From CNN:
U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan on Sunday again demanded an immediate halt to violence between Israel and Hezbollah, condemning an Israeli airstrike that killed more than 50 people.
He told the Security Council he was "deeply dismayed" that his previous calls for a cease-fire had gone unheeded.
At an emergency meeting of the council called to address the killings, Annan said the region was growing impatient that U.N.'s most powerful body had yet to issue any meaningful response after three weeks of war in Lebanon.
"We meet at a moment of extreme gravity first and foremost for the people of the Middle East, but also for the authority of this organization and especially this council," Annan told reporters before heading into the meeting.
"Action is needed now before many more children, women and men become casualties of a conflict over which they have no control."
Annan told reporters during a news conference that the 15 members "are aware that if we don't handle it right, it could lead to further escalation and could spread."
Qatar later circulated a draft statement on behalf of Arab nations meant to address Annan's concerns.
It would call for an immediate cease-fire, the withdrawal of Israeli forces from Lebanon and condemn the "loss of civilian lives in the town of Qana due to the deliberate targeting" by Israel. It would also seek an international investigation "into the Israeli massacre."
Yet the sharply worded draft had virtually no chance of being accepted by the full council for the same reason that the council has been able to do little up until now.
The United States has so far refused to back Annan's call for a cease-fire, and U.S. Ambassador John Bolton said the United States does not want any condemnation of the attack.
He repeated the American insistence that any statement must address what the U.S. says is the root cause of the conflict -- Hezbollah's continued grip on southern Lebanon and its attacks on Israel.
(snip)
In the three weeks since fighting began, the Security Council's only response has been a weak statement expressing shock and distress at Israel's bombing of a U.N. post on the Lebanon border Tuesday that killed four unarmed military observers.
The Unite States, Israel's chief ally, is primarily responsible because of its refusal to agree to seek a cease-fire.
In unusually frank terms, Annan said the council risked undermining its own authority if it does not do something.
The concern was underscored by attacks on the U.N. headquarters in Beirut earlier Sunday, when protesters angry about the Qana attack smashed windows and hurled stones, he said.
"People have noticed its failure to act firmly and quickly during this crisis," Annan said. "I am deeply dismayed that my earlier calls for the immediate cessation of hostilities were not heeded, with the result that innocent life continues to be taken and innocent civilians continue to suffer."
Lebanese special envoy Nouhad Mahoud echoed those complaints.
"Israel is committing atrocities against humanity," Mahoud said. "The fact that such massacres are yet ... to be taken up by resolutions of this august council, condemning an Israeli airstrike that killed at least 54 people . . . does not mean that the truth is to remain hidden."
UN authority? Hmmm. When have we heard that before? Oh yeah:
The conduct of the Iraqi regime is a threat to the authority of the United Nations, and a threat to peace. Iraq has answered a decade of U.N. demands with a decade of defiance. All the world now faces a test, and the United Nations a difficult and defining moment. Are Security Council resolutions to be honored and enforced, or cast aside without consequence? Will the United Nations serve the purpose of its founding, or will it be irrelevant?
The United States helped found the United Nations. We want the United Nations to be effective, and respectful, and successful. We want the resolutions of the world's most important multilateral body to be enforced. And right now those resolutions are being unilaterally subverted by the Iraqi regime. Our partnership of nations can meet the test before us, by making clear what we now expect of the Iraqi regime.
UN authority good. Glad we have that straight.
Meanwhile, before you think disarming Hezbollah is a necessary and sufficient condition of a cease-fire, read Matt.
Sunday, July 30, 2006
A Voice in the Wilderness
From today's NYT.
Although I disagree with conservative evangelicals over most of these issues, the morally relativistic militarism and rabid nationalism is perhaps the most disturbing of these items. I appreciate this pastor's courage. There's a lot of pressure on pastors to build their memberships, which in turn, is an incentive to pander to conservative ideologues. But as this article shows, not all of the flock are Republicans and at least some appear tired of conservative bullying.
Although I disagree with conservative evangelicals over most of these issues, the morally relativistic militarism and rabid nationalism is perhaps the most disturbing of these items. I appreciate this pastor's courage. There's a lot of pressure on pastors to build their memberships, which in turn, is an incentive to pander to conservative ideologues. But as this article shows, not all of the flock are Republicans and at least some appear tired of conservative bullying.
Saturday, July 29, 2006
Late Bloomer
I've always been a bit of a late bloomer, missing the trendy trends, getting all geeky interested in something just as the public turns to something more exciting.
Take the Iraq war. I tried to read Cobra II, and did manage to get through the first 100 pages or so, but until recently, I'd stayed away from books about the war and the administration's foreign policy. Then I read The One Percent Doctrine and State of War. This week I began reading The Assassin's Gate, and although I probably won't get to it for at least another week, I also picked up Fiasco today.
But as it turns out, just as I'm finally getting around to reading about The War to Save American Civilization, Glenn Greenwald is noticing that The War That Was Once So Very Very Important, Even to the Point of Ostracizing, Threatening, and Terrorizing American Opponents of America's Holy War In Mesopotamia is getting about as much coverage now as a National Hockey League playoff series:
"And having insisted for years that the fate of the free world and American security hangs in the balance in Iraq, they now just want to forget about the whole thing, pretend it never happened, and shut their eyes to the disaster they created and which they so plainly cannot control.
It isn't just that our occupation of this imploding country is being ignored by the media. What is so striking is the way which Iraq is now being talked about. It is purely surreal how the primary challenge to Sen. Lieberman is described -- in a way that is intended to be dismissive, to belittle it -- as all stemming from just one little, tiny disagreement: Iraq. Gosh, Sen. Lieberman is such a great Senator -- he votes the right way on the environment and everything -- and all he did was make one little mistake -- Iraq -- and now everyone is turning on him. That is so irrational and mean and unfair.
It is the proponents of this invasion who have insisted that Iraq is the centerpiece of American national security, that it is the primary front in the war on terror, that failure is not an option, etc. etc. They used their militaristic posture in Iraq -- and the "appeasing weakness" of opponents of the invasion -- to win two consecutive national elections. And now that the extent of the damage they created is too glaring to be denied, they want to walk away from it all, insist that it's unfair to hold them accountable for it, and hope that the media moves on to more interesting and exciting adventures than the plodding, depressing collapse of Iraq."
As we say around these here Internets, read the whole thing.
Actually I'd been noticing this trend for awhile, most of all from the neo-cons themselves, bored with the shockless follow-through to the Shock and Awe of March 2003. The neo-cons had some time ago turned aside from Iraq towards Iran and Syria. The Iraq war was boring them. What was next?
But the conflict in Lebanon has both enabled a shift of attention away from Iraq while affirming the neo-con's new Iran-Syria mission. Mindful of this change in national priorities and popular obsession, I also picked up a book on Iran, just to stay ahead of the curve.
Take the Iraq war. I tried to read Cobra II, and did manage to get through the first 100 pages or so, but until recently, I'd stayed away from books about the war and the administration's foreign policy. Then I read The One Percent Doctrine and State of War. This week I began reading The Assassin's Gate, and although I probably won't get to it for at least another week, I also picked up Fiasco today.
But as it turns out, just as I'm finally getting around to reading about The War to Save American Civilization, Glenn Greenwald is noticing that The War That Was Once So Very Very Important, Even to the Point of Ostracizing, Threatening, and Terrorizing American Opponents of America's Holy War In Mesopotamia is getting about as much coverage now as a National Hockey League playoff series:
"And having insisted for years that the fate of the free world and American security hangs in the balance in Iraq, they now just want to forget about the whole thing, pretend it never happened, and shut their eyes to the disaster they created and which they so plainly cannot control.
It isn't just that our occupation of this imploding country is being ignored by the media. What is so striking is the way which Iraq is now being talked about. It is purely surreal how the primary challenge to Sen. Lieberman is described -- in a way that is intended to be dismissive, to belittle it -- as all stemming from just one little, tiny disagreement: Iraq. Gosh, Sen. Lieberman is such a great Senator -- he votes the right way on the environment and everything -- and all he did was make one little mistake -- Iraq -- and now everyone is turning on him. That is so irrational and mean and unfair.
It is the proponents of this invasion who have insisted that Iraq is the centerpiece of American national security, that it is the primary front in the war on terror, that failure is not an option, etc. etc. They used their militaristic posture in Iraq -- and the "appeasing weakness" of opponents of the invasion -- to win two consecutive national elections. And now that the extent of the damage they created is too glaring to be denied, they want to walk away from it all, insist that it's unfair to hold them accountable for it, and hope that the media moves on to more interesting and exciting adventures than the plodding, depressing collapse of Iraq."
As we say around these here Internets, read the whole thing.
Actually I'd been noticing this trend for awhile, most of all from the neo-cons themselves, bored with the shockless follow-through to the Shock and Awe of March 2003. The neo-cons had some time ago turned aside from Iraq towards Iran and Syria. The Iraq war was boring them. What was next?
But the conflict in Lebanon has both enabled a shift of attention away from Iraq while affirming the neo-con's new Iran-Syria mission. Mindful of this change in national priorities and popular obsession, I also picked up a book on Iran, just to stay ahead of the curve.
Friday, July 28, 2006
We're All Defeatists Now
Billmon very rightly gives David Frum the business for now recognizing the Fiasco in Iraq due to internal opposition and external support for insurgents, both factors Frum, Perle and others sought to dismiss prior to the invasion.
But there was another aspect of Frum's NRO post that bears further attention.
To take back the capital from the militias that now terrorize it will take thousands, not hundreds, of American plus tens of thousands of Iraqis. No sector in Iraq can spare the loss of so many forces (our current troubles in Anbar date back to the decision in 2004 to shift troops from Anbar to the siege of Fallujah - when they returned, they discovered that every pro-US informant and ally in the province had been murdered, usually horribly and publicly). So a real plan for success in Baghdad will have to be built upon additional troops from out of area, potentially raising US troop levels back up to the 150,000 or so of late 2005.
Manifestly, neither the administration nor the Congress will contemplate such a move.
(snip)
Averting such a fate means fighting to win Baghdad. But if the president decides against such a fight - either because it would be too bloody or too politically costly or even because he doubts that the US can ultimately succeed - then we need a backup plan.
(snip)
This is not, as some American commentators argue, because the Iraqis refuse to fight for their country. Thousands of brave Iraqis, civil and military, have laid down their lives fighting or working for a secure and democratic Iraq. But Iraq has powerful enemies, inside and out. To date, the US has fought only a limited war against those enemies. Iran understands that the war in Iraq is a regional war. Syria understands it too. Only the US has tried to pretend that the war zone stops at the international border.
(snip)
As I said, we may need a backup plan.
(snip)
It's a second best. First best is to win. But that will take more commitment than the administration was prepared to offer yesterday. If we forfeit the best outcome, and refuse to plan for * second best *, we stand in very grave danger of ending up with the worst.
The gist of Frum's column is that the U.S. has not committed to go all out, to wage war unleashed. Since the U.S., both its president and worst of all, its feckless masses, have no stomach for real war, we'll have to settle for second best; Frum is posing as the conservative of conscience making for posterity's purpose a statement asserting we're only losing because of the great lack of Will. Of course this "fighting the war with one arm tied behind our backs" refrain on the part of conservatives isn't unique or new. You can find much of the same talk in Ralph Peters' and Shelby Steele's laments about not sufficiently exterminating the enemy.
And in a sense I think these conservatives are right, at least about one thing that's gone ignored in the neo-con utopian nightmare these last few years: war is messy, nasty business and should only be fought if one is willing to commit genocide, sparing neither man, woman, child, aged or animal. There's another type of war, a war of very specific, limited aims, and likewise conducted with brute, efficient and terrifying force--the type of war believed in by former Secretary Powell and most other realists.
But the neo-con vision and the Bush presumption was that neither type of war was needed in Iraq and neither paradigm accurately reflected American ability and Iraqi hopes for liberation. The war would be short, successful and received gladly by the country's oppressed masses. Collateral damage would be minimal. And in the war's early days, there was much to support this expectation.
But the ethnic and religious fissures that many critics of the war warned about prior to the invasion soon came to the fore, as did a predictable lawlessness and chaos as the American forces, lacking anything like a post-war plan, failed to secure the peace.
With three years of escalating violence and instability, some conservatives are falling back on the argument that if we had only really sacked the country and completely destroyed it would the war have been successfull, seemingly forgetting the liberating aspirations war was supposed to bring for the country's inhabitants. Some of these conservatives are cranky now either because they think America is being dishonored by the quagmire or because they want to move onto other, better wars.
Of course, other conservatives, as I've suggested, might not be at all displeased by the course of events in Iraq. Just the birth pang of a new Middle East, just the sort of creative chaos needed to ensure American hegemony.
But there was another aspect of Frum's NRO post that bears further attention.
To take back the capital from the militias that now terrorize it will take thousands, not hundreds, of American plus tens of thousands of Iraqis. No sector in Iraq can spare the loss of so many forces (our current troubles in Anbar date back to the decision in 2004 to shift troops from Anbar to the siege of Fallujah - when they returned, they discovered that every pro-US informant and ally in the province had been murdered, usually horribly and publicly). So a real plan for success in Baghdad will have to be built upon additional troops from out of area, potentially raising US troop levels back up to the 150,000 or so of late 2005.
Manifestly, neither the administration nor the Congress will contemplate such a move.
(snip)
Averting such a fate means fighting to win Baghdad. But if the president decides against such a fight - either because it would be too bloody or too politically costly or even because he doubts that the US can ultimately succeed - then we need a backup plan.
(snip)
This is not, as some American commentators argue, because the Iraqis refuse to fight for their country. Thousands of brave Iraqis, civil and military, have laid down their lives fighting or working for a secure and democratic Iraq. But Iraq has powerful enemies, inside and out. To date, the US has fought only a limited war against those enemies. Iran understands that the war in Iraq is a regional war. Syria understands it too. Only the US has tried to pretend that the war zone stops at the international border.
(snip)
As I said, we may need a backup plan.
(snip)
It's a second best. First best is to win. But that will take more commitment than the administration was prepared to offer yesterday. If we forfeit the best outcome, and refuse to plan for * second best *, we stand in very grave danger of ending up with the worst.
The gist of Frum's column is that the U.S. has not committed to go all out, to wage war unleashed. Since the U.S., both its president and worst of all, its feckless masses, have no stomach for real war, we'll have to settle for second best; Frum is posing as the conservative of conscience making for posterity's purpose a statement asserting we're only losing because of the great lack of Will. Of course this "fighting the war with one arm tied behind our backs" refrain on the part of conservatives isn't unique or new. You can find much of the same talk in Ralph Peters' and Shelby Steele's laments about not sufficiently exterminating the enemy.
