General Writing

Sometimes an image can bring a number to life.

"The fact is that, in essence, fewer soldiers than it would take to fill
up Washington, D.C.’s RFK Stadium have been asked to secure and patrol
a nation the size of California..."

It puts into perspective what we are trying to do and how we are trying to go about doing it. Supplying government to a society that has never known anything between blood relative local leaders and blood thirsty marauders is a labor intensive enterprise. Doing it requires not just, as big army leaders remind us, boots on the ground but that they be on the ground outside the nice safe air-conditioned base.

The title of the General's piece implies that Americans need to understand that the situation is 'fragile and complex' and, therefore, will require more time. The problem is that Americans do understand it is fragile and complex and that is why they don't want to give it more time.

At bottom Americans think the world is simple, at least if you are on the right side. If you are on the right side you get flowers and kisses from pretty girls and go home. That is how it worked (or seems to have worked from this many years forward) in the WWII with Germany and Japan. If it is not working out that way then, if "it" is insisting on being fragile and complex, then it is a sign that we are on the wrong side or, at best that there is no right side to be on.

This is a dangerous error. The great danger to us is not posed by our peers, by functioning societies, but by backward societies. In the world of WWII backward societies posed no threat other than temptation to great power rivalry. Today, with out new found respect for self-determination, societies that cannot even feed themselves are called nation states with all the rights and privliges thereof. The petty thugs that climb to the top of these medieval political cultures have the resources and technology at their disposal to maintain power indefinitely and threaten us with middle-age fanaticism and nuclear age arms.

The reason these societies are fragile and complex is that they are not really societies. They are hostages to our fantasy of third world "authenticism," the idea that whatever thug comes to power in a third-world country, no matter how unrepresentative or hated he is, is somehow more legitimate than an outside power. These societies are the victims of the premature ending of imperialism. Backward societies thrust into the clutches of dictators legitimized by our own guilt.

Bringing these people into the 21st century--the good parts of the 21st century, not the nightmare part of the 20th that we have consigned them to--is a complex and fragile task. That it is difficult makes it no less necessary.

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Rendition

There seems to be no cultural penalty for unfounded accusations against our government. No matter how false or wild such charges turn out to be it is all for the greater good, since if the government/Bush administration turns out not to be guilty as charged it is only because the courageous consciousness raising brought about by wild charges prevented them.

Here a former Clinton administration official takes apart the charges made (and assumptions held by most everyone engaging in public debate) in the film rendition.

Steyn and Opposition Research

Here is another fine piece of writing by Steyn. What really sets him apart from other opinion writers is not so much his humor, though it is on a higher level than other writers, but his knowledge of the opposition's case. What makes his writing so powerful here is the detail with which he attacks the other side's contentions. Moreover, the final sentence delivers on the promise made in the first paragraph: he shows us that the entitlement state with unpayable future obligations is the real attack on our children's well being.

Timing

Nothing better represents the fatuousness of the judicial approach to politics than this business about apologizing for things that happened almost outside of living memory. The government of Turkey that committed the massacres is gone and virtually all the people that were killed would be dead now anyway. Will someone feel better with an official apology for something that happened 90 years ago? If this is the worst problem someone has, that they haven't had a note of condolence from Enver Pasha's successors, then they really don't have problems.

If you are upset about the Armenian genocide the time to do something about it was in 1917, not 2007. This helps no one but our enemies and hurts no one but us.

But that is the epitome of the judicialization of International Politics. Doing nothing out of respect for sovereignty when it might actually do some good and insisting doing something when there is absolutely nothing to be gained.

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Madrassas and reciprocity

Something really has to be done about these Madrassas that the Saudis are spreading. There is no religious freedom in Saudi Arabia. If anyone tried to finance a religious school in Saudi Arabia that was not of the approved brand of Islam, let alone not Islamic, they wouldn't have it for a moment. Why are they given privileges they do not extend to others? Locke's principle of reciprocity would be well employed here.


The Associated Press: Afghan Suicide Bomber Kills Own Family

Afghan Suicide Bomber Kills Own Family

By AMIR SHAH – 5 days ago

KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) — A mother who tried to stop her son from carrying out a suicide bomb attack triggered an explosion in the family's home in southern Afghanistan that killed the would-be bomber, his mother and three siblings, police said Monday.

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In the who knew department

It turns out the entire US establishment knew about Sputnik and wanted the Russians to get there first (or at least didn't want our own Redstone rockets to be first). An early case of strategic restraint that is entirely misinterpreted by the public and yet has serendipitous effects. One of the great "policy shocks" turns out not to have been at all. After Rachel Carson what is left? Look out Ralph, these things come in threes.

Turns out there is not always room for jello

School in Illinois attempts to ban jello from sensitivity, offends sensitivities of actual voters. Have Muslims made any such accommodations? I am sure they have, just asking.

Churchill

I am listening to a DVD with excerpts from Churchill's speeches. I am struck by his open appeals to the principle of reciprocity. After the Battle of Britain in which London lost some 50,000 people. He tells Parliament that the people of Britain if offered a treaty from Germany now prohibiting bombing of cities they would now refuse it, saying that they would now prefer to pay Germany back in its own coin before considering such an offer. Parliament cheers. In another speech he says that though we will never descend to their level that if they want to play rough we can play rough too. These were serious people.

lets hear it for the international community in all their wisdom

The link is to the Nobel Prize nomination data base. The nominee is Adolf Hitler.

Hello limbo boys limbo girls

From the good, loyal Americans at Moveon.org: "General Petraeus or General Betray us? Cooking the books for the White House."

Well, at least they didn't question his patriotism. How low can you go?

Legality vs. Rationality

What is the difference between a legal rule and a rational, maximizing judgment?

it seems to me that the legal rule is a much simpler beast. the legal rule asks if a particular act or case meets the clear, objective criteria set down in a law, one that is clear enough so that most anyone with a command of the language can agree if a case--assuming all the facts are known--meets it.

A judgment, a rational decision under uncertainty is much more complicated. that is why different people can come to different judgments even if all the 'facts' are known.

it is conceded at the outset that these represent points at opposite ends of a continuum and that most cases will lie somewhere in that continuum. I only argue that as one moves toward one end or the other of the continuum the type of decision being made and the type of decision maker that is most appropriate and likely to make a good decision shifts.

I should also make clear that what constitutes a "legal" decision has shifted in recent years toward the rational judgment. For example, Roe v. Wade was hardly the enforcement of a pre-existing rule. it was the invention of a new rule from pre-existing values. whether this new rule was a good thing or a bad thing is no germane to my argument. I merely contend that such decisions are not laws in the sense in which law was understood traditionally. if it was, then such things as the strictures against ex post facto laws or laws that are not publicized would be meaningless.

A legal rule takes the form of a classical definition. A genius and a differentiae. There area some extremely complicated rules that defy these categories but often even these are more tractable than they might first appear because of the well-behaved, hierarchical nature of traditional categories in the law. they are like objects in object oriented programing that inherit all the qualities of the genus (it is no accident that object oriented programing languages borrow from classical logic) or definitions in number theory--a rational number implies all the qualities or real numbers etc. It may take a lot of empirical effort to verify the existence of all these qualities, but their hierarchical nature makes them easy to communicate.

Even if the elements of the genus are not hierarchically nested, they are still non-compensatory, which makes them like the dimensions of evaluation in satisficing.
this is a decision making procedure that is far simpler and makes far fewer demands on the decision maker's cognitive capacity. it also makes the decision making procedure more stable and predictable and transparent.

Finally, the dimensions in a legal decision tend to be defined as nominal variables rather than interval level or ordinal level variables.

Legal decision making is, thus, pattern matching, political judgments are rational decisions under uncertainty.

(Perhaps One reason that we have been drifting toward legal decision making and away from political decision making is the fact that intellectuals find pattern matching more satisfying than rational judgments under uncertainty. the latter is so messy, and you can never tell who won the game until after reality has made its move....)

Rational decision making nder uncertainty entails making value trade-offs that are not specified. we often cannot describe the trade-off between some values. often, even if we can describe the trade off in some range of the issue space but not for others. sometimes the trade-off shifts along the range of values (eliptical preferences). All of these things make such decisions irreducible to a well behaved rule. of course judges can make such decisions, but when they do so they are not applying rules, they are making judgments. it is because judges have been making more and more such decisions and that we have become more concerned with their character. we can't predict their decisions because their decisions don't depend on fules but on utility functions that are too complicated to write down or do not yet exist in any meaningful sense apart from their personal "preferences" before an actual case is before them.

The different dimensions are compensatory. if they were not, if they were like the dimensions of evaluation of a satisficer, the decision making would be more predictable and more like legal decision making. This compensibility is what makes the judgments "subtle" and "case dependent," all of which is another way of saying they are not applications of rules from outside the judge but applications of principles that lie within him.

In addition to the weighting of the dimensions of evaluation being unspecified and often as not unspecifiable, the probability judgments that go into choosing alternatives are empirical judgments that judges usually do not pretend to have knowledge of.

These judgments of probability depend on having experience in the world. they are also something that depend on an ability that we can't really observe ex ante--some person may have excelllent professional credentials and be lousy at it and others may be just the opposite (Churchill comes to mind, Roosevelt, with his second rate mind but first rate character, is another. Truman vs. Hoover. Presidential history is replete with such examples).

