentment toward the United States, and we ought to be extremely troubled by that," said Shibley Telhami, a University of Maryland professor who commissioned one of the surveys.

The other survey, titled "Impressions of America," charts a dramatic overall decline in positive views by comparing current attitudes with those sampled in April 2002.

"In 2002, the single policy issue that drove opinion was the Palestinians; now it's Iraq and <big><b>America's treatment, here and abroad, of Arabs and Muslims</b></big>," said James Zogby, who commissioned the report with the Arab American Institute.

In Zogby's 2002 survey, 76 percent of Egyptians had a negative attitude toward the United States, compared with 98 percent this year. In Morocco, 61 percent viewed the country unfavorably in 2002, but in two years, that number has jumped to 88 percent. In Saudi Arabia, such responses rose from 87 percent in 2002 to 94 percent in June. Attitudes were virtually unchanged in Lebanon but improved slightly in the UAE, from 87 percent who said in 2002 that they disliked the United States to 73 percent this year.

Those polled said their opinions were shaped by U.S. policies, rather than by values or culture. When asked: "What is the first thought when you hear 'America'?" respondents overwhelmingly said: "Unfair foreign policy."
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Whenever I hear the canard that "the will hate us no matter what we do," I try to remind people that we actually prompted the remaining 22% of Egyptians to switch sides against us <b>in two years, flat</b>.

3. Stopping legal immigration has the effect of punishing moderate, well-intentioned Muslims, while it does comparatively little to stop the illegal immigration of terrorists, who will find a way in no matter what. Now, if one of your base assumptions (and I mean base in two ways) is that <i>all Muslims want to kill us</i>, this point doesn't matter as much as the next one, which is that

4. "Stopping Muslim immigration" is a poor, poor substitute for actual national security measures. And the reason is that al-Qaeda was neither the first, nor will it be the last terrorist group concerned with American soft targets. It isn't just that successful terrorist acts breed copycats, and sympathizers, but also groups looking for cover.

To explain the last point, remember the anthrax incidents? They killed several people and shut down the Capitol building. The FBI profile pointed towards domestic terrorists who tried to cover their tracks by claiming they were Muslims when careful analysis shows they're probably just right-wingers who hate liberal Congressmen. What about that kid who crashed a small plane into an office tower in Florida? Or Oklahoma City? Or Eric Rudolph?

5. It would totally and completely undermine all of our (admittedly sparse) overtures toward the Muslim world, and put the lie to our claims of moral superiority.

6. There are an estimated 19 million refugees around the world, many of them Muslims fleeing nominally Muslim states. Compare the hundreds of thousands who died (and are dying) in the Sudanese holocaust to less than two thousand killed by terrorism in the US. But then, we all know that American lives are intrisically worth more than anybody else's, right?

In closing, let me leave you with the motto of the Confederacy: "DEO VINDICE," which meant, "<b>God will prove us right.</b>"

When Lincoln freed the slaves (in Confederate territory only, of course), some of the most voracious opposition came not from slave owners, but from poor whites. To be sure, there was an economic aspect–freed blacks would now be competing for jobs–but there was a more important and deeper social logic behind their opposition. If you were a dirt poor Caucasian in the South, the only thing you had was the knowledge that at least you weren't a slave, that you were better than these demi-humans the Lord had seen fit to place in bondage, <b>below you on the American social totem pole</b>.

Wallerstein, in his world-systems writings, talked about the world not in terms of a First, Second, or Third World, but in terms of <b>core</b> and <b>periphery</b>. As capitalism constantly demands cheap labor for production, while at the same time demanding workers with enough buying power to consume these cheaply made goods, what happened was that the core (what some refer to as 'the First World') exported the terrible labor conditions of the Industrial age to poorer countries where there was a steady supply of rural migrants fresh from the farms to the factories.

In other words, in order for us to be relatively happy, someone else must be relatively unhappy. When one country exhausts its supply of newcomers to industrialization, its cheap labor needs do not cease to exist–we just find a new bunch of people to push around.

I was thinking about this while I was watching the new show, "Mind of Mencia," on Comedy Central. Echoing a sentiment you often hear from comedians (the only people who are allowed to be racists on television), some blacks and Hispanics are overwhelmed with relief that they are no longer on the bottom of our national ladder. As Mencia said, "Achmed–tag! You're it!" Elsewhere on Comedy Central, I've seen several black stand-up comedians extolling the virtues of racial profiling… but only when it applies only to Arabs and Muslims.