And in a sense I think these conservatives are right, at least about one thing that's gone ignored in the neo-con utopian nightmare these last few years: war is messy, nasty business and should only be fought if one is willing to commit genocide, sparing neither man, woman, child, aged or animal. There's another type of war, a war of very specific, limited aims, and likewise conducted with brute, efficient and terrifying force--the type of war believed in by former Secretary Powell and most other realists.
But the neo-con vision and the Bush presumption was that neither type of war was needed in Iraq and neither paradigm accurately reflected American ability and Iraqi hopes for liberation. The war would be short, successful and received gladly by the country's oppressed masses. Collateral damage would be minimal. And in the war's early days, there was much to support this expectation.
But the ethnic and religious fissures that many critics of the war warned about prior to the invasion soon came to the fore, as did a predictable lawlessness and chaos as the American forces, lacking anything like a post-war plan, failed to secure the peace.
With three years of escalating violence and instability, some conservatives are falling back on the argument that if we had only really sacked the country and completely destroyed it would the war have been successfull, seemingly forgetting the liberating aspirations war was supposed to bring for the country's inhabitants. Some of these conservatives are cranky now either because they think America is being dishonored by the quagmire or because they want to move onto other, better wars.
Of course, other conservatives, as I've suggested, might not be at all displeased by the course of events in Iraq. Just the birth pang of a new Middle East, just the sort of creative chaos needed to ensure American hegemony.
Thursday, July 27, 2006
Time for another "Truth Tour"
Hey, I know they canceled that gal's trip to Israel, but isn't it time to send these guys back to Baghdad?
Not a Good Sign
From Steve Gilliard:
Israeli troops wave captured Hezbollah and Lebanese national flags as they cross the border into Lebanon Thursday July 27, 2006.
Considering this war/skirmish/conflict was supposed to be just about Hezbollah, the waving of a captured Lebanonese flag doesn't strike me as useful, appropriate, or good PR across the Arab world.
"The Israeli official line is that they are only fighting Hizbullah and that the huge number of civilian casualties is an accident. But why are they bombing the regular Lebanese army north of Beirut if their real enemy is Hizbullah, a southern Shiite paramilitary? Why are they bombing radio relay stations?
Note that the only way this conflict can end is for the Lebanese state to be strengthened so that it has a hope of dealing with Hizbullah. Uh, these actions are not, like, strengthening the Lebanese state."
From the start it was obvious that Israel's stated claim to be waging war on Hezbollah, and only on Hezbollah, and the West's adjunct claim that appearances to the contrary, supporting Israel's bombing of Beirut was actually good for Lebanon and in the service and for the benefit of that country's budding Cedar Revolution was fiction.
But as the conflict expands to officially welcome in opposition to the Lebanese army and the Lebanese government, not to mention the resurrecting of Al Qaeda, who also wants a place at the table, and add to this toxic stew the rantings and fervor of people like this, it's hard to say or see how this gets resolved in some rational, peaceful manner.
Wednesday, July 26, 2006
Nice UN Observation Post You Have There
--Be a shame if something happened to it.
After the IDF bombed a clearly marked UN observer post, killing four of its personnel, you might be forgiven for agreeing with Kofi Annan that Israel either has lousy aim, lacks adequate military intelligence, or targeted the observation post deliberately.
But have no fear, two of our U.S. Senators were already briefed with the applicable talking points (from Larry King Live):
KING: We'll start with Senator Allen, what do you make about these two observers killed and the apparent anger of Kofi Annan toward Israel?
SEN. GEORGE ALLEN (R), VIRGINIA: Well, it's unfortunate. I don't think that Israel wants to hit the U.N. What they're trying to hit is Hezbollah. They're trying to degrade them, pound them, and make sure that they're not attacking and they're protecting themselves.
So, I'm sure they'll find out what happened. But Israel has a right to defend itself and now they have these latest threats that they're going to be launching missiles further into Israel.Kofi Annan's statements I think are unduly harsh. It would be nice if the United Nations actually showed such resolve and anger and determination in actually enforcing Security Council Resolution 1559, which has as its purpose the removal of Hezbollah or disarming the militias along the Israeli-Lebanon border.
KING: Senator Bayh, is this then, do you consider this a casualty of war?
SEN. EVAN BAYH (D), INDIANA: Unfortunately so, Larry. I simply don't believe that the Israelis would intentionally kill U.N. observers. I'd be interested to know what Mr. Annan, what facts he has at his disposal that lead him to that assertion but until I see such facts I simply don't believe it.
And, I think George was right. We have to remember who was responsible for this. It was the Hezbollah that attacked across an internationally recognized boundary, killed soldiers, took others captive.
All this violence and tragedy flows from that act, so we have to focus on bringing Hezbollah under control, disarming them, getting a force in there that can keep them from reconstituting themselves. And then ultimately, Larry, we have to look at Iran because they're in the background of all of this. And, I think Kofi Annan would be better advised to focus upon the role that Iran has played and just think how bad things would be if Iran had nuclear weapons right now. So, this is a tragedy but we got to remember who's really to blame.
"Israel has a right to defend itself..."
"U.N. Resolution 1559"
"Hezbollah...terrorists..."
"Iran...Syria"
"Islamic fascism..."
"terrorists..."
"Iran...nuclear..."
"1559"
"UN-bad"
"Israel-good"
"Syria"
"terrorists"
rinse and repeat.
Juan Cole suggests a reason why the IDF might have "accidently" targeted the UN observers:
"The Israelis denied that they hit the base deliberately, but Kofi would know. Why do it? When you have in mind war crimes, it is better not to have neutral observers in the region."
The "accidental" bombing of the UN observation post also sounds eerily familiar to this.
Glenn Greenwald is more cautious than I am in accepting Annan's "apparently deliberate" claim:
"(5) Oddly, the very pro-Israel New York Sun says that the Israel-U.N. incident "could prove a turning point in Israel's war to rid its northern border of Hezbollah." I don't see why that would be the case. Almost every war has incidents of this sort. The U.S. bombed the Chinese embassy in Belgrade, killed a group of Canadian troops in Afghanistan in an F-16 strike, and shot missiles at media offices in Baghdad. Incidents of this type are not uncommon.
Additionally, it was somewhat surprising that Kofi Annan would so quickly and impulsively make such serious accusations against Israel -- namely, that the bombing of the U.N. observation post was "deliberate," rather than accidental. That may well be the case, but it may very well not be, and it is hard to see how Annan could know that already."
On a 2008 note, I'm a little distressed to hear Evan Bayh employing the same saber-rattling on Iran as the administration and its neo-con supporters. I don't know if his stand here is based on a genuine fear of Iran's capabilities and intentions, or if he's posturing for a national campaign, or both. Of course, it's often the case that candidates and prospective candidates sound more alarmist or beligerent before entering office. Bill Clinton, for instance, campaigned against the first President Bush's "soft on China" policy but ultimately adopted much of the same policy once in office; the current President Bush likewise criticized his predecessor's "nation-building" efforts while going on to become among the most nation-building of presidents in Iraq.
But a harsh stance towards Iran could come back to bite Bayh, and other Democratic contenders, if they ultimately are not prepared to put up or shut up when it comes to exercising force against Tehran.
After the IDF bombed a clearly marked UN observer post, killing four of its personnel, you might be forgiven for agreeing with Kofi Annan that Israel either has lousy aim, lacks adequate military intelligence, or targeted the observation post deliberately.
But have no fear, two of our U.S. Senators were already briefed with the applicable talking points (from Larry King Live):
KING: We'll start with Senator Allen, what do you make about these two observers killed and the apparent anger of Kofi Annan toward Israel?
SEN. GEORGE ALLEN (R), VIRGINIA: Well, it's unfortunate. I don't think that Israel wants to hit the U.N. What they're trying to hit is Hezbollah. They're trying to degrade them, pound them, and make sure that they're not attacking and they're protecting themselves.
So, I'm sure they'll find out what happened. But Israel has a right to defend itself and now they have these latest threats that they're going to be launching missiles further into Israel.Kofi Annan's statements I think are unduly harsh. It would be nice if the United Nations actually showed such resolve and anger and determination in actually enforcing Security Council Resolution 1559, which has as its purpose the removal of Hezbollah or disarming the militias along the Israeli-Lebanon border.
KING: Senator Bayh, is this then, do you consider this a casualty of war?
SEN. EVAN BAYH (D), INDIANA: Unfortunately so, Larry. I simply don't believe that the Israelis would intentionally kill U.N. observers. I'd be interested to know what Mr. Annan, what facts he has at his disposal that lead him to that assertion but until I see such facts I simply don't believe it.
And, I think George was right. We have to remember who was responsible for this. It was the Hezbollah that attacked across an internationally recognized boundary, killed soldiers, took others captive.
All this violence and tragedy flows from that act, so we have to focus on bringing Hezbollah under control, disarming them, getting a force in there that can keep them from reconstituting themselves. And then ultimately, Larry, we have to look at Iran because they're in the background of all of this. And, I think Kofi Annan would be better advised to focus upon the role that Iran has played and just think how bad things would be if Iran had nuclear weapons right now. So, this is a tragedy but we got to remember who's really to blame.
"Israel has a right to defend itself..."
"U.N. Resolution 1559"
"Hezbollah...terrorists..."
"Iran...Syria"
"Islamic fascism..."
"terrorists..."
"Iran...nuclear..."
"1559"
"UN-bad"
"Israel-good"
"Syria"
"terrorists"
rinse and repeat.
Juan Cole suggests a reason why the IDF might have "accidently" targeted the UN observers:
"The Israelis denied that they hit the base deliberately, but Kofi would know. Why do it? When you have in mind war crimes, it is better not to have neutral observers in the region."
The "accidental" bombing of the UN observation post also sounds eerily familiar to this.
Glenn Greenwald is more cautious than I am in accepting Annan's "apparently deliberate" claim:
"(5) Oddly, the very pro-Israel New York Sun says that the Israel-U.N. incident "could prove a turning point in Israel's war to rid its northern border of Hezbollah." I don't see why that would be the case. Almost every war has incidents of this sort. The U.S. bombed the Chinese embassy in Belgrade, killed a group of Canadian troops in Afghanistan in an F-16 strike, and shot missiles at media offices in Baghdad. Incidents of this type are not uncommon.
Additionally, it was somewhat surprising that Kofi Annan would so quickly and impulsively make such serious accusations against Israel -- namely, that the bombing of the U.N. observation post was "deliberate," rather than accidental. That may well be the case, but it may very well not be, and it is hard to see how Annan could know that already."
On a 2008 note, I'm a little distressed to hear Evan Bayh employing the same saber-rattling on Iran as the administration and its neo-con supporters. I don't know if his stand here is based on a genuine fear of Iran's capabilities and intentions, or if he's posturing for a national campaign, or both. Of course, it's often the case that candidates and prospective candidates sound more alarmist or beligerent before entering office. Bill Clinton, for instance, campaigned against the first President Bush's "soft on China" policy but ultimately adopted much of the same policy once in office; the current President Bush likewise criticized his predecessor's "nation-building" efforts while going on to become among the most nation-building of presidents in Iraq.
But a harsh stance towards Iran could come back to bite Bayh, and other Democratic contenders, if they ultimately are not prepared to put up or shut up when it comes to exercising force against Tehran.
Tuesday, July 25, 2006
Now, Back to the Oil
Today's NYT:
...But Iran's ability to rebuff the West on these matters has only increased as oil prices have risen from about $27 a barrel at the start of the Iraq war, to $65 a barrel in the spring as tensions rose over Iran's nuclear program, to $75 on Monday as the conflict continued in Lebanon.
Indeed, according to Cambridge Energy Research Associates, each $5 increase in oil prices translates into $85 million a week for Iran's bank account, emboldening its leaders and making whatever aid it supplies to Hezbollah easier to finance even as the crisis threatens to spread.
(snip)
New oil money has given not only Iran but also Russia more resources to resist Western pressure. As he played host to the Group of 8 summit meeting in St. Petersburg last week, President Vladimir V. Putin was able to swat away criticism from President Bush about Russian domestic and foreign policies.
He boasted, in fact, that Russia's oil, natural gas and nuclear energy capacities made it the biggest energy player in the world.
Months before the summit meeting, Russia was hoping to use the final communique to endorse its approach on energy, in which the state basically controls the oil sector. The Bush administration joined with Europe to block such an endorsement, American officials say.
But energy remains a major American irritant with Russia and by extension China.
The Bush administration has stepped up its efforts to support pipelines that would carry oil and natural gas to the West, bypassing Russian territory.
Russia, in turn, has pressured Central Asian countries to oppose American energy projects and the use of the area for military bases.
To do that, Russia has joined with China to mobilize a five-year-old group called the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, whose members include several Central Asian countries. The Defense Department is even worried that the group could move from its focus on energy to become a military alliance to rival NATO.
Many American analysts say energy issues are driving Russia and China into each other's arms politically, and that if anything American policies are accelerating the trend.
Meanwhile, the new oil politics are rearranging the international playing board, not simply giving Iran latitude in the Middle East but allowing Venezuela, for another example, to try to blunt Washington's influence in Latin America.
"We are seeing a radical change in how countries like Russia, Iran and Venezuela on the supply side, and China and India on the demand side, bring the world marketplace to bear on foreign policy," said Carlos Pascual, a former top aide to Ms. Rice and now foreign policy studies director at the Brookings Institution.
"I don't think any of us have done a terribly good job of thinking through how far behind the eight ball we are on these issues," he said.
So, our support of Israel's aggression in the Middle East, our invasion and stymied occupation of Iraq, and our sabber-rattling towards Iran have helped drive up the price of oil, which in turn has increased the wealth of our new supposed worst enemy, Iran. Meanwhile, Russia and China have forged an economic-energy pact, and Russian in particular, is reviving its opposition to American hegemony throughout Asia by encouraging resistance to sponsoring American military bases and forcing the U.S. to hope for an oil-gas pipeline that bypasses Russia. And if each $5/barrel increase in oil prices results in an extra $85 million/week for Tehran, than the increase in oil prices from approximately $25/barrel before the Iraq invasion to $75 now means that we've enriched Iran by approximately $75-$25 = $50, and $50 is 10-$5's meaning that 10*$85 million = $850 million/week, or about $45 billion/year. That may be chump change, or the price of one year's estate tax revenue here. But it probably helps out a lot over there.
And, oh yeah, a former top aide to Secretary Rice says we haven't done a terribly good job of thinking through these issues. Ya think?
But General Kristol and our American Mullahs still want us to attack Iran, and Syria while we're in the neighborhood.
...But Iran's ability to rebuff the West on these matters has only increased as oil prices have risen from about $27 a barrel at the start of the Iraq war, to $65 a barrel in the spring as tensions rose over Iran's nuclear program, to $75 on Monday as the conflict continued in Lebanon.