Given this, it is preferable that we place the ability to make such decisions in the hands of people we can fire. Judges in our system are defined by their life-tenure.

what people are really saying when they want the rule of law in international relations is that they want the kind of people that become judges and international legal scholars to make decisions about war and peace, not the kind of people that become politicians. This may or may not be a good idea, but it has nothing to do with the rule of law and everything to do with the rule of judges.



Law must be confined to the plain meaning of the words on the page. If it is expanded to mean whatever constructions are placed upon those words by the contending members of the legislature and the executive then law degenerates into deconstructionism armed with search engines.

Reciprocity and Respect for other religions

Something to keep in mind the next time you hear the accusation that the West is disrespectful of Islam.

Churchill's romantic percision

Churchill’s use of language to describe statistical concepts shows up in the middle of nowhere. Every time I pick up a book of his I find some phrase that gets a complex idea across with words in a new way and fresh way.

Page 87, from a speech given in the House of Commons, July 6, 1908, reprinted in Liberalism and the Social Problem: A Collection of the Early Speeches as a Member of Parliament, Manor, MD.

Here he is arguing for a bill that increases worker protection in coal mines. He is answering the objection that it will reduce efficiency and production. He could attack his opponents for being cold hearted. He could deny that it has that effect at all. But he will never dumb himself down. He says,

“If it be admitted that there may be a certain reduction in output as a consequence of this Bill, that reduction must be considered, not by itself, not in isolation, but in relation to the steady and persistent movement of coal production for the last fifty years. To me it seems certain that the small temporary reduction will be lost in the general tendency to expansion, as the eddy is carried forward by the stream and the recoiling wave is lost in the advancing tide.”

“…as the eddy is carried forward by the stream…” it is like Tuffte’s visual statistics applied to words. The air to information ratio is so high. The eddy carried forward by the stream phrase not only captures a multivariate idea of competing causal influences where those in one direction are larger than those in another, but it also carries the idea of time, the time scale of the river being longer than the time scale of the eddy. A single metaphor that reveals two relationships. Again, so much of the florid language that makes people dismiss Churchill as a romantic is a tool to communicate his ideas in the most precise manner possible.

The Poverty of Liberalism by Robert Paul Wolfe

He is one of the first to make the argument back in the 50s that American liberalism’s blithe assumption that all religions can get along works with religions that are tolerant, tame, and business friendly. But what about a religion that regarded the presence of an opposing faiths as an anathema? How does it work then? For this we have no ready answer, no answer that lives within the liberal tradition. Liberal democracy is a set of rules and procedures that works only if it have a 'liberal' population to work on.

Haditha

Nice site with a compendium of information on Haditha massacre. Unfortunate lack of opposing viewpoints and sources. Still, imagine the what the fate of our soldiers would be at the world criminal court.

Liers' roundup

Nice compendium of mostly liberal lies. Not the "your not telling the whole story" kind of thing but flat out fabrications. Mainly in mass media but some academic.

Historical Revisionism and Vietnam

What? Our president dares to disagree with professional historians? I wonder what Churchill would say?

Lawyers and the WOT

Terrific story from Newsweek about the failure to find bin Laden and other high value targets in Afghanistan. Technology allows you to program a cruise missile with great accuracy to hit a target in the middle of nowhere. It also allow a confederacy of dunces to tell men fighting in the middle of nowhere to fill out forms in triplicate before firing, and do so in real time.

Ramadi

the Ambassador walks around without his flack jacket. He should have had a better comeback ready when asked about it.

Notice how the improvement in security progresses in the absence of agreement among the Grandees in the capital. No, their absence period.

The religion of peace in Thailand

Well, at least Orwell could sympathize. Still, blowing up Buhddist monks. Is someone going to tell us stories now about the bitter legacy of Thai imperialism?

unintended consequences of affirmative action

Great example of a possible counterintuitive effect of a policy.

Whitehead

I came across a volume of Alfred North Whitehead's essays written while in North America.

In the first place it is remarkable the range and seriousness of the opinions he presumes to set forth. He talks about the flow of civilization for the last 6,000 years, comments on the turning point of the Greeks, compares the civilized to the uncivilized. He is a mathematician--what mathematician in an academic chair would dare to make such vast judgments today from a university chair. This is a different age already. His was an age of the liberal arts, an age which expected an educated man to be able to speak about anything and bring to bare all streams of human knowledge on whatever were the great political questions of the day.

But even more striking is what opinions. He was writing after the end of the Second World War, but already this well respected liberal's opinions on such things as civilization versus what he understands as savages is already beyond the realm of polite dinner conversation today. He makes as if it were unexceptionable the observation that the discovery of North America was a great expansion in the opportunity for fulfillment for mankind. No throat clearing about the Indians. The discovery of, "a half-empty continent," is celebrated for opening up opportunity for mankind's fulfillment and those subgroups within mankind that didn't do so well out of the deal are expected to sit tight and not spoil the proceedings. In his two paragraph treatment of the discovery of the New World there is not a hint of the prevaricating language that at least hints at some sort of guilt about the displacement and ruin of native peoples. "The problem of existence was not solved, but hope entered into human life as never before."

All this from Whitehead's essay on postwar reconstruction written in 1942.

Master Narratives

John Leo has some great comments on the Newsweek wrap up on the Duke Lacrosse scandal.

The game was given up by this priceless quote, "We had the right story, it was just that the facts were wrong."

The facts in this case were those of the Duke Lacrosse scandal. The facts are still in dispute but what does not seem to be in dispute is that the players in question were not guilty of rape, not even consensual sex. It is also clear that the prosecutor and now disbarred lawyer Mike Naiphong withheld exculpatory evidence from the defense, an offense for which he was disbarred.

The story was of racist white youths from privileged backgrounds preying upon black women. This story started to unravel early on, though not after the team was treated to collective punishment, public humiliation and millions in lawyers' bills.

The problem, though, is not that the press had a narrative they tried to impose on the facts, it is that they had only one. They should have been testing not if the facts can be rendered consistent with the privileged racist narrative, but if the privileged racist narrative did better or worse than the, in the words of Tom Wolfe, "The Great White Defendant" narrative.

Imposing a story on the facts is what the human mind does. One cannot avoid trying to impose some model/frame/template/story on the facts. without some background causal theory you don't even know what constitutes a relevant fact in the first place. There is a large body of research in fields as diverse as artificial intelligence to social psychology to attest to the human mind's power and proclivity to impose a schema on the facts.

So, if we must inevitably impose narratives on the facts, the important thing is to at least have an alternative narrative to test it against. Having one is dangerous because often a narrative works, it is just that another one works even better. and because we are, as Simon says, 'cognitive misers', we are apt to stop with the first one that works.

The 'privileged racist white boys' narrative had an initial plausible fit with the facts, it is just that, not being interested in testing an alternative narrative, the press continued with it long after it had become apparent to those willing to test another narrative that it didn't work.

Of course, there were, in the end, enough inconsistencies to break the fit between the original narrative and the facts without having an alternative narrative. But observers who were willing to test two narratives at the same time were much more quick to notice these inconsistencies. If "The Great White Defendant" story had been in the running from the beginning in the minds of the press observers, the "Rich Privileged Racists" story would have dropped out of the race long before it had done some much damage. Who knows, maybe Naiphong would even still be a lawyer.

Negotiating with Iran

Michael Leden's chronicle of the sad history of American presidents trying to negotiate with Iran ends with a quote from Jonathan Swift: You can't reason a man out of something he didn't reason himself into.

The point that Leden makes with this quote is that the Iranians cannot be reasoned out of their hatred for us. But if anything it applies even more to us. We have negotiated with Iran in spite of an unbroken chain of failures out of an unreasoning faith in negotiation. It is an axiom of our analysis that there is always a common ground, if only one can find it.

Indeed, I am not sure it is even fair to apply Swift's comment to the Iranians at all. Their hatred may be unreasoned, but their policy is not. Indeed, they have learned well from history, do whatever you want to the Americans and wait for them to come with an offer to negotiate.

Obama

Quote from Obama that is causing some consternation:

“We’ve got to get the job done there and that requires us to have enough troops so that we’re not just air-raiding villages and killing civilians, which is causing enormous problems there,” Obama said.

This is clearly not put well, but I think I understand what he was trying to say. Our over-reliance on air power leads to a lot of civilians getting killed and is not very effective in really protecting people from the insurgents. If this was his point then I think it was an important and correct one.

I think it is also a little dated and perhaps slightly disingenuous.

It is dated because the whole strategy of the surge is precisely to start doing proper counter insurgency, putting boots on the ground and protecting people. It is disingenuous because it is the democrats who to a large extent have dictated or at least encouraged a policy of stand off bombing instead of proper counter insurgency. Perhaps the most unfortunate, or at least extreme example of this, was during the Clinton administration's bombing of Kosovo. It is very hard to provide protection from guys going house to house raping and slitting throats with jet airplanes, but it is mmore politically palatable.

There is, to change subjects, a way in which Clinton's policy got it right. The main effect of the bombing campaign was not its direct effect on the insurgents but on their masters in Serbia. They didn't make any pretense of effecting to invade and occupy Serbia but they did pressure them through a very effective bombing campaign. At that time no one thought that a bombing campaign implied invading and occupying a country. Now, when we talk about holding Iran accountable for the actions of its proxies people hysterically assume we are going to invade. Why assume that? Iran is if anything even more vulnerable to pressure from the air.

Oren Interview

Michael Totten, and independent journalist in Iraq, has a nice interview with Michael Oren, Author of the new history of the US and the Middle-East. The book was a great read, as was his history of the 1967 War.