Why would people who, by their own admission, have suffered unjustly under racial profiling, so willingly endorse it? Because there is a hidden truth about racial profiling which I have hinted at previously:

Racial profiling is not necessarily intended to be a punitive measure against the target group, even though it ends up being one. Rather, racial profiling is a way to make racial elites feel safer. Remember who's proposing the policy–it isn't that we should be hassling Arabs, necessarily; it's that they <b>aren't</b> hassling the profilers' group(s). That's why Mencia calls 9/11 " a great day for blacks and Latinos;" they're tired of this bullshit, but the pro-profiling minority crowd's objection is neither moral nor utilitarian, it's just plain selfish.

My previous writings on racial profiling can be found here, here and here.

Last week, I pitched a TV show to a certain famous filmmaker and TV producer, and I have yet to hear a response. So, I figure I might as well share it with you, dear readers, because based on the horrified responses I get from other people I tell about it, it’ll never get made. Much like my pitch for the Brown Bunny remake, it looks like another one of my brilliant ideas will never see the light of network TV. Anyway, enjoy:

Dear Mr. Xxx,

I was arguing with some conservatives about our use of torture on detainees in the "War on Terror," and a brilliant idea struck me as to how to explain the situation in terms the American people understand--reality television.

Since so many are convinced that our 'stress and duress' techniques and systemic sexual humiliation couldn't be that much worse than a fraternity hazing, the only way to address their argument is to have them put their asses where their mouths are--for money!

The show would be called "A Day at the Beach in the Gulag," and in it, contestants would compete to outlast each other in a private 'detention facility' run by the show's producers. Playing the parts of detainees who are eventually released without charges (as most of them were), participants would have to last a minimum amount of days to qualify for any prize money; then the remaining contestants try to outlast each other for the largest share of the prize pool. Contestants would be treated according to the minimal dictates of Bush's policies, but no specific type of measure could be applied without two videotaped testimonials from former prisoners or officers that such measures were used. Once a contestant cries uncle, they are immediately taken to the "Geneva Convention camp" where "[p]risoners of war shall be quartered under conditions as favourable as those for the forces of the Detaining Power who are billeted in the same area." As the contest goes on, we'll be seeing as much of the Geneva Convention camp as the torture chambers. (Of course, the losing contestants have to stay detained until the winner cries uncle.)

The torture techniques the military uses now are designed to survive description by soundbite (sleep deprivation doesn't SOUND that bad), but actually watching people go through them is a different matter. (In Hollywood parlance, think 'Crossfire' meets 'Fear Factor' by way of Milgram's famous prison experiment.)

Your ideal contestant is a militant right-winger who would love to get their hands on a few thousand bucks for proving that the conditions at Camp X-Ray are no big deal. The appeal of this show is cross-factional, because conservatives will root for the contestants and liberals will root for the producers, but either way our human rights abuses will be well-detailed and widely known.

In order to get the right kind of contestant, we'd put out the call for this show as "the McCain-Hussein Challenge" and play up the opportunity for participants to soapbox about liberal whiners, etc. (perhaps a meme will be planted in the right-wing blogosphere?).

The most fun segments of the show will be the psychological torture. Think Red State POWs at the hands of Blue State troops; those who scoff at interrogators playing Christina Aguilera might feel differently when we blast NPR or hire the local Communist party to yell at them 24 hours a day, etc. The psy-ops possibilities are endless--celebrity torturers? Sexual humiliation on national TV? Bible abuse? Flag desecration? The sky's the limit, really.

It would be a great way to hold people at their word when they're being flip about torture, but it would also be riveting entertainment. Long story short, this would require a fair amount of money in consulting fees for lawyers and doctors (we'd need them on staff and on camera during the producers' televised torture strategy sessions), but otherwise the actual production costs are pretty low. I raided my living room sofa, but it looks like I may need some help.

When I mentioned this idea to a roomful of people at a party last night, one of them said to me, “you just want to torture conservatives.” Not true–I just want to torture people who approve of torture. I couldn’t think of any better way to get my point across, do you?