Indeed, according to Cambridge Energy Research Associates, each $5 increase in oil prices translates into $85 million a week for Iran's bank account, emboldening its leaders and making whatever aid it supplies to Hezbollah easier to finance even as the crisis threatens to spread.
(snip)
New oil money has given not only Iran but also Russia more resources to resist Western pressure. As he played host to the Group of 8 summit meeting in St. Petersburg last week, President Vladimir V. Putin was able to swat away criticism from President Bush about Russian domestic and foreign policies.
He boasted, in fact, that Russia's oil, natural gas and nuclear energy capacities made it the biggest energy player in the world.
Months before the summit meeting, Russia was hoping to use the final communique to endorse its approach on energy, in which the state basically controls the oil sector. The Bush administration joined with Europe to block such an endorsement, American officials say.
But energy remains a major American irritant with Russia and by extension China.
The Bush administration has stepped up its efforts to support pipelines that would carry oil and natural gas to the West, bypassing Russian territory.
Russia, in turn, has pressured Central Asian countries to oppose American energy projects and the use of the area for military bases.
To do that, Russia has joined with China to mobilize a five-year-old group called the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, whose members include several Central Asian countries. The Defense Department is even worried that the group could move from its focus on energy to become a military alliance to rival NATO.
Many American analysts say energy issues are driving Russia and China into each other's arms politically, and that if anything American policies are accelerating the trend.
Meanwhile, the new oil politics are rearranging the international playing board, not simply giving Iran latitude in the Middle East but allowing Venezuela, for another example, to try to blunt Washington's influence in Latin America.
"We are seeing a radical change in how countries like Russia, Iran and Venezuela on the supply side, and China and India on the demand side, bring the world marketplace to bear on foreign policy," said Carlos Pascual, a former top aide to Ms. Rice and now foreign policy studies director at the Brookings Institution.
"I don't think any of us have done a terribly good job of thinking through how far behind the eight ball we are on these issues," he said.
So, our support of Israel's aggression in the Middle East, our invasion and stymied occupation of Iraq, and our sabber-rattling towards Iran have helped drive up the price of oil, which in turn has increased the wealth of our new supposed worst enemy, Iran. Meanwhile, Russia and China have forged an economic-energy pact, and Russian in particular, is reviving its opposition to American hegemony throughout Asia by encouraging resistance to sponsoring American military bases and forcing the U.S. to hope for an oil-gas pipeline that bypasses Russia. And if each $5/barrel increase in oil prices results in an extra $85 million/week for Tehran, than the increase in oil prices from approximately $25/barrel before the Iraq invasion to $75 now means that we've enriched Iran by approximately $75-$25 = $50, and $50 is 10-$5's meaning that 10*$85 million = $850 million/week, or about $45 billion/year. That may be chump change, or the price of one year's estate tax revenue here. But it probably helps out a lot over there.
And, oh yeah, a former top aide to Secretary Rice says we haven't done a terribly good job of thinking through these issues. Ya think?
But General Kristol and our American Mullahs still want us to attack Iran, and Syria while we're in the neighborhood.
From Our Mullahs to Your Mullahs
On the heels of my post yesterday about the connections between neo-conservative foreign policy and American megachurch evangelicalism, TAPPED tells us that some of our leading teevee mullahs are lobbying Washington to attack Iran for reasons that, as Sarah Posner has documented, stem from a toxic brew of end-times biblical literalism and apocalyptic forecasting.
So, you know, just in case you thought sanity or reason might prevail relative to the latest Middle East crisis, well, it doesn't look good.
So, you know, just in case you thought sanity or reason might prevail relative to the latest Middle East crisis, well, it doesn't look good.
Monday, July 24, 2006
Megachurch Evangelicalism and Neo-Conservative Foreign Policy
I'm sure someone's made this connection in one form another before, like maybe this guy, and this other guy.
But it still seems to me an unholy merger that warrants continued investigation, like an onion constantly peeled back to show yet additional gradations. For one thing, both megachurch evangelicalism and neo-conservative politics are heavily oriented around the nation of Israel, the former for its presumed role in bible prophecy leading to the rapture and return of Christ, the latter for other reasons, mostly geopolitical. So in regards to Israel, both movements have the same goal--the preservation of the Jewish state and the destruction of its infidel neighbors.
And both emerged at around the same time, in the late 1970's, as reactions against cultural liberalism and realist detente politics. And both represent significant breakages from the traditional Republican coalition and thought. Once upon a time, it was the mainline Protestant churches, Episcopalian, Methodist, Baptist, Presbyterian, etc, that made up the Republican elite and its core northern support. Now, mainline Protestantism is in decline, replaced by megachurch evangelicalism, and political Christianity is more rooted in the south and west than in the north.
Meanwhile, neo-conservative politics got its start in the late 1970's as the Reagan/Kilpatrick wing of Republicanism, which desired a more beligerent posture towards the Soviet Union and an end to the realist policy of detente and arms control led driven by Nixon-Ford-Kissenger. George H.W. Bush, General Scowcroft and Colin Powell resurrected a realist foreign policy vision as the U.S. entered the post-Cold War era. The election of Bill Clinton brought with it a more internationalist and humanitarian tweaking to the old realism, an adaptation that provided a ready target for discontented conservatives anxious to flex America's newly buffed muscles now that the other bully on the beach--Soviet Russia--had been vanquished.
But there is a sense in which megachurch evangelicalism and neo-conservative foreign policy are marketably different. The former seeks domestic authoritarianism, a destruction of the Constitutional wall between church and state, and a hyper-invasive posture towards privacy rights, lifestyle issues, and personal morality and religiosity.
But where megachurch evangelicalism demands hyper-order and control in the homeland, neo-conservative foreign policy advocates international disorder and chaos abroad. The old Republican realism of Nixon and Kissinger aimed for world order and a balance of power. In a word, stability. The new neo-conservatism of Gringrich and Kristol wants no order and relishes, if not purposely orchestrates, global instability. That's the only conclusion I can draw from the administration's Iraq strategery and its latest policy, or lack thereof, on Israel, Palestine and Lebanon.
There's a well known anecdote from Secretary of State George C. Marshall's visit with Stalin in the Soviet Union just before the formulation and announcement of the Marshall Plan. During the visit, Marshall was appalled to realize that Stalin didn't care about the reconstruction of Europe or the fate of the nations and peoples so ravaged by the war. Rather, Stalin appeared indifferent, if not pleased, by conditions of the countries borderin his own. The better, no doubt, to ensure the Soviet dictator he wouldn't be enduring any more invasions from the west.
The current neo-conservative foreign policy elite seem to share a similar mindset. Splinter the enemy, exploit the divisions, or attempt to exploit the divisions between Sunni and Shia Muslims, decapitate regimes deemed unfriendly to American power, and reap the benefits of countries left in turmoil or cowed into obesience. As I've mentioned before, the civil war in Iraq works for neo-conservatives for at least two reasons. One, it reduces Iraq's future opposition to U.S. middle east policy by causing the state to war against itself. Two, the continued chaos aids the neo-conservative story about the middle east and the global war on terror by providing an example of another situation where America is seemingly interested in promoting democracy but is hindered by terrorist opponents.
This latter point was made by Newt Gringrich on C-Span yesterday. For the Newter, the bloodshed there is indicative of the enemies we face and justifies continued American beligerence and war-mongering. That's the beauty of the neo-conservative foreign policy nightmare. There are no circumstances that don't reaffirm and justify its ambitions. If a friendly democracy is created in Iraq (or Iran or Syria) than the effort was worth it. On the other hand, if as a result the state disintegrates into sectarian violence, than that proves how dangerous and anti-American the area's peoples are, which in turn, reaffirms and justifies the American initiative.
I also seems clear to me that Newt Gringrich is emerging as the neo-conservative's leading political spokesman. Although out of office, his re-emergence in the last few months and his adoption of the neo-conservative war agenda gives the neo-con establishment a fresh, new believer, ready to take up the banner when George W. vacates the WH in two years. And it wouldn't surprise me if Gringrich both runs in 2008 and wins the nomination. He's the only True Believer among the prospective contenders who also brings an articulate nightmarish vision, unlike others, such as George Allen, who while being sufficiently ideological, I think lacks the charisma necessary for winning the presidency. Then again, who knows. Maybe someone like Allen would be the perfect, pliable Bush replacement, while Gringrich and Kristol procede with the real work of influencing public opinion and manipulating the bureaucracy to extend America's power across the globe and to destabilize our enemies, both real and imagined.
But it still seems to me an unholy merger that warrants continued investigation, like an onion constantly peeled back to show yet additional gradations. For one thing, both megachurch evangelicalism and neo-conservative politics are heavily oriented around the nation of Israel, the former for its presumed role in bible prophecy leading to the rapture and return of Christ, the latter for other reasons, mostly geopolitical. So in regards to Israel, both movements have the same goal--the preservation of the Jewish state and the destruction of its infidel neighbors.
And both emerged at around the same time, in the late 1970's, as reactions against cultural liberalism and realist detente politics. And both represent significant breakages from the traditional Republican coalition and thought. Once upon a time, it was the mainline Protestant churches, Episcopalian, Methodist, Baptist, Presbyterian, etc, that made up the Republican elite and its core northern support. Now, mainline Protestantism is in decline, replaced by megachurch evangelicalism, and political Christianity is more rooted in the south and west than in the north.
Meanwhile, neo-conservative politics got its start in the late 1970's as the Reagan/Kilpatrick wing of Republicanism, which desired a more beligerent posture towards the Soviet Union and an end to the realist policy of detente and arms control led driven by Nixon-Ford-Kissenger. George H.W. Bush, General Scowcroft and Colin Powell resurrected a realist foreign policy vision as the U.S. entered the post-Cold War era. The election of Bill Clinton brought with it a more internationalist and humanitarian tweaking to the old realism, an adaptation that provided a ready target for discontented conservatives anxious to flex America's newly buffed muscles now that the other bully on the beach--Soviet Russia--had been vanquished.
But there is a sense in which megachurch evangelicalism and neo-conservative foreign policy are marketably different. The former seeks domestic authoritarianism, a destruction of the Constitutional wall between church and state, and a hyper-invasive posture towards privacy rights, lifestyle issues, and personal morality and religiosity.
But where megachurch evangelicalism demands hyper-order and control in the homeland, neo-conservative foreign policy advocates international disorder and chaos abroad. The old Republican realism of Nixon and Kissinger aimed for world order and a balance of power. In a word, stability. The new neo-conservatism of Gringrich and Kristol wants no order and relishes, if not purposely orchestrates, global instability. That's the only conclusion I can draw from the administration's Iraq strategery and its latest policy, or lack thereof, on Israel, Palestine and Lebanon.
There's a well known anecdote from Secretary of State George C. Marshall's visit with Stalin in the Soviet Union just before the formulation and announcement of the Marshall Plan. During the visit, Marshall was appalled to realize that Stalin didn't care about the reconstruction of Europe or the fate of the nations and peoples so ravaged by the war. Rather, Stalin appeared indifferent, if not pleased, by conditions of the countries borderin his own. The better, no doubt, to ensure the Soviet dictator he wouldn't be enduring any more invasions from the west.
The current neo-conservative foreign policy elite seem to share a similar mindset. Splinter the enemy, exploit the divisions, or attempt to exploit the divisions between Sunni and Shia Muslims, decapitate regimes deemed unfriendly to American power, and reap the benefits of countries left in turmoil or cowed into obesience. As I've mentioned before, the civil war in Iraq works for neo-conservatives for at least two reasons. One, it reduces Iraq's future opposition to U.S. middle east policy by causing the state to war against itself. Two, the continued chaos aids the neo-conservative story about the middle east and the global war on terror by providing an example of another situation where America is seemingly interested in promoting democracy but is hindered by terrorist opponents.
This latter point was made by Newt Gringrich on C-Span yesterday. For the Newter, the bloodshed there is indicative of the enemies we face and justifies continued American beligerence and war-mongering. That's the beauty of the neo-conservative foreign policy nightmare. There are no circumstances that don't reaffirm and justify its ambitions. If a friendly democracy is created in Iraq (or Iran or Syria) than the effort was worth it. On the other hand, if as a result the state disintegrates into sectarian violence, than that proves how dangerous and anti-American the area's peoples are, which in turn, reaffirms and justifies the American initiative.
I also seems clear to me that Newt Gringrich is emerging as the neo-conservative's leading political spokesman. Although out of office, his re-emergence in the last few months and his adoption of the neo-conservative war agenda gives the neo-con establishment a fresh, new believer, ready to take up the banner when George W. vacates the WH in two years. And it wouldn't surprise me if Gringrich both runs in 2008 and wins the nomination. He's the only True Believer among the prospective contenders who also brings an articulate nightmarish vision, unlike others, such as George Allen, who while being sufficiently ideological, I think lacks the charisma necessary for winning the presidency. Then again, who knows. Maybe someone like Allen would be the perfect, pliable Bush replacement, while Gringrich and Kristol procede with the real work of influencing public opinion and manipulating the bureaucracy to extend America's power across the globe and to destabilize our enemies, both real and imagined.
Saturday, July 22, 2006
Random Thoughts on Israel-Lebanon
1. Cease-fire. There's a lot of all-or-nothing talk regarding a cease-fire. Israel and its patron--us--say no cease-fire because...well...that would only help the Hezbollah terrorists who've "provoked" the current crisis. But why not call for a cease-fire concerning Beirut and all points central and north in Lebanon? There's justification for Israel to combat Hezbollah in the south of Lebanon, where their power base is and from where they're launching rocket attacks into northern Israel. So why is the notion of a cease-fire being talked about as if it has to be a total cease-fire or none at all?
2. Disproportionate force. The Israeli bombing of Beirut has been way over the top, outrageous and immoral. There's anywhere between 500,000 and 1 million refugees and dislocated persons as a result, not to mention hundreds of civilians already dead from the attacks.
3. Forcing a crisis. The motive of Israel's over-reaching seems to be to provoke an international crisis. Israel probably thinks that absent a crisis of monumental proportions, Hezbollah would never be disarmed per the United Nations Security Council resolution 1559 and for the lasting peace of the Lebanon-Israel border generally.
4. The Bush-Rice response to the Israeli attacks has been despicable. Digby says Rice's They've put all the blame on Hezbollah, and talked about the group's attacks on northern Israel as if no broader, more destructive attacks on Lebanon were being conducted by Israel. Hezbollah did "start" the current series of events by kidnapping the Israeli soldiers. But the rocket attacks into northern Israel didn't start until after the knee-jerk air attacks on Beirut by Israel.