A couple of things I had forgotten from the book. Jefferson was the great anti-tribute leader. Even though he bobs and weaves tactically he is very clear on principle.

Jefferson reports a North African leaders answer to Jefferson's offer of peace:

"There was the case in 1785 where Thomas Jefferson is sent to negotiate with the envoy of the Pasha of Tripoli. Jefferson says to him that America only wants peace with the Barbary states. And he says to Jefferson “No, we want war with you. We have a holy book called the Koran which says that we have to conquer and enslave all infidel states. And the United States is an infidel state. And moreover our holy book the Koran tells us that if we are killed in the course of carrying out this war that we’ll go directly to Paradise.” So I didn’t think I even had to put the label jihadist on there. I figured that remarkable report of Jefferson’s at the Continental Congress would suffice to alert contemporary readers what Jefferson was dealing with in the Middle East."

The more things change....

He also reminds us of the Christian restorationist movement that was mainstream and very strong throughout the 19th and early 20th century. The current evangelical support for Israel is just a return to longstanding practice.

He also makes the point that you have to give battle on the ground the enemy invades, not where you would like him to invade:

"America has to get involved in theology. We’ve been fighting a theology with an ideology. It doesn’t work. We have to get in the business of promoting a reformist Islam. It’s important. It’s controversial, but important.

MJT: How do we do that? Do you mean by promoting the moderates who already exist?

Oren: Well there are some moderates who exist. They don’t have any places where they can go out and speak and speak free of harm. We can help disseminate their ideas. Right now the extreme Wahhabi interpretation of Islam predominates in schools across Europe. The West has basically given up the field to these people."

Caesar's Gallic Commentaries

I am reading Carolyn Hammond's translation of Caesar's Gallic Commentaries.

There is a parallel with Churchill, as usual. Both were the greatest statesmen of their age and both wrote definative accounts of conflicts they were involved in. Caesar's style is almost the opposite of Churchill's. It is almost a lack of style. He lays out events in spare prose that seem to have not a single wasted word. He concentrates on the outlines of events, the big moves on the chessboard made by him and his "peers" (since he doesn't consider any of his barbarian opponents his equal). On occasion he tightens focus to a detail in a battle where some extraordinary act of bravery was performed by a common soldier. The spareness of the prose, the fact that he has, in the commentaries, kept commentary to a rather bare minimum, makes the final evaluations of these actions, "...and so died nobly," all the more affecting.

Honor, as opposed to material gain, is the unquestioned motivator of the actors involved.

This is most easily seen at the level of individual soldier. "This action took place on high ground and in sight of our army, and a loud shout went up on both sides. Thus each man tried his best to be noticed, and to have his courage marked and witnessed, by exposing himself to the missiles and fire of the enemy." 8.42

It has more in common with a high school football game than what, since the trenches of WWI at least, have thought of as warfare. It is both more and less civilized than war in our age. For the soldier there is a more direct connection between courage and skill on the one hand and survival on the other. However, for civilians it is less civilized. The consequences for non-combatants are often slavery or slaughter.

But honor drives all the parties from top to bottom. Caesar never reports amounts or values of property taken or taxes and tributes garnered, but the length of the Thanksgiving that is ordered for him in Rome. He fights for adulation and honor.

The Gauls are also motivated by honor. The reasons for their rebellions are not material, in many cases they are better off under the Romans, particularly tribes that went over to the Romans and were thus freed from having to pay tribute to other tribes or face the constant danger of raids. The causes for the revolt are constantly reiterated as being desire for their former independence and to regain their former military glory. They keep coming back and revolting, in essence re-fighting their battle of independence, for the same reason that high school football teams come back to play the next season, for their reputation.



There are many acts that we would consider dishonorable but that they had no problem with. Caesar reports how, after an especially treacherous attack by the city of Avaricum, the Romans, on breaking through the city's walls, put all to death, even women and children, instead of taking them as slaves. Caesar is actually rather proud of this since it means that they are passing up money in favor of justice, at least justice of a sort. The deaths of women and children does not give him pause.

7.28: "Not one of our men gave a thought to booty. They were so severely provoked by the massacre at Cenabum and the effort they had put into the siege that they spared neither the elderly, nor the women, nor even the little children. In the end, of a total number of about 40,000, barely 800 reached Vercingetorix safely; these had run from the town as soon as they heard the shout."

Hammond states that the triple anaphora of 'non's, neither the old, nor the women nor the children, to highlight rather than to hide the soldiers' actions, pointing out their "disinterested" desire for revenge over profit.

On the other hand, when they use perfidy to try and assassinate a particularly troublesome Gallic leader the soldier charged with striking the blow hesitates because, Caesar speculates, because of the "unusual" nature of the order.


Vercingetorix spends a lot of his time having to talk his men into not deserting him. He is democratically elected, several times in fact. But this represents a weakness as much as a strength. After every reverse he is forced to re-argue his strategy. Caesar faces both of these problems but at different levels. He has politics to deal with but they are back in Rome. At the level of a commander in field he is never challenged and this seems a clearly more efficient arrangement. His speeches to his troops are about his strategy as well but the purpose is never to preserve his command but only to encourage his solders and increase their confidence. Thus the difference isn't between the decision making mechanism (democratic voting is common to both) but in institutional stability. Among the Romans, once command is conferred that is the end of the matter. Vercingetorix's command is only as firm as his last victory or last explanation for defeat.

Of course, once elected to command Vercingetorix can met out punishments. 7.5: "In his command he combined extreme conscientiousness with extreme severity." He would inflict the death penalty by means of torture. At other times he would gouge eyes out and return the offender home as a warning to others.

The Gauls have so much trouble cooperating among themselves that they have to give hostages to each other to solidify their pact against the Romans. It is a mark of Vercingetorix's leadership that he can command enough respect to keep a conspiracy together without exchanging hostages, thus enabling them to keep their revolt secret from the Romans. They solemnize their pact by putting their standards together, an act which Caesar reports is "a rite of the greatest sanctity." 7.3

It makes sense. This is the most important commitment a group can make, saying your safety is the same as our safety, your fate is our fate.


Caesar's decision making constantly choses to ignore the past and look toward the future. Punishment of the guilty in itself is of no interest to him. His only concern is the effect an action will have on the future. This effect lies in the reputation it builds and the evidence it constitutes to onlookers that being a friend of the Romans is good and being their enemy is bad. It is also a judgment driven by costs of enforcement. An example is the attempted revolt of the Senones (6.3) which is preempted by a forced march and Caesar's early arrival.

"They were obliged to abandon their purpose and sent envoys to Caesar to beg for mercy, approaching him through the Aedui (for a long time their state had been under teh Aedui's protection). At the Aedui's request Caesar freely pardoned them and accepted their excuses, for he judged that summer was a time for active campaigning, not for holding inquiries." 6.4

Thus Caesar strengthens the authority and standing of his friends the Aedui and conserves the valuable resource of summer weather for the higher valued activity of attacking people that actively oppose the Romans. This strategically sensible and rational course, ignoring the past and sunk costs and focusing on the expected value of actions in the future, is precisely what is not possible with the judicial approach to such conflicts.

Another departure from the military/diplomatic history is the ethnology of Gaul and Germany.

Perhaps unsurprisingly for a Roman, the first thing he thinks worth reporting about the Gauls is the prevalence of faction, something which his Commentaries highlight as a weakness. 6.12: "In Gaul there are factions, not only in every state and every village and district but practically in each individual household as well."

In addition to faction there is oppressive hierarchy: "The ordinary people are considered almost as slaves: they dare do nothing on their own account and are not called to counsels. When the majority are oppressed by debt or heavy tribute, or harmed by powerful men, they sear themselves away into slavery to the aristocracy, who then have the same rights over them as masters do over their slaves." 6.13

He remarks on the strange religion of the Gauls, the Druids. The interesting thing here is that they do not want their teachings "spread abroad." Therefore, they do not commit their teaching to writing.

Caesar says that they were constantly at war with each other before his arrival.

They practice human sacrifice before battles and at festivals. There are state sacrifices as well, where the victim is placed in the wicker arms of the god's image and burned alive. "They believe that the gods are more pleased by such punishment when it is inflicted upon those who are caught engaged in theft or robbery or other crimes; but if there is a lack of people of this kind, they will even stoop to punishing the guiltless." 6.16

There is an interesting thought on free speech which is the exact opposite of our understanding. It is not permitted to discuss state affairs except openly at the assembly. It is rather like our rule that a trial may not be discussed outside of court. "The states that are thought to run thier public affairs most judiciously have a legal ordinance that if anyone hears rumors or tidings affecting the state from neighboring peoples, he is to report it to the magistrate and not to discuss it with anyone else."

The Germans are really barbaric. They know nothing of the gods and have no interest in any other than a few such as can be connected directly with a benefit, such as their sun god or Vulcan.

They do not have sexual intercourse before the age of 20. The sexes bath openly together. They hold land in common and are reassigned a plot each year. this prevents anyone from making improvements. The reasons they cite are that it keeps people interested in war and directs all their energy from economic gains to making war. Also, everyone can be sure that their possessions are equal to one another. 6.22

He reports that the Germans have no way of measuring distance in their language. This is almost impossible to believe. It seems one of the most basic functions of language and would be invaluable in war. Perhaps all distance is reported in terms of how long it takes to get there, a 'metric' that combines terrain and distance?

Caesar describes, second hand, the appearance of an animal called the unicorn. He also describes what must be Moose as animals whose legs have no joints. They never sit and if they are ever knocked to the ground they are done for.




Caesar

highways

A lot of people are talking about privatizing bridges. They think about it in terms of saving the public money. They should think about it from the point of view of the real victims--the children of trial lawyers.

I mean, it is one of the great yet-to-be-made alliances: privatizers and trial lawyers. After all, when the government owns the bridge, who can sue who? How are trial lawyers to put their kids through school?

That is the answer to the perennial question of social scientists: why no socialism in the US? Forget no feudalism, etc. If the government owned everything, no one could sue anyone. What belongs to all belongs to no one. What belongs to no one means no defendant. The trial lawyers would never allow it. No capitalism, no parasites.

Invidious comparisons

We had a speaker at the SWOTT conference do a presentation on bias in the media. One of her pieces of evidence was a picture of Osama bin Ladin which--brace yourselves--had detectably higher levels of red tint in it.

There are a number of things one could say here. Maybe all pictures on magazines have higher levels of red or, perhaps, some other visual alteration to make the picture more attractive or fetching to the eye. Maybe Osama bin Ladin has usually pale skin, or the photograph was over exposed. One could go on. These are the sorts of questions a social scientist would ask, questions that suggest alternative explanations and ways to test for them.

But when I asked, the answer was, "Well, the press has an obligation to show the truth in an unbiased way. I escaped from Nazi Germany and I know how dangerous it is when the truth is distorted. I mean unless you want to go back to that..."

There are a number of things one could say to this. Of course the most salient, at least for me, is the equivalence between our press and that of the Nazis. I don't know all that Goebbels was up to but I am confident it went far beyond 'tinting.' It is like calling in doctor for a sucking chest wound only to have him say, "First, let me have a look at that hangnail." But it goes beyond that. Sometimes a difference in degree is a difference in kind.

Suppose that you could put the American Press treatment of bin Laden and the Nazi treatment of their enemies on a continuum, it might be that their distance from one another on that continuum is so far as to make even implied equivalences tendentious if not offensive. Progressive income tax and Communism both reasonably be placed on a single continuum of policies to redistribute income I am sure we would agree. It would still be both insulting and unjust to react to a suggestion that the poll tax be abolished by saying, "Hey, I lived in the Soviet Union under Stalin. You want to take us back to that?"

SWOTT

Today begins the Summer Workshop on Teaching about Terrorism. I had a great time at the reception last night. It was such a change from the Al Musharaka group. Here are a bunch of people hear because they are interested in Terrorism and so I am not the only conservative. In fact, I caught a few people doing what I always do at academic conferences, giving my conservative opinions couched in non-committal language. So a guy who is an expert on WMD said that the window of opportunity 'may' be closing on taking out the 'possible' Iranian nuclear program by air bombardment. Another guy admitted to reading the National review, but only after several drinks.

Conversation and conservatism

I have just been to two academic conferences. I enjoyed them both and got on well enough with the people. In general I like academics. I share their tastes and outlook. I do not share their politics, though.

The strangest thing about being a conservative among academics is that everyone automatically assumes you are a liberal. What is worse, liberalism so dominates the outlook of most academics that for them, liberal ideas are not ideological but just common sense. Liberal politics are synonymous with intelligence and good will.

This comes out most in conversations about the US. Remarks that, if made about another country, would be clearly seen as insults, are casually made about the US in the spirit of observations about the weather, commonplaces that can be made without fear of contradiction. Remarks that can be made so without fear of contradiction that they can serve as conversational openers, propositions of such wide agreement that they can be used to break the ice by providing a common ground of shared agreement.

For example, one very nice biologist who had come here from Canada casually remarked how Americans are so ignorant of foreign countries and that the news here is so focused on the US. I was supposed to say, "Oh yes, I know what you mean, isn't it terrible." When I instead said, "Well, people may watch the news to get information about the things that effect their lives," she was somewhat taken aback.

She said that if Americans knew more about the world they would be more generous. America lags far behind other countries in the amount that it gives to developing nations. Then I truly cut the last ties that I had with common humanity and said, "Well, I am not so sure. Actually, when you factor in private giving, America goes back up near the top of the list. Also, a lot of what America does is not captured by the percentage of GNP figures one hears. So, during the Tsunami the only way that most people could get supplies was by means of US military."

And she is looking at me like I am arguing for the age of consent to be lowered to single digits. She actually shivered and looked around, as if to confirm for herself that there were normal people around to come to the rescue.

If you have a disagreement with a store clerk or a shoe salesman about politics there is hardly ever a sense that it becomes personal. But with academics anything outside of a narrow range is evidence of moral depravity. The strongest advocates for formal tolerance are often the most assiduous practitioners of informal intolerance.

What is missing from this picture?

Interesting article about a young woman that was killed by her own family. The amazing thing is that they manage to tell the entire story without ever mentioning that the family was Muslim. Well, of course, it is cultural, and all cultures have honor killings from time to time, and nothing in Islam requires honor killings and.....

Still, if the family were in the paper for winning a Nobel Prize or something positive one suspects the fact that they were Muslim might have worked its way into the story.

Al Qaeda

What is so odd about the war in Iraq right now is that people are willing to give up and leave even though they admit that Al Qaeda is fighting us there. Lots of people say that Al Qaeda is only a small proportion of the people that we are fighting in Iraq. But even if that is true, what difference does that make? If it is Al Qaeda fighting us there why would we ever leave until we have defeated them? Moreover, whatever proportion of our enemies there are Al Qaeda no one thinks that it is Iraqis that are blowing themselves up to murder civilians. What could ever make us give up the fight against such an enemy?

Black Hawk Down

I was just watching the movie, "Black Hawk Down" again. It is a great example of what is wrong with the "due process" model of dealing with international problems. We got ourselves into this impossible and futile mission to capture Aideed for trial. And then what? After killing a thousand people in the process of bringing these clowns in for a "trial" what then changes? The problem is a lack of a monopoly on violence. Aideed stole the UN food because if he didn't another war lord would have. Would example of what happened to Aideed change the behavior of other warlords? Since we killed a thousand peasants to try to arrest Aideed, it would still appear that a rational actor would focus on being a sucessful warlord rather than being a peasant.

most of the other big mistakes are somehow traceable to the due process model. The decision not to have tanks and C-130 gunships available was driven by a desire to make this not look like a war, we wanted it to seem like a police action. The trouble is that their are two sides (at least) in a war and one side on its own can't decide that it will only be a policing problem. Aideed thought he was fighting a war and our wishing that we weren't was not going to change that.

New York Times

I can't stand their editorial page but my gosh, they do some terrific writing. What other organization could do a story like this? Three continents and 6 countries? And for what? Tracking down why some peasants too poor to afford a coffin died.

The Ptolemeic Left

Here is an interesting article about the turn against secularism in Turkey and the turn against Turkey in Europe. What is so odd about it is that the author sees these developments as more evidence of the failure of neocon foreign policy. It is really quite bizarre. All of this is very important, but to somehow make it all a function of American foreign policy, much less the foreign policy of the last 6 years, just seems to border on a mania. It is like ancient astronomers that were always ready to take any observation and pry more proof of the geocentric universe from it. For the contemporary left there is not a star in the heavens whose course cannot be explained by the machinations of the neocons.

It is eerily reminiscent of the American's before Pearl Harbor who, as Prangle argues, assumed that whatever Japan was going to do depended on the actions of the United States. No matter how far removed from our control a phenomena may be there is always an epicycle to bring it back to the orbit of America instigated evil.

collective action

I think there is something missing from the whole debate about our progress or lack of it in Afghanistan and Iraq. The possibility that our problem is the inability of these societies to solve their collective action problems.

A tacit assumption that lies behind a lot of the thinking about the war is an assumption along the lines that if a society fails to form an effective national army and police force it is because they don't want to. There is another possibility. they may be entirely on our side and may overwhelmingly want to form and effective national army and police force but may just be incapable of it for reasons that have nothing to do with their preferences or level of commitment.

The beautiful thing about a collective action problem is that you can have everyone wants to do one thing individually but as a group behave in a precisely opposite fashion. To the extent that the failures of the Iraqis and, to a lesser extent, the Afghans, to stand up effective national police forces and armies are due to collective action problems rather than a lack of commitment to the cause of liberal democracy at an individual level then calls to impose benchmarks or to "leave them to kill each other" are misplaced to say the least.

There is this odd similarity between the 19th Century Imperialists and contemporary liberals in the way they evaluate the attempts of Iraqis and Afghans to form national institutions. The fact that the democratically elected governments of these countries to form effective fighting forces is seen as proof of their unfitness to govern. In the case of the British Imperialists the conclusion was that they should be ruled by the British. In the case of contemporary liberals it is that we should abandon them to the terrorists.

The Progress of the Legal Profession

So now the lawyers have come up with a new way to advance the cause of racial and international comity. They are filing suit to gain recompense for the victims of slavery. Only this suit, leading to an admission of guilt by the parties responsible and reparations payments to the some 30 to 40 million surviving descendents of the victims in America will heal the wounds of America’s crimes.

Now there is no doubt that this is a necessary first step to solving our problems and making this a country that other minorities and non-white people would be at least willing to consider immigrating to, but why stop there? The whole world is suffering from the effects of this scourge. Why should America’s lawyers limit their beneficence only to our country? there are so many other strife town places that could benefit from their wisdom.