4a. Digby says: "The Bush administration are monsters. That is not hyperbole. There can be no other explanation as to why the secretary of state, the person in charge of American diplomacy, would be so crude and stupid... Jesus. They don't even know how to fake it anymore. Isn't it at least smart to pretend you care about the dying children?"
4b. What Glenn Greenwald says.
5. Media coverage. I generally only watch CNN and for the most part, it's coverage (except for Lou Dobbs) has been OK; they've paid attention to the refugee crisis and to the Israeli destruction of Beirut generally. They continue to raise the question of Israeli's disproportionate response. But the Bush administration and most American pundits have been tone deaf to the consequences of Israel's actions.
6. Lasting peace. I referenced Richard Cohen's op-ed yesterday in which the Wash Post columnist alluded to Israel's 1948 creation and location in the midst of Arab Muslims having been a mistake. I don't know if that is true. As I mentioned, Egypt and Jordan have ultimately established peaceful relations with Israel, so it doesn't strike me as completely impossible for the surrounding governments to peacefully accomodate the Jewish state. But lasting peace won't be possible if Israel destroys Lebanon and scatters half or more of it's four million people. And the damage has probably already been done now, regardless of whether an eventual cease-fire and international force in southern Lebanon is agreed to.
7. Long term implications. Although Egypt, Jordan, and even Saudi Arabia's governments have issued official statements condemning Hezbollah, I can't help but think that the response on the Arab Street is and in the future will be, anything but further inflammation against Israel. I doubt any of us living well in the U.S. have any sense of what it's like to be living as most Arabs live in the Middle East. We had two skyscrappers and 3,000 people killed and we freaked out. Arab countries have the rough equivalent of 911 on an almost continual basis. If you think the nationalist response from Americans after 911 was significant, take that reaction to the nth power for a sense of how humiliated most Arabs probably feel, given the poverty most Arabs live under and how little their governments represent their aspirations (Bush is largely right on this point although the new "democracy" in Iraq he has helped create does not appear to be either stabile or supportive of our Israeli friends).
7a. James Wolcott says we're complicit in our government's contribution to the massacre in Lebanon, not to mention the civil war in Iraq. And he's right. I don't know if World War III has started, but I can see our unapologetic defense of Israel's savagery causing many of us who gave the administration a pass on Iraq to start taking to the streets and withdrawing our support and discontinuing our enabling of our society for sanctioning this new war.
2. Disproportionate force. The Israeli bombing of Beirut has been way over the top, outrageous and immoral. There's anywhere between 500,000 and 1 million refugees and dislocated persons as a result, not to mention hundreds of civilians already dead from the attacks.
3. Forcing a crisis. The motive of Israel's over-reaching seems to be to provoke an international crisis. Israel probably thinks that absent a crisis of monumental proportions, Hezbollah would never be disarmed per the United Nations Security Council resolution 1559 and for the lasting peace of the Lebanon-Israel border generally.
4. The Bush-Rice response to the Israeli attacks has been despicable. Digby says Rice's They've put all the blame on Hezbollah, and talked about the group's attacks on northern Israel as if no broader, more destructive attacks on Lebanon were being conducted by Israel. Hezbollah did "start" the current series of events by kidnapping the Israeli soldiers. But the rocket attacks into northern Israel didn't start until after the knee-jerk air attacks on Beirut by Israel.
4a. Digby says: "The Bush administration are monsters. That is not hyperbole. There can be no other explanation as to why the secretary of state, the person in charge of American diplomacy, would be so crude and stupid... Jesus. They don't even know how to fake it anymore. Isn't it at least smart to pretend you care about the dying children?"
4b. What Glenn Greenwald says.
5. Media coverage. I generally only watch CNN and for the most part, it's coverage (except for Lou Dobbs) has been OK; they've paid attention to the refugee crisis and to the Israeli destruction of Beirut generally. They continue to raise the question of Israeli's disproportionate response. But the Bush administration and most American pundits have been tone deaf to the consequences of Israel's actions.
6. Lasting peace. I referenced Richard Cohen's op-ed yesterday in which the Wash Post columnist alluded to Israel's 1948 creation and location in the midst of Arab Muslims having been a mistake. I don't know if that is true. As I mentioned, Egypt and Jordan have ultimately established peaceful relations with Israel, so it doesn't strike me as completely impossible for the surrounding governments to peacefully accomodate the Jewish state. But lasting peace won't be possible if Israel destroys Lebanon and scatters half or more of it's four million people. And the damage has probably already been done now, regardless of whether an eventual cease-fire and international force in southern Lebanon is agreed to.
7. Long term implications. Although Egypt, Jordan, and even Saudi Arabia's governments have issued official statements condemning Hezbollah, I can't help but think that the response on the Arab Street is and in the future will be, anything but further inflammation against Israel. I doubt any of us living well in the U.S. have any sense of what it's like to be living as most Arabs live in the Middle East. We had two skyscrappers and 3,000 people killed and we freaked out. Arab countries have the rough equivalent of 911 on an almost continual basis. If you think the nationalist response from Americans after 911 was significant, take that reaction to the nth power for a sense of how humiliated most Arabs probably feel, given the poverty most Arabs live under and how little their governments represent their aspirations (Bush is largely right on this point although the new "democracy" in Iraq he has helped create does not appear to be either stabile or supportive of our Israeli friends).
7a. James Wolcott says we're complicit in our government's contribution to the massacre in Lebanon, not to mention the civil war in Iraq. And he's right. I don't know if World War III has started, but I can see our unapologetic defense of Israel's savagery causing many of us who gave the administration a pass on Iraq to start taking to the streets and withdrawing our support and discontinuing our enabling of our society for sanctioning this new war.
8. If you don't know this already, Juan Cole is the preminent Middle Eastern commenter around these parts. Go read up. He's generally pro-Arab and pro-Palestinian. But if you want the Israeli view point, you can get that on just about any cable network.
Friday, July 21, 2006
Organized Disorganization
Just finished reading State of War by James Risen, the author who neo-conservative scold, William Bennett, said belongs behind bars for...well I'm not really sure; obstensibly because Risen's reporting on the CIA's secret overseas prisons and NSA's massive domestic surveillance program damaged "national security", but most likely because Risen's reporting sheds light on, and deigns to criticize, the Republican administration and its foreign policy. And that's downright illegal and unAmerican. Anyway, if Bennett says the guy's reporting warrants inprisonment, than you just gotta go out and get the book, don't you?
I read State of War on the heels of reading most of the way through The One Percent Doctrine, a more recent book that covers much of the same ground, the war on terra through the frame of the CIA, although Risen's book comes across as more critical, particularly of Tenet, who was apparently the primary source for One Percent Doctrine.
I'll probably have more to say about both books in future posts, but one thing that stands out from them, and Cobra II as well, is (a) just how poorly the Iraq invasion was planned and (2) the planning, or lack thereof, was so bad, it couldn't have been by accident.
Cobra II's authors write about how uninterested the Pentagon was in identifying, much less securing, the supposed sites of Iraq's WMD in the lead up to the war, to prevent those arms and materials from ending up in the hands of foreign jihadists or would-be-insurgents. Risen notes the lack of Arabic speakers in the CIA, kind of a surprising one would think when invading two Middle Eastern countries.
When I read these accounts and see the chaos and killing Iraq, I can't help but think that while an Iraqi civil war might not have been the war architect's plan or hope, there's a sense that how Iraq has played out isn't necessarily counter to the neo-con's vision of global affairs.
I wrote a week or two back about different foreign policy perspectives including neoconservatism. One thing about neoconservatism that I probably didn't emphasize is that orientation's comfort level with instability and chaos. But the administration's response, or again, lack thereof, amidst the most recent Middle East explosion in Lebanon just reinforces the idea that the neocons would just assume see the Middle East, except Israel, meltdown. That would seem to carry over to the neo-con's call to bomb/invade Syria and Iran. That we presently lack the troops needed for such a mission, and that our Iraq debacle should be an object lesson, a negative object lesson, for planners wanting to bomb/invade any more Middle Eastern countries is beside the point. In the world of Bill Kristol, and the neocons still spread throughout the administration and reporting the "news" at Fox, any instability in the Middle East caused by our bombing and destruction is either irrelevant or actually beneficial, to the degree that it weakens ours, or Israel's, opponents.
For an administration "creating its own reality", there's little need to play by the old rules, or any rules at all. All of which would have been largely irrelevant had it not been for 911, which was absolutely fortuitous for the neocons spreading throughout the administration. As Ron Suskind notes in The One Percent Doctrine, 911 not only gave the neocon defense establishment a perfect opening to invade Iraq and expand executive power, but created, or at the very least, reinforced, in the mind of the president the idea that any past historical evidence, practice, or practicioners (including his father) were unreliable or inapplicable for the crisis posed by global terrorism, meaning that the administration insulated itself to an even greater degree in its decision-making than it probably would have anyway.
A final inference I draw from State of War is that the administration's governmental neglect extends beyond the most obvious domestic linkages to FEMA and the Mine Safety and Health Administrations of the executive branch, but even to foreign policy agencies including the CIA and the State Department. Both were regarded by the neocons in exile as subversive and insufficiently political. And while State was initially awarded to the administration's most distinguished member, Colin Powell, the General was all but shut out of the major decision making process and he and his successor, Condi Rice were barreled over by an aggressive Rumsfeld Pentagon.
And the latter, while dominating the foreign policy decision-making has made clear it's disdain, both before hand and afterwards, for "nation-building". The result has been a narrow circle of insulated decision-makers in Washington, playing hit and run over the Middle East, with little regard for diplomacy or for reconstructing the desecrated society's they leave in their wake. Afghanistan, the first point of entry, is over-run with heroin growers, Iraq is awash in blood, and Lebanon has all but been destroyed. Think the "west" will include in its strategy for "peace" the healing of Beirut? Not likely. Syria and Iran await.
I read State of War on the heels of reading most of the way through The One Percent Doctrine, a more recent book that covers much of the same ground, the war on terra through the frame of the CIA, although Risen's book comes across as more critical, particularly of Tenet, who was apparently the primary source for One Percent Doctrine.
I'll probably have more to say about both books in future posts, but one thing that stands out from them, and Cobra II as well, is (a) just how poorly the Iraq invasion was planned and (2) the planning, or lack thereof, was so bad, it couldn't have been by accident.
Cobra II's authors write about how uninterested the Pentagon was in identifying, much less securing, the supposed sites of Iraq's WMD in the lead up to the war, to prevent those arms and materials from ending up in the hands of foreign jihadists or would-be-insurgents. Risen notes the lack of Arabic speakers in the CIA, kind of a surprising one would think when invading two Middle Eastern countries.
When I read these accounts and see the chaos and killing Iraq, I can't help but think that while an Iraqi civil war might not have been the war architect's plan or hope, there's a sense that how Iraq has played out isn't necessarily counter to the neo-con's vision of global affairs.
I wrote a week or two back about different foreign policy perspectives including neoconservatism. One thing about neoconservatism that I probably didn't emphasize is that orientation's comfort level with instability and chaos. But the administration's response, or again, lack thereof, amidst the most recent Middle East explosion in Lebanon just reinforces the idea that the neocons would just assume see the Middle East, except Israel, meltdown. That would seem to carry over to the neo-con's call to bomb/invade Syria and Iran. That we presently lack the troops needed for such a mission, and that our Iraq debacle should be an object lesson, a negative object lesson, for planners wanting to bomb/invade any more Middle Eastern countries is beside the point. In the world of Bill Kristol, and the neocons still spread throughout the administration and reporting the "news" at Fox, any instability in the Middle East caused by our bombing and destruction is either irrelevant or actually beneficial, to the degree that it weakens ours, or Israel's, opponents.
For an administration "creating its own reality", there's little need to play by the old rules, or any rules at all. All of which would have been largely irrelevant had it not been for 911, which was absolutely fortuitous for the neocons spreading throughout the administration. As Ron Suskind notes in The One Percent Doctrine, 911 not only gave the neocon defense establishment a perfect opening to invade Iraq and expand executive power, but created, or at the very least, reinforced, in the mind of the president the idea that any past historical evidence, practice, or practicioners (including his father) were unreliable or inapplicable for the crisis posed by global terrorism, meaning that the administration insulated itself to an even greater degree in its decision-making than it probably would have anyway.
A final inference I draw from State of War is that the administration's governmental neglect extends beyond the most obvious domestic linkages to FEMA and the Mine Safety and Health Administrations of the executive branch, but even to foreign policy agencies including the CIA and the State Department. Both were regarded by the neocons in exile as subversive and insufficiently political. And while State was initially awarded to the administration's most distinguished member, Colin Powell, the General was all but shut out of the major decision making process and he and his successor, Condi Rice were barreled over by an aggressive Rumsfeld Pentagon.
And the latter, while dominating the foreign policy decision-making has made clear it's disdain, both before hand and afterwards, for "nation-building". The result has been a narrow circle of insulated decision-makers in Washington, playing hit and run over the Middle East, with little regard for diplomacy or for reconstructing the desecrated society's they leave in their wake. Afghanistan, the first point of entry, is over-run with heroin growers, Iraq is awash in blood, and Lebanon has all but been destroyed. Think the "west" will include in its strategy for "peace" the healing of Beirut? Not likely. Syria and Iran await.
Tuesday, July 18, 2006
Dimwits
This Wash Post editorial is about the dumbest thing I've read yet on the latest Middle East conflict:
In other words, the current warfare in Lebanon, Gaza and Israel stems not from Israel's occupation of Arab lands or its holding of Palestinian and Lebanese prisoners, but from a blatant bid by Iran and Syria and their allies in Hamas and Hezbollah to stop the creation of a democratic Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza and the parallel consolidation of a democracy in Lebanon.
So, Hamas, which surprisingly won control over the Palestinian Authority in recent elections, is trying "to stop the creation of a democratic Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza..."? That makes no sense. Same with Hezbollah. They're trying "to stop...the parallel consolidation of a democracy in Lebanon"? What does that mean? Now, I doubt Hamas and Hezbollah care anything about democracy, liberal or otherwise. But to suggest that Hamas and Hezbollah--spurred on by their patrons in Syria and Iran of course--are deliberately self-sabotaging their own societies strikes me as pretty way off the mark.
Richard Cohen, of all people, may be closer to the truth when he suggests here that the latest outbreak of violence between Israel and its neighbors has an air of historical determinism about it:
The greatest mistake Israel could make at the moment is to forget that Israel itself is a mistake. It is an honest mistake, a well-intentioned mistake, a mistake for which no one is culpable, but the idea of creating a nation of European Jews in an area of Arab Muslims (and some Christians) has produced a century of warfare and terrorism of the sort we are seeing now. Israel fights Hezbollah in the north and Hamas in the south, but its most formidable enemy is history itself.