Take the Arab peninsula. Over 8 million Europeans were taken as slaves by the Barbary states of Muslim North Africa in the course of 3 centuries. Europe has never really recovered from this devistation but might be willing to acquiesse in the Iranian bomb project if their grievances were addressed. Who knows, they might even be willing to, say, look the other way when Jews are blown up in pizza parlors and public busses by suicide bombing Muslims if the Muslims were to demonstrate a bit of humanity by paying up for the sins of their fore bearers.

A similar arrangement might be reached between the Arabs and sub-Saharan Africa. Of course, the problem may at first appear too daunting given the sheer numbers involved: upwards of 200 million by some counts. This would make the potential number of descendents too large to realistically compensate. We can hardly expect the stats of Arabia to transfer an amount of money that large to another country. But there are some silver linings. For one thing, the male captives were castrated so they have no descendents right there. But there is more good news. Due to the broadmindedness of the Arabs on racial matters, most of the descendents were children of harems and, since maternity was not held against the child of a slave and a Muslim, these children were considered Arabs themselves and have over the centuries become indistinguishable from the rest of the population. It is as if the 200 million captives never existed. So, happily, the Arabs could just pay themselves.

There are other meliorating factors in the case of Muslim enslavement of Europeans. Given that their practices in slavery were so much more human than the brand practiced by Europeans some of them should require little or no compensation to current generations.

For example the Ottoman Turks three century practice of “The Cull,” where all males between the ages of 4-8 in Christian villages in the Balkans were periodically lined up for inspection with the most well-formed were taken away from their parents to be trained as soldiers and forcibly converted to Islam to be the personal army of the Sultan, might strike the contemporary layman as being somewhat macabre. But, again, owing to the humanity of the Muslim religion, the picture is not as bad as all that. The boys were mercifully severed from all ties with their home culture and forbidden to speak their native tongue, let alone have any contact with their parents again. In effect they were nurtured into forgetting that they had ever been anything but Muslims. Indeed, given the habitual senility and incompetence of the Sultans they often ended up effectively running the empire. The system worked so well that many of the Janisarries would lead the expeditions to cull succeeding generations of their erstwhile compatriots. Given the Christian only taxes and legal disabilities that the residents of the Sultan’s empire had to endure, it is not at all clear that the “enslaved” youths were really victims at all. Thus, there is some doubt this case would be actionable, or even if the descendants of those whose parents hid them or, in some extreme cases of poor judgment, even killed their own offspring rather than let them be culled, are the ones that are in fact liable.

There are of course the cases of the Golden Hordes in the 13th Century. Some would ironiously hold the descendents of Genghis Khan liable to the descendents of those he enslaved, but this betrays a lack of historical understanding. Genghis, being a nomad, had little use for slaves and so, in an act that is errs should forever be grateful, shielded them from liability by killing most of the people that fell to his armies. The case of his dubious descendent Tibmerlame is more problematic. Many people ironiously assume that he killed most of the populations that fell to him as well, perhaps reasoning from certain occasional sensational acts like piling up a pyramid of sculls 300 feet high to celebrate his victory in modern day Uzbekistan. But in fact, Timberlame did not always show the forensic foresight of his illustrious fore bearer. In fact he did enslave upwards of a few hundred thousand. However, his descendents can take some solous in the fact that his descendents are mainly in the Central Asian countries of Uzbekistan and Tajikistan. As some of the poorest countries in the world they may, happily, be judgment proof.

One concern with this legal project is that it might inadvertently give some legitimacy to neo-con schemes to invade countries that are practicing slavery now. One thinks of the Sudan where open air slave markets still flourish and where its recent departure from the UN Human Rights Commission make it especially vulnerable to ill conceived schemes to do something about slavery by employing armed force to remove from power the regimes that practice it.

Obviously it would be a tragedy if the efforts of the legal community were put to such perverse uses. Not only would such a use of armed force be in violation of international law, by breaking the continuity of the regime that condones slavery, it might compromise the rights of the slaves’ descendents to seek their day in court.

Sadly there is a precedent for such a miscarriage of justice, and ironically, it comes from a member of the very legal profession that is leading the fight for justice in the cause of slavery today.

Over the graves of soldiers that fought in the war that ended slavery in our country almost 150 years ago, he said, “If the blood of a generation serve to expiate the sin of slavery then so be it……[para phrase]” that is right. Not only did this lawyer advocate the use of armed force to end slavery, he also, in what must be the ultimate perversion of tort law, appeared to think that the deaths of 500,000 soldiers in that war to end slavery somehow constituted compensation for the victims of the crime. He compounded his twisting of common law by arrogantly sought to alienate the right of future generations to sue for compensation by releasing the perpetrators of the crimes of slavery from any liability. “with malice towards none and charity towards all…”

Friends of international justice and freedom can only be thankful for the progress that has been made by the legal profession since the days of Abraham Lincoln.

"Allies"

It is not enough that they let us do all the firghting, now they want to indict us for it.

An Italian prosecutor has decided that CIA officers should be indicted for kidnapping for removing an Egyptian from Italy to his native country. That the Italian police had had him under survaliance for several years and cooperated with the Americans is irrelevant.

Why indict? Isn't exposing their names enough to get them killed? Isn't it enough that the open trial of the Italian officers will supply Al Qaeda with all it needs to know about evading detecton in the future?

And where is liberal outrage at the exposing of CIA officers' identities? Real CIA officers, not 40 something mothers of twins that work in the basement of Langley, but CIA officers working undercover in hostile territory?

For that is what Europe has become--hostile territory. How long will it be before we realize that the men fighting the war on terrorism have more to fear from our "allies" than our enemies?

Mississippi and Race

A Small, Good Thing


I remember when I first told people back in Chicago that I was moving to Mississippi. The first thing they would always say is, “You mean, those racists?”

I was a bit worried myself. That is why it was so striking to me how little tension I felt when I finally arrived. Coming from Hyde Park on the South side of Chicago, I was used to people finding things to get mad about as if on purpose. I remember often a simple encounter with the store clerk would become the occasion of a miniature racial incident. “You threw that money down on the counter,” “No I didn’t….”

That is why it was such a pleasant surprise coming here. Dealing with black people had none of the tension I was used to from Chicago.

It struck me that the town I grew up in, Dayton, Ohio, was almost 40% black, and yet I almost never talked to a black person up through high school. The few times I met a black person were at those “meet black people” events, where everyone acts how they think they should act.

I recall when I was about 8 or 9 we had this special integrated summer camp that my progressive parents sent me to. The only thing I remember was the first football game we had, the white kids against the black kids. We were slaughtered. From then on we became firmly committed to integration, especially in contact sports.

But beyond that it was a few odd clerks here and there; that was my entire experience with black people growing up. They had their side of the river, we had ours.

I suppose that is the first thing that is different here. Whatever sad history we have here, we at least have contact. However people stand on principle, in practice Mississippians of both races live their lives together.

In college back in Ohio we practically imposed segregation on ourselves. There were all these ethnicity specific clubs—the Asian American or Latino American and of course the African American student associations.

Later on at grad school it was the same thing but even more fine grained: the Chinese-American or the Gay students or the LGBT. And what was so odd was that all this impulse toward separation was strongest in the place where it was least needed. Young people who had gone their whole lives in the conservative mid-West without needing a support group, suddenly, on arriving at the most liberal 3 acres in the universe—a graduate program at a North American research university—suddenly needed a segregated club to feel secure. The first thing they are asked when enrolling was which ethnic grievance group did they want to join? Here was finally a group of people that, left to their own devices, would be the best able to overcome segregation, and they were re-imposing it on themselves. Sometimes it was like those pictures you see of the old South, with colored and white sections marked off as clearly as if there were a line painted on the floor.

I thought about this the other day when the faculty got another email with another article about racial sensitivity.

I never know what I am supposed to do after I get these things. Has there been a complaint? Has some student of color come forward to complain that he hasn’t been treated with the same sarcastic condescension I show to the white students?

Then, the next day, I had a class meet for the first time: all the black students were sitting on one side of the room and all the white students—considerably more numerous—were sitting on the other.

I find this intensely sad. I have been reading about Mississippi in the 1960s over MLK week. Compared with those times, what feelings of racial animosity we have today seem so trivial. I see the students of this generation almost there. It feels like students here in Mississippi could lead the nation instead of follow.

There is a lot of serious thought given to what we can do to bring about a truly color blind society. But I think many of the practical proposals we hear these days take us in the wrong direction. Proposals like having a separate black students association or having more “diversity” focused events are at best beside the point and at worse compound the malady they aim to cure.

Such approaches assume that what is needed is some dramatic change of heart, when perhaps all that is needed are a few new habits. We think that if there is a high degree of racial segregation in some activity or setting, there must be a high degree of racial animosity behind it. That does not have to be the case.

The economist Thomas Schelling demonstrated that only a slight preference for being with people of the same race—say wanting at least 40% of your immediate neighbors to be the same race as you—can lead to almost complete segregation in practice. The first person coming into a room sits next to someone the same color as himself and without anyone intending it, the room becomes almost perfectly split along color lines.

We don’t need more special “think about diversity” days. We had plenty of those back in Dayton and fat lot of good it did. What we need is more interaction where race is not the main topic of the meeting. The hard part—the heroic part—of the work has been done. What is needed now is the work that ordinary people can do, that only ordinary people can do.

Mississippi is a place where black and white people can actually do things together without it being forced, without faking it or putting on a new personality.