At the same time, Egypt and Jordan, which have previously and unsuccessfully warred against Israel, have more or less come around to Israel's regional presence (and hegemony) and have established peace and normal diplomatic relations with it. That there are still forces within both nominally friendly and officially unfriendly countries, however, suggests that the conflict remains largely intractible and highly complex.
The latter is perhaps why the Bush administration has taken a reserved posture on the conflict and in contrast to its GWOT and Operation Iraqi Freedom days, recognizes an ambiguity here that is either not amenable to simplistic black and white depictions or in any event, presents conditions that do not lend easily lend themselves to simple, dramatic solutions or modes of intervention.
All of which is to say the world of puritanical neo-conservatism is not happy with the Bush administration's words and actions so far. Seemingly unaware of ongoing conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq, the neo-con machinery is geering up for another war or wars for someone else's children to fight. Even normally moral absolutionist commentators such as George Will are at the breaking point with his movement's ideologues:
The administration, justly criticized for its Iraq premises and their execution, is suddenly receiving some criticism so untethered from reality as to defy caricature. The national, ethnic and religious dynamics of the Middle East are opaque to most people, but to the Weekly Standard -- voice of a spectacularly misnamed radicalism, "neoconservatism" -- everything is crystal clear: Iran is the key to everything .
"No Islamic Republic of Iran, no Hezbollah. No Islamic Republic of Iran, no one to prop up the Assad regime in Syria. No Iranian support for Syria . . ." You get the drift. So, the Weekly Standard says:
"We might consider countering this act of Iranian aggression with a military strike against Iranian nuclear facilities. Why wait? Does anyone think a nuclear Iran can be contained? That the current regime will negotiate in good faith? It would be easier to act sooner rather than later. Yes, there would be repercussions -- and they would be healthy ones, showing a strong America that has rejected further appeasement."
"Why wait?" Perhaps because the U.S. military has enough on its plate in the deteriorating wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, which both border Iran. And perhaps because containment, although of uncertain success, did work against Stalin and his successors, and might be preferable to a war against a nation much larger and more formidable than Iraq. And if Bashar Assad's regime does not fall after the Weekly Standard's hoped-for third war, with Iran, does the magazine hope for a fourth?
As for the "healthy" repercussions that the Weekly Standard is so eager to experience from yet another war: One envies that publication's powers of prophecy but wishes it had exercised them on the nation's behalf before all of the surprises -- all of them unpleasant -- that Iraq has inflicted. And regarding the "appeasement" that the Weekly Standard decries: Does the magazine really wish the administration had heeded its earlier (Dec. 20, 2004) editorial advocating war with yet another nation -- the bombing of Syria?
In other words, the current warfare in Lebanon, Gaza and Israel stems not from Israel's occupation of Arab lands or its holding of Palestinian and Lebanese prisoners, but from a blatant bid by Iran and Syria and their allies in Hamas and Hezbollah to stop the creation of a democratic Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza and the parallel consolidation of a democracy in Lebanon.
So, Hamas, which surprisingly won control over the Palestinian Authority in recent elections, is trying "to stop the creation of a democratic Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza..."? That makes no sense. Same with Hezbollah. They're trying "to stop...the parallel consolidation of a democracy in Lebanon"? What does that mean? Now, I doubt Hamas and Hezbollah care anything about democracy, liberal or otherwise. But to suggest that Hamas and Hezbollah--spurred on by their patrons in Syria and Iran of course--are deliberately self-sabotaging their own societies strikes me as pretty way off the mark.
Richard Cohen, of all people, may be closer to the truth when he suggests here that the latest outbreak of violence between Israel and its neighbors has an air of historical determinism about it:
The greatest mistake Israel could make at the moment is to forget that Israel itself is a mistake. It is an honest mistake, a well-intentioned mistake, a mistake for which no one is culpable, but the idea of creating a nation of European Jews in an area of Arab Muslims (and some Christians) has produced a century of warfare and terrorism of the sort we are seeing now. Israel fights Hezbollah in the north and Hamas in the south, but its most formidable enemy is history itself.
At the same time, Egypt and Jordan, which have previously and unsuccessfully warred against Israel, have more or less come around to Israel's regional presence (and hegemony) and have established peace and normal diplomatic relations with it. That there are still forces within both nominally friendly and officially unfriendly countries, however, suggests that the conflict remains largely intractible and highly complex.
The latter is perhaps why the Bush administration has taken a reserved posture on the conflict and in contrast to its GWOT and Operation Iraqi Freedom days, recognizes an ambiguity here that is either not amenable to simplistic black and white depictions or in any event, presents conditions that do not lend easily lend themselves to simple, dramatic solutions or modes of intervention.
All of which is to say the world of puritanical neo-conservatism is not happy with the Bush administration's words and actions so far. Seemingly unaware of ongoing conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq, the neo-con machinery is geering up for another war or wars for someone else's children to fight. Even normally moral absolutionist commentators such as George Will are at the breaking point with his movement's ideologues:
The administration, justly criticized for its Iraq premises and their execution, is suddenly receiving some criticism so untethered from reality as to defy caricature. The national, ethnic and religious dynamics of the Middle East are opaque to most people, but to the Weekly Standard -- voice of a spectacularly misnamed radicalism, "neoconservatism" -- everything is crystal clear: Iran is the key to everything .
"No Islamic Republic of Iran, no Hezbollah. No Islamic Republic of Iran, no one to prop up the Assad regime in Syria. No Iranian support for Syria . . ." You get the drift. So, the Weekly Standard says:
"We might consider countering this act of Iranian aggression with a military strike against Iranian nuclear facilities. Why wait? Does anyone think a nuclear Iran can be contained? That the current regime will negotiate in good faith? It would be easier to act sooner rather than later. Yes, there would be repercussions -- and they would be healthy ones, showing a strong America that has rejected further appeasement."
"Why wait?" Perhaps because the U.S. military has enough on its plate in the deteriorating wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, which both border Iran. And perhaps because containment, although of uncertain success, did work against Stalin and his successors, and might be preferable to a war against a nation much larger and more formidable than Iraq. And if Bashar Assad's regime does not fall after the Weekly Standard's hoped-for third war, with Iran, does the magazine hope for a fourth?
As for the "healthy" repercussions that the Weekly Standard is so eager to experience from yet another war: One envies that publication's powers of prophecy but wishes it had exercised them on the nation's behalf before all of the surprises -- all of them unpleasant -- that Iraq has inflicted. And regarding the "appeasement" that the Weekly Standard decries: Does the magazine really wish the administration had heeded its earlier (Dec. 20, 2004) editorial advocating war with yet another nation -- the bombing of Syria?
Friday, July 14, 2006
33
In the course of this fine summer day, you might want to take a look at a very special list, a list of the most despicable members of the House of Representatives. If you weren't sure who the worst members were, this list should clarify things for you.
These 33 Republicans voted against renewing the Voting Rights Act yesterday. At least they were honest. But even the anti-immigrant J.D. Hayworth and anti-gay Marilyn Musgrave voted aye. But for the Republican 33, renewing the VRA was just too much for their tender sensibilities.
Some of the 33 have gone so far as to post explanations for their noes on their House websites. Let's let Georgia Rep Charlie Norwood, a no vote, explain:
That is the contention of HR 9, as it ravages the rights of the innocent, whose only offense is in their place of dwelling.
I can partially understand Rep Norwood's interest in removing the stigma of federal oversight of voting in his state, the desire to put his state on the same plain with the majority of U.S. states that can institute minor changes in voting procedures and district outlines without an OK from the Federal Justice Department.
But "ravages the rights of the innocent"? Me thinks the Congressman doth protest too much.
In the meantime, if states like Georgia decide to stop trying to pass bogus photo ID requirements for voting, and to discontinue the tired rhetoric from conservatives about how much a threat voting fraud by (black and poor) individuals is, maybe the next 25 years will be sufficient to demonstrate Charlie's state has changed.
And maybe when the VRA comes up for reauthorization again, Charlie Norwood's no vote, along with those of his 32 companions, will be remembered for the bigotry it is, and regretted accordingly.
These 33 Republicans voted against renewing the Voting Rights Act yesterday. At least they were honest. But even the anti-immigrant J.D. Hayworth and anti-gay Marilyn Musgrave voted aye. But for the Republican 33, renewing the VRA was just too much for their tender sensibilities.
Some of the 33 have gone so far as to post explanations for their noes on their House websites. Let's let Georgia Rep Charlie Norwood, a no vote, explain:
That is the contention of HR 9, as it ravages the rights of the innocent, whose only offense is in their place of dwelling.
I can partially understand Rep Norwood's interest in removing the stigma of federal oversight of voting in his state, the desire to put his state on the same plain with the majority of U.S. states that can institute minor changes in voting procedures and district outlines without an OK from the Federal Justice Department.
But "ravages the rights of the innocent"? Me thinks the Congressman doth protest too much.
In the meantime, if states like Georgia decide to stop trying to pass bogus photo ID requirements for voting, and to discontinue the tired rhetoric from conservatives about how much a threat voting fraud by (black and poor) individuals is, maybe the next 25 years will be sufficient to demonstrate Charlie's state has changed.
And maybe when the VRA comes up for reauthorization again, Charlie Norwood's no vote, along with those of his 32 companions, will be remembered for the bigotry it is, and regretted accordingly.
Wednesday, July 12, 2006
Neo-Conservativism and Realignment
Glenn Greenwald theorizes that the opposition to Joe Lieberman by grassroots Democrats is rooted in the latter's opposition to the former's embrace of the administration's "neo-conservatism." Moreover, Greenwald suggests the Connecticut primary battle is indicative of a realignment away from the old conservative-liberal axis and towards a neo-conservative vs. non-neo-conservative dimension. Greenwald believes the Iraq war has been the primary dividing line between Lieberman and the Lamont forces, and that in a broader sense, the nation's new primary default line lies over Iraq as well, Iraq as a symbol of neoconservative politics. As evidence, Greenwald offers the opposition by some Republicans to Bush's and the neo-conservative's foreign policies, in Iraq and elsewhere, the opposition to Lieberman by Democrats despite Lieberman's liberal voting record on domestic issues, and by the support among neo-conservative members of the press--like David Brooks--for the Democratic Lieberman.
I think there is some basis for Greenwald's conclusions. Iraq certainly is the dividing line of our time, as it was in 2002 and 2004. With the exception of last year's Katrina, the Iraq war has dominated the national debate and news coverage since 2002. And one of the effects of Iraq has been to make strange bedfellows in Congress, as conservative Walter Jones of NC and liberal Dennis Kucinich of Ohio appear together calling for a withdrawal from Iraq of U.S. military forces.
But I suspect Greenwald is making too much out of a national--or even regional--neoconservative versus non-neoconservative split where the issue of Iraq is concerned.
In the first place, I agree with Ezra that the basis for the Democratic grassroots opposition to Lieberman is not primarily the war, but Lieberman's vocal opposition to the war's opponents. As Ezra notes, other Democratic Senators up for re-election this year supported the war and have not faced the wrath of the Democratic Internets.
In the second place, I'm not sure that the Iraq war continues to be the exemplary of a neoconservative foreign policy. Only one Republican voted for the Levin Amendment last month, which makes me think that most Republicans still support the administration in Iraq. But I'm not sure that makes these Republicans neocons in the purest sense of the word, nor do I think it makes neocons out of the other five Democratic Senators that voted against Levin. This is the point I think the AltHippo is making as well.
Which raises the question of what exactly a neocon is.
Neo-conservatism, in my understanding, is a foreign policy perspective that prefers the use of military force, or at least the threat of military force, over diplomacy or as the primary piece of diplomacy; unilateral action rather than cooperation with international institutions; that obstensibly targets un-Democratic regimes; and that most ardently promotes American Exceptionalism.
Neo-conservatism contrasts with foreign policy Realism which: generally aims for world stability as opposed to world democracy; is more inclined to work cooperatively with other nations and institutional bodies; is less inclined to rely on military force as a means of diplomacy and is even less reluctant to apply it except in conditions that are of a last resort and which promise swift victory and a clean exit strategy.
A third foreign policy perspective is Isolationism, which shares with neo-conservatism an anti-international organizational stance, a willingness to use force, and American Exceptionalism, but is like the Realists more guarded about applying military force to limited circumstances and generally not concerned with the internal politics of other nations.
A fourth foreign policy perspective I would call Humanistic-Developmental. This foreign policy aims to ensure human rights across the globe and promote the economic and political development of third world countries, primarily through the auspices of international action. There are some similarities between this view and the obstensible support for democracy favored by neo-conservatives, but unlike the latter, the former are less inclined to act unilaterally or favor the use of force in most situations.
Most people probably at one point or another could be in any of these four camps at any particular time, and each might be relevant at any particular period. But most Democrats are probably either Realists or Humanistic-Developmentalists. Meanwhile, most Republicans are spread out over the first three categories, although the neo-con wing of the Republican Party has dominated under Bush II and importantly, since 911, in contrast to the Realism that occured from Nixon to Bush I.
In any event, my sense is that despite the declaration of One Percent Doctrines, pre-emptive wars, and calls from among the neocon dead-enders at the Weekly Standard and in Rupert Murdoch's media affiliates for extending the Iraq war to Iran, North Korea, and other countries throughout the Middle East, the neocon foreign policy agenda is finished, at least as it concerns overt military action in the next two years. Militarily, the neocon agenda is probably dead period. It may live on in anti-UN propaganda and American Exceptionalism rhetoric, but as an action plan, neoconservativism lacks the genuine popular support necessary for carrying out its ambitions. And by genuine popular support, I mean enough boots on the ground to wage global, eternal war.
Neoconservatism could possibly take its ball and go home, and revert to a Pat Buchanan-Tom Tancredo anti-immigration centered Isolationism, but the Republican Party's business base probably won't let that happen, and progressives that share neoconservatism's anti-globalism, won't buy into the anti-immigrant program. So it's probably a bit soon and too much of a stretch to see Iraq or neoconservativism as a realigning force. Yet.
I think there is some basis for Greenwald's conclusions. Iraq certainly is the dividing line of our time, as it was in 2002 and 2004. With the exception of last year's Katrina, the Iraq war has dominated the national debate and news coverage since 2002. And one of the effects of Iraq has been to make strange bedfellows in Congress, as conservative Walter Jones of NC and liberal Dennis Kucinich of Ohio appear together calling for a withdrawal from Iraq of U.S. military forces.
But I suspect Greenwald is making too much out of a national--or even regional--neoconservative versus non-neoconservative split where the issue of Iraq is concerned.
In the first place, I agree with Ezra that the basis for the Democratic grassroots opposition to Lieberman is not primarily the war, but Lieberman's vocal opposition to the war's opponents. As Ezra notes, other Democratic Senators up for re-election this year supported the war and have not faced the wrath of the Democratic Internets.