A small, good thing would be to use the time we have in our classrooms, not to discuss race more but to live race less. Just as it takes so little in the way of inclination to segregate a room, it takes little in the way of effort to integrate one. The next time you are deciding where to sit, instead of sitting next to a person from your Fraternity or Sorority or team, sit next to someone that you don’t know, someone who is a different color from you. Considering what we have paid to get to this point, it is a small price, and well worth paying.

The Surge

Do you know how you know the surge is working? Because of all the stories you haven’t read about it not working.

This is a sort of law of mine about the media. They never lie, they just leave out.

If something doesn’t agree with their world view or the story they are trying to push, they don’t deny it, they just ignore it.

That is why the media is so contemptuous and indignant at the existence of new media outlets that operate free of big media’s “ethical standards.” That is why they are so offended at media that have a point of view, it forces them to admit that they have one.

They are in the position of a prosecuting attorney that had gotten used to arguing his cases with the defendant allowed to communicate with the judge only through the prosecutor’s reports. The prosecutor, who prides himself on never lying, gets rather used to being allowed to decide what should be passed on to the judge and the jury. He even stops thinking of himself as a prosecutor and instead presents himself as the disinterested spokesman for truth.

All the sudden a defense attorney shows up and the prosecutor is indignant. It is not just that he has to work harder at arguing his side, it is that he has to admit to having a side. It is not so much the extra work he hates as the moral authority he misses.

If violence is down 80% with one extra brigade, what might be achieved with the arrival of the four more coming by May?

The point is not that everything is alright but that we can affect the situation on the ground by changing our tactics. The security problem is not driven by primordial ethnic hatreds, by some fact about the way “those people” are that we can do nothing about. It is that there is an enemy that is actually rather small, that has limited resources and that can be defeated.

We are always told by liberals that we shouldn’t over-generalize about Muslims whenever we are victims of terrorism, why shouldn’t the same point apply we Iraqis are victims?

The reporting on Iraq always seems to be premised on the idea that the terrorists DO represent the Iraqis. The terrorism is always seen as proof that they are not ready for democracy.

When Al Qaeda blew up the Mosque in Samara it was seized on as proof that democracy will never work there, that they are like that, too violent, unable to settle their differences in a civilized manner. If Muslim terrorists destroy something in the US we are at pains to criticize anyone that suggests their actions are somehow indicative of the feelings or intentions of the world’s Muslims. Why should we not at least as careful in the inferences we draw when the victims are Iraqis?

Realism

There are lots of things one might call the belief that talking to Kim Il Jung or Assad will lead to their realizing that we have a common stake in reducing violence and bringing about a democratic Iraq. “Realistic” is hardly one of them. And yet it is now received wisdom among the elite that somehow talking to these people will make them come around.

If realism means anything it would seem to be the acceptance that other countries may not have your best interests at heart.

If you accept that you have conflicting interests you are in a bargaining situation, and the only real question is what costs and what benefits you can offer the other side for acceding to your wishes.

It is possible that there are some messages that have to be delivered in person, but the thing about imposing future costs is that they are usually costly to the nation imposing them as well as the nation imposed upon. In that case it might well be that agreeing to talks, particularly when the world is demanding it, might deliver exactly the wrong message. It might bespeak and unwillingness to bear up under international criticism, criticism that will surely be sharper in the face of delivering real costs—such as, say, a military strike—than they are in the case of simply not agreeing to sit down one on one with someone.

It may do more than send an unfortunate signal, it may send an unintended benefit. By sitting down to talk one on one with your adversary you are confering upon him a certain amount of legitimacy. By seeking another agreement you are in part letting him off the hook for trashing the last one.

Hitler's generals were said to have relaxed their opposition to his aggressive stance against France and Great Britain after Chamberlain agreed to direct talks with the Furher. Nothing increases a leaders stature like shaking hands with aonther world leader for the camera. American Presidents routinely go abroad to repair thier stature with the domestic public; it is a commonplace of political punditry that interacting with a foreign leader, any foreign leader, increases the president's domestic standing.

If it works for the leader of the free world when he meets leaders with far less power than he, imagine the effect on the standing of the leaders of lesser powers when they are seen on TV back home being greeted by the leader of the free world as an equal.

Steyn's "I told you so," of the day:

Where have all the Euro-weenies gone? Or, if they are not gone, to what use are they being put?

Pontiac Aztec

Baring being invisible to radar there is no excuse for a car this ugly.

that darn Pope guy

The Pope has got us all into trouble. He has quoted one of his predecessors to the effect that Islam is a violent religion. Angry mobs throughout the Muslim world have protested, claiming that Islam is a religion of peace and that anyone who implies that it isn’t must be put to death where ever they are found.

The Muslims are understandably offended. Given that this Pope that Pope Gregory is quoting was under siege by Muslim armies and would in fact, just two years later be killed and see his city sacked by the followers of the world’s number one religion of peace, he was hardly an unbiased observer. Of all the Patriarchs of the Eastern Orthodox Church he could have quoted, he chooses one that was killed by Muslims. And then he wonders why they are offended.

The timing couldn’t be more tragic. The wounds were just beginning to heal in the Muslim world inflicted by nervous stares so many Muslim men were unjustly subjected to in airports of the Christian world after the last hijacking.

Still, this misconceived connection in the mind of people outside the Sublime faith is so widespread that the origins of the misconception are worth looking into. One source of the misconception are certain historical facts such as the liberal application of the death penalty to the unbelievers.

This is first of all just plain incorrect. The leaders of the Muslim world in its heyday far from forcing people to convert by the sword actively discouraged it. They even set up financial incentives to prevent themselves from backsliding on religious tolerance by taxing dihimmis (the word for nonbelievers in living under Muslim protection) at a higher rate. That way if any of them, in a moment of weakness, ever did start to mix religion and the sword they would be penalizing themselves financially. The system worked so well that the Sultans actively discouraged conversion to the final revelation. The only time they would punish people was when they left it to convert back to their original religion, which would signal that the person had been evading their taxes all the time they were pretending to be a Muslim. So even this small intrusion of force into matters of religion could be looked at as much as a matter of taxation as religion.

The Muslims of the past not only compare favorably with their Christian contemporaries, they were progressive enough to be able to teach our so-called advanced societies something today. Many Western societies are intolerant of different modes of dress. In France, for instance, girls are barred from wearing the hijab to school and in the Netherlands they are forced to bare their faces to grown men outside their families to have drivers license photos taken.

The Caliphate was so tolerant faith based sartorial diversity that they actually enforced it. Jews got to wear a special armband, Christians got to wear a special hat. And they were all encouraged to express their unique and rich heritages by riding on donkeys, instead of horses, which was the preferred vehicle of Muslim self-expression in transport.

Now there is no compunction in religion. Some people are unfairly generalizing from some isolated incidents of friction between the Muslim world and the infidels. Naturally, a naïve observer might get the wrong idea from the ‘forced’ confessions of the two Fox News Reporters after they had been kidnapped in the West Bank. This one had the Imams working overtime denouncing misguided attempts to generalize about the nature of the Muslim faith from this incident that these kidnappers did not represent Islam. One can understand their frustration. They have had a busy year of massacres committed in the name of their religion to explain had nothing to do with their religion. The high-school girls beheaded in Thailand, the report that majority of rapes committed in the Netherlands were committed by the 5% ‘non-Dutch’ population.

Their difficulties were compounded by what one can most charitably term misguided suggestions on the part of some non-Muslims that the Imams would be more convincing if they had spent less time denouncing those who wondered aloud about the connection between Islam and the violence committed in its name and more time denouncing those who committed violence in its name.

Though one suspects that such suggestions are disingenuous, it is probably worth reviewing why the Imams would not do so in the interests of not playing into the hands of the intolerant.

Obviously, if the Imams were to denounce, say, the kidnappers of the two Fox reporters, they would be playing into the hands of those that wish to draw a connection between Islam and terrorism. It is bad enough that those who wish to smear Islam have the handful of fanatics committing intolerant acts creating a connection in the public mind between Islam and terrorism. How much worse would it be if every time the viewer saw a prominent Imam denouncing some one who happens to be Muslim for committing an act of terror, or worse, compulsion in religion? The people that know this is false know it a priori, that all religions are equally true, that all religions have their fanatics (don’t make us go through medieval history books to dig up our own) and that any temporary correlations that may appear to obtain between any of the world’s faith communities can only be the residual effects of that community’s oppression by another. The people that don’t know this have managed to persist in such retrograde beliefs in spite of at least 12 years of state mandated sensitivity training. How can we expect foreign teachers to succeed where our own efforts have failed?

Confirmation Bias and Jon Bene

Great example of confirmation bias in the news right now with the arrest in the Jon Bene Ramesey murder. The police initially became suspicious of the Father when he found the body. The initial police report is full of “telling” details, like how the Father got more and more nervous the longer it took to find her, that he seemed to be unable to stand the tension as the police were unable to turn up any sign of his daughter. That he finally struck off on his own and seemed to go directly to where the body was. And then he deliberately messes up the crime scene in bringing his daughter’s body up stairs and pretending to try and revive her.

Of course all of these details are also consistent with a Father not knowing where his daughter is. The longer it takes to find her the more worried he gets. He gets an idea of where she might be. He goes straight there because it is his house, not a particularly large house, and he knows that all the other places have been checked. He messes up the crime scene because he is inexperienced at finding his daughter murdered and doesn’t really know how to investigate a murder—something which might equally be said of the Denver police.

As is often the case the theory that gets first refusal on the facts happens to flatter the vanity of the theorizer (confirm their identity, as we are supposed to say in academia) or otherwise somehow serve his interests. The reason that the daughter was not found by the police while the Father went straight to her had nothing to do with the incompetence of the police if the Father is the murderer.

This is why it is important to have a lot of theories that one can bring to bare on a question ready and deployable before hand.

Insensitive to the feelings of Fascists

Well, once again Bush has done it, undermining attempts to “build bridges to the Islamic community.” According to Abu Shahid, by saying that we are at war with “Islamic fascists.” She demands an apology and I agree. President Bush owes an immediate and heartfelt apology to the Fascist community.

What did the Fascists ever do to be associated with these people? Sadly, the Fascists are not here to speak for themselves (a less enlightened generation of Americans, not understanding the futility of trying to solve a political problem by military means, failed to leave enough Fascists alive to keep up their end of the public dialogue), I will do my best to explain why the fascists have a right to be offended.

Unfortunately no one wants to speak for the Fascists, tarring all with the same Jew murdering brush, even though the proportion of fascists that actually killed Jews is laughably small. It is as if all the people of Islam were expected to be silent just because a small proportion of their co-religionists go about blowing up airplanes. But leave that aside, how can we justify comparing Fascists to these clowns in the Middle East?

Now part of the reason that Fascists are held in such low esteem is the way they treated civilians. In particular, the Fascists had a bad habit of murdering children. The pictures of little Jewish children baring their arms to display the tattoos the Nazi’s had given them at the death camps has been a particularly difficult image to live down. But say what you will about how the Fascists treated other people’s children, they were reluctant to hide behind their own. Can you recall any stories about Germans building gunnery emplacements near schools? Loading up the van that transports missiles with kids before heading off to the front?

And uniforms. If there is one thing that defines the present conflict in Lebanon and Iraq it is that the Islamic side refuses to wear uniforms. Now comparing the Fascists to people that don’t wear uniforms when they fight is grossly unfair—if ever there were a people that loved uniforms it was the Fascists. And they looked good in them.

Even when the Germans used children as soldiers during the final fight for Berlin they were careful to put them in uniforms.

Now this is not the whole story. The Arabs like uniforms just fine. Anyone who has seen their interminable parades of tanks and even guys dressed up for suicide would have to admit that they love uniforms and have even made contributions to the art of uniform design—who before the Islamists could have come up for a suicide bomber. In the homes of some Palestinians there are even photographs of the family toddler dressed up in a little Shaheed uniform.

But the difference is that the Arabs seem to lose all there enthusiasm for uniforms when it is time to fight. Those uniforms we see during the Hezbollah day parade are for display to adoring crowds; when it comes time to actually fight the uniform becomes and impediment.

And this is why it is so unfair to tar the Fascists with the Islamic brush. The uniform is not just a fashion statement. It is a tool to make oneself a target in order to protect the non-combatants on your own side. And herein lies the reason that the Arab/Islamist enthusiasm for uniforms dims as soon as the shooting starts. Wearing a uniform represents a double loss. It makes the ‘soldier’ more vulnerable to getting killed and makes the civilian less so. Given that generating casualties among their chief war aims actually wearing a uniform to the fighting represents a lose-lose for the Islamist. True, the Jews are not entirely blameless here: it is after all the reluctance of the Israelis to knowingly kill civilians that presents the Islamic side with the temptation in the first place. But the same bait was dangled in front of the Fascists under even more dire circumstances and taking it was never even contemplated. Advantage Fascists.

To be fair there are some points on which the Islamists have bragging rights. For instance, in being clear on ones intentions. Hitler, as one may recall, did not demand that Europe bow down and submit to Nazi rule. He negotiating position was that he just wanted Justice for the Germans of Czechoslovakia. True, a new local grievance was found as soon as the last “final demand” was met (protection from Polish aggression being my favorite), but at least Neville Chamberlain could claim that he had the problem of figuring out what the real Fascist intentions really were.

There was that whole Mein Kamph, thing where Hitler indiscreetly laid out plans for world domination and the elimination of the Jews from the face of the Earth, but, wily old Fascist he was, the Furher passed these off as youthful indiscretions in the actual negotiating sessions with Neville. Thus the British leader could legitimately say he had the problem of deciding if Hitler really meant it when he called a demand “final.”

The Islamists, by comparison, have been admirably forthright in both their intentions, both in the conflict with Israel and their larger plans for the whole Dhihimi community. President Adimejad has made no secret about his plans for world Jewry. He has relieved the rest of the world of the burden of deciding whether any ceasefire agreed to by the Islamists would be genuine. “The real solution to the problem is the destruction of Israel, but a temporary cease fire at this time could be justified for humanitarian reasons.” And this commitment to honesty and openness—the keys to any negotiation one would agree—is not just something on the fringe of Islamic society. Recall these encouraging remarks by the leader of the “moderate” wing in Iranian politics. “The nuclear weapon will be useful to us in our fight against Israel since with a couple of weapons we can destroy all of Israel but their retaliation could only destroy a small proportion of Dar al Islam.”

If only the Fascists had been so forthright. There is one thing where the Islamists and the Fascists can be fairly compared. Neither of them can be appeased.

No war movies

Richard Corless speculates on why there are no movies about 9/11. Only 2 so far. He gets it wrong and he inadvertently reveals the real reason in his suggestions for what kind of movies could be made: Holly Wood's ideology is too far out of touch with the way the rest of America feels, or at least felt, in the first four years after 9/11.

The kind of movie he thinks should be made is one that exposes the "real" reasons behind the invasion of Iraq or lays bare the ways that Bush manipulated public opinion to its own purposes after the attack. The kind of movies that people would have wanted to see were the kind that he gives backhanded praise to in his article, the ones that were being made after WWII, ones about a confrontation between good and evil.

Notice that Clooney portrays his two movies as being relevant to contemporary events--his movie about McCarthyism and his movie about a CIA plot to install a compliant dictator in a small Arab country. In other words, movies where America is the real villain. These are the only kinds of movies that Hollywood and contemporary intellectuals would regard as serious. Clooney made them about imaginary or long past situations because he thought, probably correctly, that movies with such a thesis would not be well received if about contemporary events. This is what Hollywood liberals mean when they talk about people not being ready for movies on this subject. People are not ready to hear that their sons are dying for a lie, and the "real" causes or 9/11 are America's own actions in the past.

This is why the only movies explicitly about 9/11 are so narrow in focus, concentrating only on the immediately effected participants. The heroism of ordinary Americans is something that Hollywood and the rest of America can agree on. Go any larger than that and the disagreements become too large.

The UN's efforts for peace

Oh joy, oh bliss! Working tirelessly, the great minds of the diplomatic world have finally reached a consensus on how to solve the crisis in the Middle East. The Jews should surrender.

There are some details to be worked out of course, concerning what the diplomats refer to as “modalities.” The Arabs are steadfast in their insistence that the surrender be effected in the traditional following the traditional Arab practice of the surrendering party’s army dropping their weapons and fleeing in disarray. The French, with their traditional sensitivity to dignity, propose that the Jews maintain good discipline and march out in formation with their hands in the air. The American diplomatic core, dismissing these proposals as unbefitting a great power, have proposed instead that the Israelis merely withdraw unannounced, perhaps throwing a few helicopters over the side of some aircraft carriers as a sop to world opinion.

Unfortunately, the Jews have other ideas. The seem almost willfully oblivious to the benefits to Arab self-esteem and eventual peace of unilateral withdraw. They seem to think that an attack across an international border and the indiscriminate—indeed unaimable—rocket firings seem to require some sort of response. Indeed, they go so far as to maintain that the precedent set by a powerful nation allowing an armed gang to attack their civilian population with impunity would somehow encourage more of the same. The 6 million Jews living in the state of Israel point to the stated intention of the 200 million Arabs surrounding them to wipe the Jews off the face of the Earth as some sort of justification for treating the situation as a war. They treat the statement of intentions as some sort of guide to their enemy’s intentions, instead of what all sophisticated people know it to truly be: a cry for help.

For surely, as every educated person knows, people don’t just hate for no reason. They do not hate someone simply because they are better than them. They only hate because they have been oppressed. The Israelis, instead of recognizing the persistent hatred of the people surrounding them as evidence of Israeli mistreatment of the Arabs and taking it as an occasion to search their souls and formulate proper acts of contrition, treat it as a justification to defend themselves!

Instead of seizing this golden opportunity to demonstrate their contrition and commitment to peace by allowing Hezbollah to go on amassing missiles from their patrons in Iran, the Israelis go on using the excuse of ball-bearing loaded missiles being launched at their cities as a pretext for bombing those rockets—in spite of the Israelis being perfectly well aware of the Arab custom of building pre-schools next to rocket launchers.

This callous indifference to multicultural norms can no longer be tolerated by the international community. Israeli intolerance is testing the world's tolerance.

Compare

We have live pictures from the attack on Haifa on TV right now. Notice how different the atmosphere is compared to the Qana bombing. people rushing around, no one posing the corpses for the cameras, no one contorting on queue for the cameras.

Last gasp

I don't want to get started with the sad and somewhat desperate speculation that the increasing intensity of an insurgent group's attacks indicates that the insurgents are losing. There has been enough of that in the case of Iraq. But I do think that the increased frequency of Hezbollah rocket launches could indicate that some of their launching pads are under pressure.