In the second place, I'm not sure that the Iraq war continues to be the exemplary of a neoconservative foreign policy. Only one Republican voted for the Levin Amendment last month, which makes me think that most Republicans still support the administration in Iraq. But I'm not sure that makes these Republicans neocons in the purest sense of the word, nor do I think it makes neocons out of the other five Democratic Senators that voted against Levin. This is the point I think the AltHippo is making as well.
Which raises the question of what exactly a neocon is.
Neo-conservatism, in my understanding, is a foreign policy perspective that prefers the use of military force, or at least the threat of military force, over diplomacy or as the primary piece of diplomacy; unilateral action rather than cooperation with international institutions; that obstensibly targets un-Democratic regimes; and that most ardently promotes American Exceptionalism.
Neo-conservatism contrasts with foreign policy Realism which: generally aims for world stability as opposed to world democracy; is more inclined to work cooperatively with other nations and institutional bodies; is less inclined to rely on military force as a means of diplomacy and is even less reluctant to apply it except in conditions that are of a last resort and which promise swift victory and a clean exit strategy.
A third foreign policy perspective is Isolationism, which shares with neo-conservatism an anti-international organizational stance, a willingness to use force, and American Exceptionalism, but is like the Realists more guarded about applying military force to limited circumstances and generally not concerned with the internal politics of other nations.
A fourth foreign policy perspective I would call Humanistic-Developmental. This foreign policy aims to ensure human rights across the globe and promote the economic and political development of third world countries, primarily through the auspices of international action. There are some similarities between this view and the obstensible support for democracy favored by neo-conservatives, but unlike the latter, the former are less inclined to act unilaterally or favor the use of force in most situations.
Most people probably at one point or another could be in any of these four camps at any particular time, and each might be relevant at any particular period. But most Democrats are probably either Realists or Humanistic-Developmentalists. Meanwhile, most Republicans are spread out over the first three categories, although the neo-con wing of the Republican Party has dominated under Bush II and importantly, since 911, in contrast to the Realism that occured from Nixon to Bush I.
In any event, my sense is that despite the declaration of One Percent Doctrines, pre-emptive wars, and calls from among the neocon dead-enders at the Weekly Standard and in Rupert Murdoch's media affiliates for extending the Iraq war to Iran, North Korea, and other countries throughout the Middle East, the neocon foreign policy agenda is finished, at least as it concerns overt military action in the next two years. Militarily, the neocon agenda is probably dead period. It may live on in anti-UN propaganda and American Exceptionalism rhetoric, but as an action plan, neoconservativism lacks the genuine popular support necessary for carrying out its ambitions. And by genuine popular support, I mean enough boots on the ground to wage global, eternal war.
Neoconservatism could possibly take its ball and go home, and revert to a Pat Buchanan-Tom Tancredo anti-immigration centered Isolationism, but the Republican Party's business base probably won't let that happen, and progressives that share neoconservatism's anti-globalism, won't buy into the anti-immigrant program. So it's probably a bit soon and too much of a stretch to see Iraq or neoconservativism as a realigning force. Yet.
Sunday, July 09, 2006
Conservative Moral Relativism: When it's White, it's Right
What's an Iraqi Life Worth?
By Andrew J. Bacevich
Sunday, July 9, 2006; B01
In Iraq, lives differ in value -- and so do deaths. In this disparity lies an important reason why the United States has botched this war.
Last November in Haditha , a squad of Marines, outraged at the loss of a comrade, is said to have run amok, avenging his death by killing two dozen innocent bystanders. And in March, U.S. soldiers in Mahmudiyah allegedly raped a young Iraqi woman and killed her along with three of her relatives -- an apparently premeditated crime for which one former U.S. soldier has been charged . These incidents are among at least five recent cases of Iraqi civilian deaths that have triggered investigations of U.S. military personnel. If the allegations prove true, Haditha and Mahmudiyah will deservedly take their place alongside Sand Creek, Samar and My Lai in the unhappy catalogue of atrocities committed by American troops.
But recall a more recent incident, in Samarra . On May 30, U.S. soldiers manning a checkpoint there opened fire on a speeding vehicle that either did not see or failed to heed their command to stop. Two women in the vehicle were shot dead. One of them, Nahiba Husayif Jassim, 35, was pregnant. The baby was also killed. The driver, Jassim's brother, had been rushing her to a hospital to give birth. No one tried to cover up the incident: U.S. military representatives issued expressions of regret.
In all likelihood, we will be learning more about Haditha and Mahmudiyah for months to come, whereas the Samarra story has already been filed away and largely forgotten. And that's the problem.
The killing at the Samarra checkpoint was not an atrocity; most likely it was an accident, a mistake. Yet plenty of evidence suggests that in Iraq such mistakes have occurred routinely, with moral and political consequences that have been too long ignored. Indeed, conscious motivation is beside the point: Any action resulting in Iraqi civilian deaths, however inadvertent, undermines the Bush administration's narrative of liberation, and swells the ranks of those resisting the U.S. presence.
Gen. Tommy Franks, who commanded U.S. forces when they entered Iraq more than three years ago, famously declared: "We don't do body counts." Franks was speaking in code. What he meant was this: The U.S. military has learned the lessons of Vietnam -- where body counts became a principal, and much derided, public measure of success -- and it has no intention of repeating that experience. Franks was not going to be one of those generals re-fighting the last war.
Unfortunately, Franks and other senior commanders had not so much learned from Vietnam as forgotten it. This disdain for counting bodies, especially those of Iraqi civilians killed in the course of U.S. operations, is among the reasons why U.S. forces find themselves in another quagmire. It's not that the United States has an aversion to all body counts. We tally every U.S. service member who falls in Iraq, and rightly so. But only in recent months have military leaders finally begun to count -- for internal use only -- some of the very large number of Iraqi noncombatants whom American bullets and bombs have killed.
Through the war's first three years, any Iraqi venturing too close to an American convoy or checkpoint was likely to come under fire. Thousands of these "escalation of force" episodes occurred. Now, Lt. Gen. Peter Chiarelli, the commander of U.S. ground forces in Iraq, has begun to recognize the hidden cost of such an approach. "People who were on the fence or supported us" in the past "have in fact decided to strike out against us," he recently acknowledged.
In the early days of the insurgency, some U.S. commanders appeared oblivious to the possibility that excessive force might produce a backlash. They counted on the iron fist to create an atmosphere conducive to good behavior. The idea was not to distinguish between "good" and "bad" Iraqis, but to induce compliance through intimidation.
"You have to understand the Arab mind," one company commander told the New York Times, displaying all the self-assurance of Douglas MacArthur discoursing on Orientals in 1945. "The only thing they understand is force -- force, pride and saving face." Far from representing the views of a few underlings, such notions penetrated into the upper echelons of the American command. In their book "Cobra II," Michael R. Gordon and Gen. Bernard E. Trainor offer this ugly comment from a senior officer: "The only thing these sand niggers understand is force and I'm about to introduce them to it."
Such crass language, redolent with racist, ethnocentric connotations, speaks volumes. These characterizations, like the use of "gooks" during the Vietnam War, dehumanize the Iraqis and in doing so tacitly permit the otherwise impermissible. Thus, Abu Ghraib and Haditha -- and too many regretted deaths, such as that of Nahiba Husayif Jassim.
As the war enters its fourth year, how many innocent Iraqis have died at American hands, not as a result of Haditha-like massacres but because of accidents and errors? The military doesn't know and, until recently, has publicly professed no interest in knowing. Estimates range considerably, but the number almost certainly runs in the tens of thousands. Even granting the common antiwar bias of those who track the Iraqi death toll -- and granting, too, that the insurgents have far more blood on their hands -- there is no question that the number of Iraqi noncombatants killed by U.S. forces exceeds by an order of magnitude the number of U.S. troops killed in hostile action, which is now more than 2,000.
Who bears responsibility for these Iraqi deaths? The young soldiers pulling the triggers? The commanders who establish rules of engagement that privilege "force protection" over any obligation to protect innocent life? The intellectually bankrupt policymakers who sent U.S. forces into Iraq in the first place and now see no choice but to press on? The culture that, to put it mildly, has sought neither to understand nor to empathize with people in the Arab or Islamic worlds?
There are no easy answers, but one at least ought to acknowledge that in launching a war advertised as a high-minded expression of U.S. idealism, we have waded into a swamp of moral ambiguity. To assert that "stuff happens," as Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld is wont to do whenever events go awry, simply does not suffice.
Moral questions aside, the toll of Iraqi noncombatant casualties has widespread political implications. Misdirected violence alienates those we are claiming to protect. It plays into the hands of the insurgents, advancing their cause and undercutting our own. It fatally undermines the campaign to win hearts and minds, suggesting to Iraqis and Americans alike that Iraqi civilians -- and perhaps Arabs and Muslims more generally -- are expendable. Certainly, Nahiba Husayif Jassim's death helped clarify her brother's perspective on the war. "God take revenge on the Americans and those who brought them here," he declared after the incident. "They have no regard for our lives."
He was being unfair, of course. It's not that we have no regard for Iraqi lives; it's just that we have much less regard for them. The current reparations policy -- the payment offered in those instances in which U.S. forces do own up to killing an Iraq civilian -- makes the point. The insurance payout to the beneficiaries of an American soldier who dies in the line of duty is $400,000, while in the eyes of the U.S. government, a dead Iraqi civilian is reportedly worth up to $2,500 in condolence payments -- about the price of a decent plasma-screen TV.
For all the talk of Iraq being a sovereign nation, foreign occupiers are the ones deciding what an Iraqi life is worth. And although President Bush has remarked in a different context that "every human life is a precious gift of matchless value," our actions in Iraq continue to convey the impression that civilian lives aren't worth all that much.
That impression urgently needs to change. To start, the Pentagon must get over its aversion to counting all bodies. It needs to measure in painstaking detail -- and publicly -- the mayhem we are causing as a byproduct of what we call liberation. To do otherwise, to shrug off the death of Nahiba Husayif Jassim as just one of those things that happens in war, only reinforces the impression that Americans view Iraqis as less than fully human. Unless we demonstrate by our actions that we value their lives as much as the lives of our own troops, our failure is certain.
----
When they aren't celebrating our "liberation" of Iraq, the U.S. press, military spokespersons, leading public officials, and representatives from the 101st fighting keyboarders routinely disparage the actual people of Iraq and people across the Middle East more generally. There's been next to no coverage or concern about the number and extent of Iraqi civilian deaths on account of the war and occupation. In the absence of Iraq's attacking either ourselves or any of its neighbors, our invasion and occupation was and is immoral. But no one of any prominence or distinction has really said this. Maybe Michael Moore or Cindy Sheehan has, but we know what the press thinks of them. Even most of the Democrats who supported the war initially and have now expressed regret for their vote, do so primarily from the standpoint that the invasion and occupation were "botched" and mishandled, not for the war's moral implications.
The American nationalism displayed by our press, public officials, and members of the public is moral relativism personified and exemplified. Of course our supposedly Christian clerics and the equally dubious "pro-life" forces they command have been largely silent at best on the war's carnage, or worse, they've acted as the administration's and "country's" apologists.
As Chris Rock jokes about White America's slavery, bootlegging and war-waging history, "When it's White, it's Right". Civilian deaths in Iraq? "We don't do body counts...especially those of sand niggers".
By Andrew J. Bacevich
Sunday, July 9, 2006; B01
In Iraq, lives differ in value -- and so do deaths. In this disparity lies an important reason why the United States has botched this war.
Last November in Haditha , a squad of Marines, outraged at the loss of a comrade, is said to have run amok, avenging his death by killing two dozen innocent bystanders. And in March, U.S. soldiers in Mahmudiyah allegedly raped a young Iraqi woman and killed her along with three of her relatives -- an apparently premeditated crime for which one former U.S. soldier has been charged . These incidents are among at least five recent cases of Iraqi civilian deaths that have triggered investigations of U.S. military personnel. If the allegations prove true, Haditha and Mahmudiyah will deservedly take their place alongside Sand Creek, Samar and My Lai in the unhappy catalogue of atrocities committed by American troops.
But recall a more recent incident, in Samarra . On May 30, U.S. soldiers manning a checkpoint there opened fire on a speeding vehicle that either did not see or failed to heed their command to stop. Two women in the vehicle were shot dead. One of them, Nahiba Husayif Jassim, 35, was pregnant. The baby was also killed. The driver, Jassim's brother, had been rushing her to a hospital to give birth. No one tried to cover up the incident: U.S. military representatives issued expressions of regret.
In all likelihood, we will be learning more about Haditha and Mahmudiyah for months to come, whereas the Samarra story has already been filed away and largely forgotten. And that's the problem.
The killing at the Samarra checkpoint was not an atrocity; most likely it was an accident, a mistake. Yet plenty of evidence suggests that in Iraq such mistakes have occurred routinely, with moral and political consequences that have been too long ignored. Indeed, conscious motivation is beside the point: Any action resulting in Iraqi civilian deaths, however inadvertent, undermines the Bush administration's narrative of liberation, and swells the ranks of those resisting the U.S. presence.
Gen. Tommy Franks, who commanded U.S. forces when they entered Iraq more than three years ago, famously declared: "We don't do body counts." Franks was speaking in code. What he meant was this: The U.S. military has learned the lessons of Vietnam -- where body counts became a principal, and much derided, public measure of success -- and it has no intention of repeating that experience. Franks was not going to be one of those generals re-fighting the last war.
Unfortunately, Franks and other senior commanders had not so much learned from Vietnam as forgotten it. This disdain for counting bodies, especially those of Iraqi civilians killed in the course of U.S. operations, is among the reasons why U.S. forces find themselves in another quagmire. It's not that the United States has an aversion to all body counts. We tally every U.S. service member who falls in Iraq, and rightly so. But only in recent months have military leaders finally begun to count -- for internal use only -- some of the very large number of Iraqi noncombatants whom American bullets and bombs have killed.
Through the war's first three years, any Iraqi venturing too close to an American convoy or checkpoint was likely to come under fire. Thousands of these "escalation of force" episodes occurred. Now, Lt. Gen. Peter Chiarelli, the commander of U.S. ground forces in Iraq, has begun to recognize the hidden cost of such an approach. "People who were on the fence or supported us" in the past "have in fact decided to strike out against us," he recently acknowledged.
In the early days of the insurgency, some U.S. commanders appeared oblivious to the possibility that excessive force might produce a backlash. They counted on the iron fist to create an atmosphere conducive to good behavior. The idea was not to distinguish between "good" and "bad" Iraqis, but to induce compliance through intimidation.
"You have to understand the Arab mind," one company commander told the New York Times, displaying all the self-assurance of Douglas MacArthur discoursing on Orientals in 1945. "The only thing they understand is force -- force, pride and saving face." Far from representing the views of a few underlings, such notions penetrated into the upper echelons of the American command. In their book "Cobra II," Michael R. Gordon and Gen. Bernard E. Trainor offer this ugly comment from a senior officer: "The only thing these sand niggers understand is force and I'm about to introduce them to it."
Such crass language, redolent with racist, ethnocentric connotations, speaks volumes. These characterizations, like the use of "gooks" during the Vietnam War, dehumanize the Iraqis and in doing so tacitly permit the otherwise impermissible. Thus, Abu Ghraib and Haditha -- and too many regretted deaths, such as that of Nahiba Husayif Jassim.
As the war enters its fourth year, how many innocent Iraqis have died at American hands, not as a result of Haditha-like massacres but because of accidents and errors? The military doesn't know and, until recently, has publicly professed no interest in knowing. Estimates range considerably, but the number almost certainly runs in the tens of thousands. Even granting the common antiwar bias of those who track the Iraqi death toll -- and granting, too, that the insurgents have far more blood on their hands -- there is no question that the number of Iraqi noncombatants killed by U.S. forces exceeds by an order of magnitude the number of U.S. troops killed in hostile action, which is now more than 2,000.
Who bears responsibility for these Iraqi deaths? The young soldiers pulling the triggers? The commanders who establish rules of engagement that privilege "force protection" over any obligation to protect innocent life? The intellectually bankrupt policymakers who sent U.S. forces into Iraq in the first place and now see no choice but to press on? The culture that, to put it mildly, has sought neither to understand nor to empathize with people in the Arab or Islamic worlds?
There are no easy answers, but one at least ought to acknowledge that in launching a war advertised as a high-minded expression of U.S. idealism, we have waded into a swamp of moral ambiguity. To assert that "stuff happens," as Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld is wont to do whenever events go awry, simply does not suffice.
Moral questions aside, the toll of Iraqi noncombatant casualties has widespread political implications. Misdirected violence alienates those we are claiming to protect. It plays into the hands of the insurgents, advancing their cause and undercutting our own. It fatally undermines the campaign to win hearts and minds, suggesting to Iraqis and Americans alike that Iraqi civilians -- and perhaps Arabs and Muslims more generally -- are expendable. Certainly, Nahiba Husayif Jassim's death helped clarify her brother's perspective on the war. "God take revenge on the Americans and those who brought them here," he declared after the incident. "They have no regard for our lives."
He was being unfair, of course. It's not that we have no regard for Iraqi lives; it's just that we have much less regard for them. The current reparations policy -- the payment offered in those instances in which U.S. forces do own up to killing an Iraq civilian -- makes the point. The insurance payout to the beneficiaries of an American soldier who dies in the line of duty is $400,000, while in the eyes of the U.S. government, a dead Iraqi civilian is reportedly worth up to $2,500 in condolence payments -- about the price of a decent plasma-screen TV.
For all the talk of Iraq being a sovereign nation, foreign occupiers are the ones deciding what an Iraqi life is worth. And although President Bush has remarked in a different context that "every human life is a precious gift of matchless value," our actions in Iraq continue to convey the impression that civilian lives aren't worth all that much.
That impression urgently needs to change. To start, the Pentagon must get over its aversion to counting all bodies. It needs to measure in painstaking detail -- and publicly -- the mayhem we are causing as a byproduct of what we call liberation. To do otherwise, to shrug off the death of Nahiba Husayif Jassim as just one of those things that happens in war, only reinforces the impression that Americans view Iraqis as less than fully human. Unless we demonstrate by our actions that we value their lives as much as the lives of our own troops, our failure is certain.
----
When they aren't celebrating our "liberation" of Iraq, the U.S. press, military spokespersons, leading public officials, and representatives from the 101st fighting keyboarders routinely disparage the actual people of Iraq and people across the Middle East more generally. There's been next to no coverage or concern about the number and extent of Iraqi civilian deaths on account of the war and occupation. In the absence of Iraq's attacking either ourselves or any of its neighbors, our invasion and occupation was and is immoral. But no one of any prominence or distinction has really said this. Maybe Michael Moore or Cindy Sheehan has, but we know what the press thinks of them. Even most of the Democrats who supported the war initially and have now expressed regret for their vote, do so primarily from the standpoint that the invasion and occupation were "botched" and mishandled, not for the war's moral implications.
The American nationalism displayed by our press, public officials, and members of the public is moral relativism personified and exemplified. Of course our supposedly Christian clerics and the equally dubious "pro-life" forces they command have been largely silent at best on the war's carnage, or worse, they've acted as the administration's and "country's" apologists.
As Chris Rock jokes about White America's slavery, bootlegging and war-waging history, "When it's White, it's Right". Civilian deaths in Iraq? "We don't do body counts...especially those of sand niggers".
Thursday, July 06, 2006
Irrepressible Conflict?
I've been thinking about this Billmon post and about the contentious, culturally driven politics of our times. I read Billmon's post on the same day my NYT ran this article, and the same day Kevin Drum posted this.
I think the three are related but the Billmon post deserves the most analysis so I'll confine most of my comments to it.
First, I think Billmon is right to portray the country's inner, party-framed conflict as one between traditionalism and modernism, a point the Rogue Progressive made some time ago. Moreover, Billmon is surely correct that this divide has a lot to do with the forces of globalization, a point recently made by David Brooks. And unfortunately, I share Billmon's angst about this divide, doubt the country can be brought together, and likewise fear that this will ultimately lead to more violent conflicts, as each side of the cultural divide perceives its opponents as malignantly motivated and authoritatively illegitimate. The frequent and hysterical use of eliminiationist rhetoric by many prominent conservatives only heightens this apprehension. Finally, the reality that is our inter-connected world makes it all the more likely that our awareness of and repulsion towards our ideological opponents will only increase, making the harsh divide even more bitter, potentially sowing the seeds of a future, violent upheaval. Billmon suggests a coming conflict could be a sudden and as violent as the Civil War, a point he concedes sounds like hyperbole, but which is nonetheless both as realistic and as unfathonable to us today as the coming of the Civil War was to the people of the North and South in 1860-1861.
So what is the solution, if any? The short version I think is that the coming years will see a devolution of power or at least a devolution of authority and scope from the national level to the state level; a denationalization of issues if you will. A reversion back to older time federalism.
Consider welfare (reform). The issue of welfare has pretty much dropped off the political agenda, primarily because the 1996 "reform" act ended the federal entitlement and shifted the control over it from the national government to the states. With a lower level of federal funding but greater discretion, states responded by establishing eligibility deadlines and enforcing work requirements. Politically the result of this policy shift has been a less contentious national debate about welfare policy.
A similar pattern appears to be occuring in abortion policy. The elevation of two, presumably anti-choice Supreme Court Justices in Bush's second term encouraged first South Dakota and more recently, Louisiana to initiate abortion prohibition legislation. If Roe v. Wade is overturned, as I suspect it eventually will be, states will again have authority to restrict abortion. What the effect of this will be nationally is harder to project than the case of welfare. Some conservatives will no doubt press for national legislation and even continue their efforts to enact an anti-abortion amendment to the Constitution. But it's at least conceivable that the devolution of abortion policy to the state level could minimize the issue's national scope. For a critical view of the likely outcomes to occur under a state-centered abortion policy regime, Lawyers, Guns and Money has a number of informative and compelling posts on the subject.
Additionally, the overturning of the ban on corporate, coerced school prayer would turn another heated issue back to the states and local level. The devolution of school prayer and other "establishment clause" issues would likely reduce--although probably not eliminate--the conflict over church and state issues from a national perspective.
Naturally, the rejection of national liberal values pertaining to abortion, church and state issues, and other moral and rights-based issues would be a deeply disturbing outcome for many liberal activists, religious minorities and women (and for the writer of this blog).
But, such changes might--might--pave the way for a less contentious national politics; at the very least, it would likely lead to a more stabile national political regime, albeit diverting some of that conflict to the state and local levels.
The other alternative is that the forces that have led to the liberalization of the country, from the establishment of the Constitution itself, to the ending of slavery, the passing of consumer and worker safety legislation and oversight, the enactment of the New Deal and Great Society programs, and the judicial liberalizations themselves will ultimately, eventually lead to a greater liberalization and tolerance across the country.
And what exactly are those forces? One of them is, ironically, the spread of vastly complex, interdependent market economies. If societies are largely the product of the factors of production--the society's economic system--as Marx taught, there are certain implications stemming from a market based economy. One of these is the increased diversity of production and differentiation of labor. Market economy capitalism, in its fullest, theoretical sense, assumes (among other things) perfect competition, a condition that itself assumes multiple and varied producers and an amoral pricing and distributive system. As Kevin Drum alludes to, this type of economic system, particularly if as Marx assumed economic systems dictated social relations and institutional development, is not conducive to conservatism, in either its historic or current day manifestation. If the country, and the world, continue to grow more interconnected through its material exchanges, and if this global economic system remains stable, the traditionalist's world of superstition and exclusiveness (and exceptionalism) will gradually whither. If, however, globalization as an economic trend falters or collapses completely, traditionalism will no doubt gain an extra life and continue in duration.
As informative and potentially determinative as all this may be, I suspect there's more to this story than economics. Billmon's post made me try to understand the current state of affairs from a more historical perspective of Constitutional development and expanding notions of citizenship.
In the beginning, the Constitution identified and recognized the basic rights of the people (primarily the rights and prerogatives of white males) and set up a system of balancing institutions designed to ensure it would not be easy to set aside those rights, particularly where it concerned property rights. In addition were rights that presumably applied to the people as a whole, such as those related to the freedom to assemble and the freedom of the press. Paradoxically, the Constitution was also designed to bind the states more firmly together for the purposes of national defense and commercial standardization. But even though the Declaration of Independence a decade earlier had offered a revolutionary notion of human rights and national citizenship, the national government in its early days was concerned mostly with the country's national defenses, its geographical expansion and its economic development. While certain ideas about the rights of man were held by a large class of the country's leaders, if not its population, the national government lacked the resources and the interest to regulate the state governments and local communities, ensuring matters of welfare, crime and religion were left with state and local leaders, and which no doubt varied from state to state. And with a financially and constitutionally minimal federal government, and mostly agricultural economy of self-contained communities, there was little potential or interest in specifying or safeguarding national rights for the country's many varied classes of people.
The eventual "irrepressible conflict" between the slave South and industrial North changed this dynamic, however. It's important to recognize that prior to the outbreak of war, most people in the south probably had no intention of requiring slavery in the North, and most people in the North, particularly its elites, had no wish to interfere with slavery in the South. Race relations and slavery was a sectional issue, not a national issue. But the North and South could not agree on how slavery would be regulated or allowed in the rapidly expanding territories and war resulted. The war in turn resulted in the end of slavery everywhere and the passing of important Constitutional amendments that in essense expanded the notion of citizenship and more widely defined and applied the rights held by the nation's people. As important as these changes were, however, the North lacked the moral imperative, the financial wherewithall and the political will to enforce those rights, and not long after the Civil War, the national definition of citizenship enshrined in the new Amendments was relegated to the trash heap, particularly in the South. And the sectional and local authority over culture and individual rights was reinstated.
At the same time, the continuing industrial revolution and expansion put a spotlight on the relationship between labor and capital, ensuring that federal attention would have to be paid to the class of workers. General prosperity through the 1920's, and the political power gained by corporate dollars helped to stave off the enlargement of citizenship that the Declaration of Independence, Civil War, 13th-15th Amendments, and labor unrest had forecast. But the Great Depression made possible the nationalization of previously local economic responsibilities. With the New Deal the country's elite began to more seriously respond to the Constitution's call to ensure the country's overall and universal welfare. The country's international obligations stemming from World War II and the Cold War, meanwhile, required that the rights it was seeking to defend abroad were also ensured at home. In this early sense of globalization, America responded fitfully but ultimately forcefully to the problem of Civil Rights.
Among the earliest and most fruitful avenues of change on Civil Rights was provided by the federal courts, long thought and in practice the most conservative and undemocratic of the federal branches of government. The principle of Judicial Review as espoused by John Marshall in the country's first decade of existence, was applied by a newly progressive court in response to challenges by social activists and minority populations both religious and racial to fight against local and state legislation that hindered their freedom.
By the 1960's and the Warren Court, the notion of national citizenship had increased dramatically. Minority and disenfranchised citizens discovered the convoluted federal system of multiple veto points could be engaged in to their favor. But the expansion of citizenship, largely through the judicial branch of government, that benefitted religious and racial minorities in turn incited conservative opponents of this redefined sense of national citizenship who wished to maintain the sovereignty of local and state authorities. Simply put, while certain global and economic changes had made the country's economy and way of life more inter-dependent, not everyone shared the new liberal consensus of individual rights and political change. Economic changes had not been fully followed by a corresponding political change in the mood of the public and its elected, legislative representatives.
This brings us to today, where court decisions (in response to plaintiffs) have resulted in what were once local issues becoming both national and more contentious. The court system which once was seen as lagging seriously behind the legislative and executive branches in terms of political innovativeness suddenly lept ahead in the 1950's and 1960's.
For many of the nation's political elite, especially its clerical leaders and their attentive followers, these liberalizing court decisions expanding the definition and protection of national citizenship were seriously disempowering. This disempowerment has been turned into a powerful tool of resentment, as priests, clerics, and talk show hosts appeal to those believed to be aggrieved (or those elites believe could be convinced of the injury done them by "judicial activists"). The power of this resentment has been greatly aided of late by the expansion of cable TV and the concentration of the nation's corporate media generally.
And this resentment is also the basis of the political movement, represented by the Republican Party, that at least since 1964 has helped elect Republican presidents and in 1994, a Republican Congress. The result has been a gradual shift in the politics of the court system and a retrenchment of national citizenship as Federal Society judges appointed by Republican executives begin the process of turning back the clock and devolving national issues back to the states (the recent over-turning of Texas' sodomy law appears to be either an anomaly to this retrenchment or a sign that the denationalization of policy has very limited potential, driven as it is by economic and cultural changes beyond the scope of the authoritarian right's ability to control).
At the same time, conservatism itself has changed. Perhaps because of the global and economic changes that have driven the country's liberalization, many of today's conservatives aren't and won't be content to denationalize the country's contentious culture wedge issues. Where once conservatives were largely content to confine their authoritarian tendencies (such as slavery and segregation) to the local stage, their growth in power, and their fear of enemies "foreign and domestic" have helped create a more nationalistic and ideological movement. Consider the NYT article I linked to above that contained this quote from a Tennessee mega-church, African-American pastor:
The statue, inspired by a Memphis church that has three giant crosses, strikes him as "a creative means of just really letting people know that God is the foundation of our nation," he said.