If you are surrounded by the Israeli army you know that you are going to lose all of your rockets soon, so you have no choice but to use them or lose them.

But even more importantly they are beginning to launch at night. Before, they would only launch during the day because at night the flames from the end of the rocked can be more easily picked up by Israeli drones. Today two landed in Haifa at night. One has apparently caught a lot of people in a building. They were not in a bomb shelter because the rockets always landed during the day.

A reporter on the scene says that the daytime firing indicates strength on the part of Hebollah, a sort of declaration that we can launch anytime they want. That may be the case, but it seems that it is just as consistent someone deciding that the rockets must be used or sacrificed.

Hezbollah's blunder

Hezbollah is apparently calling for a cease fire. What a blunder. Don't they know that the ineffectual Israeli bombing campaign is just creating more recruits for there organization in the long run? Don't they read Robert Pape? The New York Times?

If only

points out that if only Gibson had substituted the word "Israelis" for "Jews" in assigning blame for all the wars in the world he would have been spared a scandal and probably been raised in stature.

Quote of the Day from President of Iran (whose name I still cannot spell

Courtesey of Hugh Hewitt:

"Today, the Iranian people is the owner of nuclear technology. Those who want to talk with our people should know what people they are talking to. If some believe they can keep talking to the Iranian people in the language of threats and aggressiveness, they should know that they are making a bitter mistake. If they have not realized this by now, they soon will, but then it will be too late. Then they will realize that they are facing a vigilant, proud people."

Good thing they are not interested using that nuclear stuff for weapons.

They're involved

Quote from an Israeli pilot talking about the Qana incident from a Guardian article critical Israeli "whitewash":

"What do you do if you see hundreds of rockets and they are against your family? For me, I hit the target. Once these civilians are letting people use their houses, they are involved."

That about sums it up for me.

Mel Gibson again

The real theme that runs through Gibson's films is hatred of the British. The Jews are an afterthought. And there is the real key to his ideology. It is envy. The British and the Jews are people that have succeeded and triumphed through their own prowess. It is a particular kind of small mind that is attracted to the idea that some powerful group is responsible for all their problems. In the context of American society these things--anti semitism and antipathy for the English--have not gone together, but in the rest of the world this is probably a common coupling.

I think that it is very important for conservatives and religious people to take the lead in condemning Gibson the way we did in condemning Trent Lott. We have often pointed out that the failure of Muslims to condemn terrorism justifies suspicion that Muslims as a group are complicit in terrorism.

Pape

Pape takes some interesting facts and uses them to support a completely wrong-headed conclusion.

He shows that the suicide bombers of Hezbollah are not usually personally fundamentalists but in fact come from a broad spectrum of society, representing a range of religious and political convictions. He infers from this that they are motivated by the incursions on their territory by Israel and that trying to wipe them out militarily will only increase their ability to recruit.

It is true they believe that their land has been violated by the presence of foreigners, but the key question is what are borders of the land that they consider to be violated. The violation is not the borders of Lebanon but the borders of the Dar al Islam. It is not the borders of Isreal but its existence that constitutes the incursion. Why else would Israel's evacuation of Lebanon, Gaza and the West Bank have lead to increasing its attacks instead of reducing them?


What is the point of saying the whole problem will go away if you withdraw from what your enemies consider "occupied territory?" The current conflict came after Israel withdrew from the occupied territory.Hezbollah's's response was to stock up on missiles. And doesn't the effectiveness of his advice depend crucially on how the other side defines the territory that is occupied?

If the evidence from the suicide bombers themselves about their motivation is so crucial when it concerns whether they are religiously motivated, why don't we listen to them when they tell us what the territories they consider to be occupied are? Isn't it the case that they refer to Israel itself to be occupied territory?

What is the point of saying the whole problem will go away if you withdraw from what your enemies consider "occupied territory?" The current conflict came after Israel withdrew from the occupied territory.Hezbollah's's response was to stock up on missiles. And doesn't the effectiveness of his advice depend crucially on how the other side defines the territory that is occupied?

If the evidence from the suicide bombers themselves about their motivation is so crucial when it concerns whether they are religiously motivated, why don't we listen to them when they tell us what the territories they consider to be occupied are? Isn't it the case that they refer to Israel itself to be occupied territory?

Pape makes much of the finding that the divisions between socialists and religiously motivated terrorists are brought together by hatred for Jews and Christians. He uses the ecumenicsim of the Islamic Fascist movement to support his argument that there is some secular demand, some reasonable amount of territory that could be given up to appease this movement. But the same finding could also support a clash of civilizations view of the conflict. After all, Fascism in Germany brought together a broad spectrum of German society as well. The Islamists' motivation is not some definable piece of territory that could be given back settling the whole thing. They want to regain the power and glory of Islamic civilization. The honor of that civilization was martial in nature and they will only be satisfied by being able to dominate and expand against the outsiders the way they once were able to.

The observation that the recruits for Hezbollah are from a broad range of ideological and sectarian leanings could mean that they are all motivated by some satiable territorial demand. But it is also consistent with the clash of civilizations interpretation of the conflict.

"Given Syria’s total control of its border with Lebanon, stemming the flow of weapons is a job for diplomacy, not force." What? Doesn't that mean that the force is merely being directed to the wrong place? The fact that Syria has effect control over whether Hezbollah gets weapons or not merely means that changing Syria's behavior is one wato achieveee Israel's goals. Changing Syria's behavior could be brought about by military means or diplomacy.

He says that his data shows that the only thing that ends suicide bombings is withdraw by the occupier. But suicide attacks from Lebanon were not the problem for the Israelis, were they? Just because he did a study of suicide bombers doesn't mean that every problem is suicide bombers.

And there is this lazy assumption that because a movement is "popular" it is invincible. Destroying Nassar's army apparently increased support for him and hatred of Israel. We now hear reports that Hezbollah is getting more popular as "the only force that can defend the country," leaving out that the only reason anyone as any interest in attacking the country is Hezbollah. We can't fight the enemy because that will make the enemy more popular.

But we have wasted 50 years basing our policy on the notion that there is some deal to be made if only we are nice enough to the other side. Lets try winning. Winning decisively. Winning so clearly that even the Arafantasistts can convince themselves otherwise.

It is odd that realism, which supposedly offers us a universal theory of international relations seems to shirk from applying its nostrums to the other side. Why doesn't a realist say to the Arabs that they are being irrational? That every state would have to respond is you attack its soldiers across an international border and start lobbing missiles at their population centers. That such actions will only increase the hatred on the other side. That the Israelis only ever attack in response to violations of their territory? As always in the case of Isreal, we have an ideology offering universal rules that are only enforced against one side--the Jews.

Mel Gibson

I am done with this guy. He is no longer acceptable to me as a public figure. I feel especially bad because I remember defending him after his movie came out. Now, everyone that argued he should be given a benefit of a doubt now look like complete fools. And so we should. Sometimes there really is coded racism.

What does it mean?

The fact that the people that used to run Iraq, the people that were allowed by the "international community" to sit in the UN and pronounce on the morality of US policies and were treated as "legitimate," are now murdering Shiites at random is being used as an argument that these same monsters should have been left in charge of the country. If Nazis had reacted to the defeat, occupation and democratization of their country by murdering people at random in public places (my apologies to any Nazis who may be reading this, since, after all, whatever they did to other's children never contemplated murdering their own), would we infer from that that we should have left them in charge of the country?

Either or

"We are not here to talk about Hezbollah"
I hate this dodge. When you are talking about a war there are two sides. You have to choose one or the other. When you make demands of one side that disadvantage it then you are advantaging the other side. This obligates you to address whether the other side is, on the whole, better or worse. If you demand on humanitarian grounds that the allies unilaterally stop bombing German cities and demand it stop you are obligated to address 1) whether this might lead to a German victory and 2) whether or not that result will not, in the end, be better or worse for humanitarian values.

The Humanitarian Dodge

Just as the Bush and Blair were giving their press conference reports came in that a Hezbollah rocket hit a hospital. Did you catch the outrage in the UN? Neither did I. And to be fair, it is not as if Hezbollah's rockets can be aimed.

But there is no outrage because no one was hurt--the Israelis had already evacuated. No humans hurt, no humanitarian outrage.

And that is why the framing of demands in terms of "simple humanitarianism" is neither simple nor, necessarily, humanitarian.

By calling this a humanitarian crisis the issue of right and wrong, intentions and moral culpability, are conveniently sidestepped. The fact that these tragedies occur in spite of the best efforts of the Israelis, while they are only avoided on the other side only because of HezbollahÂ’s incompetence, is ruled out of order by calling it a simple humanitarian problem.

So we are telling anyone that attacks “us” (in the sense of a first world country) that all you have to do is fire from behind schools and hospitals at schools and hospitals (if you can aim) and you will have the world on your side.

saying it is a humanitarian problem makes taking a side not look like taking a side. The humanitarian position is that the killing should stop now--until the terrorist decide to start it again. And when they do start it again they will have all of their rockets atheirier ball bearing warheads intact and even replenished. The prisoners they have taken will still be held. And the terrorists will have been strengthened in the public opinion theirier own countries because they will have been seen to have come off the victors in an encounter with Israel.

The simple "humanitarian" position gives the terrorists in effect the right to attack civilians and to hide behind them, indeed, encourages the practice, since civilians dying on one side is the sole measure of the other side's morality. If you are willing to hide behind civilians you are awarded by the international community the right to do so with impunity, even if you are attacking the other side's civilians.


more later....