Mr. Williams has written several books and pamphlets analyzing a variety of matters, among them patriotism and the original intent of the founding fathers.
In "The Meaning of the Statue of Liberation Through Christ: Reconnecting Patriotism With Christianity," he explains that the teardrop on his Lady is God's response to what he calls the nation's ills, including legalized abortion, a lack of prayer in schools and the country's "promotion of expressions of New Age, Wicca, secularism and humanism."
In another book, he said Hurricane Katrina was retribution for New Orleans's embrace of sin.
Mr. Williams said his statue's essential point was that Christianity should be the guiding ethos of the nation. But because the church he leads is predominantly black, as is he, there is an added dimension to the message.
So what can we conclude if anything from all this? As I noted above, I suspect that Roe v. Wade and some of the more unpopular establishment clause court decisions will be undone by future, and maybe even the present, Supreme Court. While this will no doubt be the cause of much anguish on the part of the left, and much celebration on the part of the right, two consequences of such a judicial turn to the right might result. The first is a change in the country's national politics to one in which international and economic issues replace the more divisive cultural issues of the current era. The second is that the continued pace of globalization and modernity may result in the isolation of the more regressive states that respond to the new court decisions with repressive legislation. Free markets tend to promote and require both flexibility as well as standardization. States excluded to various degrees from the progress shared by more liberal states may find their regressive social policies are holding them back or at the very least are embarassing.
Of course other less favorable developments could also occur. The conservative movement would take or keep its national focus and attempt to enforce religious and culture mores on the country. Or the repressive changes instituted within states could seriously undermine the gains in civil rights and individual freedom generated from the work of over a century of activism and progress. I'm aware that the argument I'm making is not alltogether dissimilar from the argument of those who minimize the importance of the Civil War and later the Civil Rights movements' impact on political change, arguing that economic necessity would have sooner or later forced the ending of slavery and segregation. Those are not arguments I'm in agreement with and if it were up to me, Roe v. Wade and the ban on coerced school prayer would be allowed to stand. The courts, in response to the disenfranchized, became the engine of political change and progress that perhaps decades or more of congresses and legislatures would not have accomplished.
But the current climate has made Democratic progress difficult. On the one hand, I fear the system may break completely, resulting in a significant upheaval, if the current cultural divide continues. On the other hand, a devolution of policy in the cultural realm may allow the party a greater room to maneuver at the federal level while still allowing most Americans the full range of citizenship the last century has made possible. It may also provide a highly instructive study in the contrast between liberal and repressive societies which the world at large should be an example but which unfortunately for many people is not yet.
I think the three are related but the Billmon post deserves the most analysis so I'll confine most of my comments to it.
First, I think Billmon is right to portray the country's inner, party-framed conflict as one between traditionalism and modernism, a point the Rogue Progressive made some time ago. Moreover, Billmon is surely correct that this divide has a lot to do with the forces of globalization, a point recently made by David Brooks. And unfortunately, I share Billmon's angst about this divide, doubt the country can be brought together, and likewise fear that this will ultimately lead to more violent conflicts, as each side of the cultural divide perceives its opponents as malignantly motivated and authoritatively illegitimate. The frequent and hysterical use of eliminiationist rhetoric by many prominent conservatives only heightens this apprehension. Finally, the reality that is our inter-connected world makes it all the more likely that our awareness of and repulsion towards our ideological opponents will only increase, making the harsh divide even more bitter, potentially sowing the seeds of a future, violent upheaval. Billmon suggests a coming conflict could be a sudden and as violent as the Civil War, a point he concedes sounds like hyperbole, but which is nonetheless both as realistic and as unfathonable to us today as the coming of the Civil War was to the people of the North and South in 1860-1861.
So what is the solution, if any? The short version I think is that the coming years will see a devolution of power or at least a devolution of authority and scope from the national level to the state level; a denationalization of issues if you will. A reversion back to older time federalism.
Consider welfare (reform). The issue of welfare has pretty much dropped off the political agenda, primarily because the 1996 "reform" act ended the federal entitlement and shifted the control over it from the national government to the states. With a lower level of federal funding but greater discretion, states responded by establishing eligibility deadlines and enforcing work requirements. Politically the result of this policy shift has been a less contentious national debate about welfare policy.
A similar pattern appears to be occuring in abortion policy. The elevation of two, presumably anti-choice Supreme Court Justices in Bush's second term encouraged first South Dakota and more recently, Louisiana to initiate abortion prohibition legislation. If Roe v. Wade is overturned, as I suspect it eventually will be, states will again have authority to restrict abortion. What the effect of this will be nationally is harder to project than the case of welfare. Some conservatives will no doubt press for national legislation and even continue their efforts to enact an anti-abortion amendment to the Constitution. But it's at least conceivable that the devolution of abortion policy to the state level could minimize the issue's national scope. For a critical view of the likely outcomes to occur under a state-centered abortion policy regime, Lawyers, Guns and Money has a number of informative and compelling posts on the subject.
Additionally, the overturning of the ban on corporate, coerced school prayer would turn another heated issue back to the states and local level. The devolution of school prayer and other "establishment clause" issues would likely reduce--although probably not eliminate--the conflict over church and state issues from a national perspective.
Naturally, the rejection of national liberal values pertaining to abortion, church and state issues, and other moral and rights-based issues would be a deeply disturbing outcome for many liberal activists, religious minorities and women (and for the writer of this blog).
But, such changes might--might--pave the way for a less contentious national politics; at the very least, it would likely lead to a more stabile national political regime, albeit diverting some of that conflict to the state and local levels.
The other alternative is that the forces that have led to the liberalization of the country, from the establishment of the Constitution itself, to the ending of slavery, the passing of consumer and worker safety legislation and oversight, the enactment of the New Deal and Great Society programs, and the judicial liberalizations themselves will ultimately, eventually lead to a greater liberalization and tolerance across the country.
And what exactly are those forces? One of them is, ironically, the spread of vastly complex, interdependent market economies. If societies are largely the product of the factors of production--the society's economic system--as Marx taught, there are certain implications stemming from a market based economy. One of these is the increased diversity of production and differentiation of labor. Market economy capitalism, in its fullest, theoretical sense, assumes (among other things) perfect competition, a condition that itself assumes multiple and varied producers and an amoral pricing and distributive system. As Kevin Drum alludes to, this type of economic system, particularly if as Marx assumed economic systems dictated social relations and institutional development, is not conducive to conservatism, in either its historic or current day manifestation. If the country, and the world, continue to grow more interconnected through its material exchanges, and if this global economic system remains stable, the traditionalist's world of superstition and exclusiveness (and exceptionalism) will gradually whither. If, however, globalization as an economic trend falters or collapses completely, traditionalism will no doubt gain an extra life and continue in duration.
As informative and potentially determinative as all this may be, I suspect there's more to this story than economics. Billmon's post made me try to understand the current state of affairs from a more historical perspective of Constitutional development and expanding notions of citizenship.
In the beginning, the Constitution identified and recognized the basic rights of the people (primarily the rights and prerogatives of white males) and set up a system of balancing institutions designed to ensure it would not be easy to set aside those rights, particularly where it concerned property rights. In addition were rights that presumably applied to the people as a whole, such as those related to the freedom to assemble and the freedom of the press. Paradoxically, the Constitution was also designed to bind the states more firmly together for the purposes of national defense and commercial standardization. But even though the Declaration of Independence a decade earlier had offered a revolutionary notion of human rights and national citizenship, the national government in its early days was concerned mostly with the country's national defenses, its geographical expansion and its economic development. While certain ideas about the rights of man were held by a large class of the country's leaders, if not its population, the national government lacked the resources and the interest to regulate the state governments and local communities, ensuring matters of welfare, crime and religion were left with state and local leaders, and which no doubt varied from state to state. And with a financially and constitutionally minimal federal government, and mostly agricultural economy of self-contained communities, there was little potential or interest in specifying or safeguarding national rights for the country's many varied classes of people.
The eventual "irrepressible conflict" between the slave South and industrial North changed this dynamic, however. It's important to recognize that prior to the outbreak of war, most people in the south probably had no intention of requiring slavery in the North, and most people in the North, particularly its elites, had no wish to interfere with slavery in the South. Race relations and slavery was a sectional issue, not a national issue. But the North and South could not agree on how slavery would be regulated or allowed in the rapidly expanding territories and war resulted. The war in turn resulted in the end of slavery everywhere and the passing of important Constitutional amendments that in essense expanded the notion of citizenship and more widely defined and applied the rights held by the nation's people. As important as these changes were, however, the North lacked the moral imperative, the financial wherewithall and the political will to enforce those rights, and not long after the Civil War, the national definition of citizenship enshrined in the new Amendments was relegated to the trash heap, particularly in the South. And the sectional and local authority over culture and individual rights was reinstated.
At the same time, the continuing industrial revolution and expansion put a spotlight on the relationship between labor and capital, ensuring that federal attention would have to be paid to the class of workers. General prosperity through the 1920's, and the political power gained by corporate dollars helped to stave off the enlargement of citizenship that the Declaration of Independence, Civil War, 13th-15th Amendments, and labor unrest had forecast. But the Great Depression made possible the nationalization of previously local economic responsibilities. With the New Deal the country's elite began to more seriously respond to the Constitution's call to ensure the country's overall and universal welfare. The country's international obligations stemming from World War II and the Cold War, meanwhile, required that the rights it was seeking to defend abroad were also ensured at home. In this early sense of globalization, America responded fitfully but ultimately forcefully to the problem of Civil Rights.
Among the earliest and most fruitful avenues of change on Civil Rights was provided by the federal courts, long thought and in practice the most conservative and undemocratic of the federal branches of government. The principle of Judicial Review as espoused by John Marshall in the country's first decade of existence, was applied by a newly progressive court in response to challenges by social activists and minority populations both religious and racial to fight against local and state legislation that hindered their freedom.
By the 1960's and the Warren Court, the notion of national citizenship had increased dramatically. Minority and disenfranchised citizens discovered the convoluted federal system of multiple veto points could be engaged in to their favor. But the expansion of citizenship, largely through the judicial branch of government, that benefitted religious and racial minorities in turn incited conservative opponents of this redefined sense of national citizenship who wished to maintain the sovereignty of local and state authorities. Simply put, while certain global and economic changes had made the country's economy and way of life more inter-dependent, not everyone shared the new liberal consensus of individual rights and political change. Economic changes had not been fully followed by a corresponding political change in the mood of the public and its elected, legislative representatives.
This brings us to today, where court decisions (in response to plaintiffs) have resulted in what were once local issues becoming both national and more contentious. The court system which once was seen as lagging seriously behind the legislative and executive branches in terms of political innovativeness suddenly lept ahead in the 1950's and 1960's.
For many of the nation's political elite, especially its clerical leaders and their attentive followers, these liberalizing court decisions expanding the definition and protection of national citizenship were seriously disempowering. This disempowerment has been turned into a powerful tool of resentment, as priests, clerics, and talk show hosts appeal to those believed to be aggrieved (or those elites believe could be convinced of the injury done them by "judicial activists"). The power of this resentment has been greatly aided of late by the expansion of cable TV and the concentration of the nation's corporate media generally.
And this resentment is also the basis of the political movement, represented by the Republican Party, that at least since 1964 has helped elect Republican presidents and in 1994, a Republican Congress. The result has been a gradual shift in the politics of the court system and a retrenchment of national citizenship as Federal Society judges appointed by Republican executives begin the process of turning back the clock and devolving national issues back to the states (the recent over-turning of Texas' sodomy law appears to be either an anomaly to this retrenchment or a sign that the denationalization of policy has very limited potential, driven as it is by economic and cultural changes beyond the scope of the authoritarian right's ability to control).
At the same time, conservatism itself has changed. Perhaps because of the global and economic changes that have driven the country's liberalization, many of today's conservatives aren't and won't be content to denationalize the country's contentious culture wedge issues. Where once conservatives were largely content to confine their authoritarian tendencies (such as slavery and segregation) to the local stage, their growth in power, and their fear of enemies "foreign and domestic" have helped create a more nationalistic and ideological movement. Consider the NYT article I linked to above that contained this quote from a Tennessee mega-church, African-American pastor:
The statue, inspired by a Memphis church that has three giant crosses, strikes him as "a creative means of just really letting people know that God is the foundation of our nation," he said.
Mr. Williams has written several books and pamphlets analyzing a variety of matters, among them patriotism and the original intent of the founding fathers.
In "The Meaning of the Statue of Liberation Through Christ: Reconnecting Patriotism With Christianity," he explains that the teardrop on his Lady is God's response to what he calls the nation's ills, including legalized abortion, a lack of prayer in schools and the country's "promotion of expressions of New Age, Wicca, secularism and humanism."
In another book, he said Hurricane Katrina was retribution for New Orleans's embrace of sin.
Mr. Williams said his statue's essential point was that Christianity should be the guiding ethos of the nation. But because the church he leads is predominantly black, as is he, there is an added dimension to the message.
So what can we conclude if anything from all this? As I noted above, I suspect that Roe v. Wade and some of the more unpopular establishment clause court decisions will be undone by future, and maybe even the present, Supreme Court. While this will no doubt be the cause of much anguish on the part of the left, and much celebration on the part of the right, two consequences of such a judicial turn to the right might result. The first is a change in the country's national politics to one in which international and economic issues replace the more divisive cultural issues of the current era. The second is that the continued pace of globalization and modernity may result in the isolation of the more regressive states that respond to the new court decisions with repressive legislation. Free markets tend to promote and require both flexibility as well as standardization. States excluded to various degrees from the progress shared by more liberal states may find their regressive social policies are holding them back or at the very least are embarassing.
Of course other less favorable developments could also occur. The conservative movement would take or keep its national focus and attempt to enforce religious and culture mores on the country. Or the repressive changes instituted within states could seriously undermine the gains in civil rights and individual freedom generated from the work of over a century of activism and progress. I'm aware that the argument I'm making is not alltogether dissimilar from the argument of those who minimize the importance of the Civil War and later the Civil Rights movements' impact on political change, arguing that economic necessity would have sooner or later forced the ending of slavery and segregation. Those are not arguments I'm in agreement with and if it were up to me, Roe v. Wade and the ban on coerced school prayer would be allowed to stand. The courts, in response to the disenfranchized, became the engine of political change and progress that perhaps decades or more of congresses and legislatures would not have accomplished.
But the current climate has made Democratic progress difficult. On the one hand, I fear the system may break completely, resulting in a significant upheaval, if the current cultural divide continues. On the other hand, a devolution of policy in the cultural realm may allow the party a greater room to maneuver at the federal level while still allowing most Americans the full range of citizenship the last century has made possible. It may also provide a highly instructive study in the contrast between liberal and repressive societies which the world at large should be an example but which unfortunately for many people is not yet.
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